Dr. Lisa Dieker is a Professor and Lockheed Martin Eminent Scholar at the University of Central Florida. She received her undergraduate and master’s degree from Eastern Illinois University and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. Her primary area of research focuses on collaboration between general and special education at the secondary level with a specific interest in the unique opportunities that exist in urban schools in the areas of mathematics and science. She also has a passion for how technology and specifically virtual classrooms can be used to impact teacher preparation As the Lockheed MartinEminent Scholar, she works collaboratively with outstanding UCF faculty in mathematics and science to Direct the Lockheed Martin/UCF Mathematics and Science Academy. Dr. Dieker is also the coordinator of the Ph.D. program in special education.  This program, during her tenure and in collaboration with her colleagues in special education, has graduated 50 new scholars.  Twelve are students with disabilities and twenty come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. She has published numerous articles focused on interdisciplinary collaboration. She is sought out regularly to provide national and international keynote addresses. She serves in numerous leadership roles including serving on the board of the Council for Exceptional Education Teacher Education Division where she was selected by the Council for Exceptional Children as the Child Advocate Network (CAN) coordinator of the year.  She also has been the editor and associate editor for two international journals and is currently the Associate Editor of Teaching Exceptional Children.

Selma Powell is a doctoral candidate at the University of Central Florida. She received her undergraduate and master’s degree from the University of South Florida. Her dissertation research focus is on developmentally appropriate use of mathematics applications for iPads in early childhood classrooms. Additionally, she is committed to advocacy for children with special needs and their families. In November of 2011, she was recognized by the Council for Exceptional Children, Division of Early Childhood, as the recipient of the J. David Sexton Doctoral Student Award for her contributions to these children and families. Selma Powell has published three articles and has presented at numerous national and state conferences. Within the university, Selma Powell has held leadership positions with the Council for Exceptional Children student chapter, as well as the Association for Doctoral Students in Exceptional Education. For the past two and a half years, she has worked as the assistant to the associate editor of Teaching Exceptional Children.

Lisa Marie Lacy was a former Special Education teacher who taught for six years in an urban school district in a large metropolitan area in the southwestern region of the United States. She is currently a doctoral student at Arizona State University in the Curriculum & Instruction-Special Education program. Lisa’s research interests lie in the area of identity and teachers’ beliefs and perceptions as they relate to inclusive education. She is interested in how teachers’ beliefs and perceptions are shaped by their lived experiences and cultural histories and have an impact on how they view students with disabilities in the educational setting. Additionally, she is interested in creating culturally responsive school/family partnerships for the betterment of all students.

I arrived at work in a harried state and frame of mind. I have so much work to do today and a ton of IEP meetings, these words ran through my head as I unlocked the classroom door and instinctively turned on the lights and walked to my desk and retrieved my phone messages. I put my book bag on the floor next to my desk, and checked my emails, one-by-one, quickly glancing at the clock on the wall. 8:45. I sighed, and mumbled come on to the computer as I waited impatiently for all ten pages of my IEP documents to print from my printer. I just had enough time to grab the student’s file and all other paperwork that goes into a student’s file that is going to receive special education services. Read more

Kathleen King Thorius, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Special Education in Indiana University’s School of Education in Indianapolis. She received her doctorate in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis on special education from Arizona State University. Previously, Dr. Thorius was an urban school psychologist, and worked for the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt), which was funded by the US Office of Special Education Programs to address disproportionality in special education. Dr. Thorius is the Principal Investigator for the Great Lakes Equity Center, one of ten federally-funded educational equity assistance centers, and has published and presented nationally and internationally on response to intervention, inclusive education, and higher education access. Her research is concerned with the ways in which multiple levels of educational policy are appropriated in the everyday practice of local educators and mediated by local socio-historical contexts to shape experiences of historically underserved students, particularly those identified with disabilities.

As a school psychologist during the late 1990s and early 2000s, I spent lots of time carrying out various parts of the process of determining students’ eligibility for special education. I also spent considerable, but not nearly enough, time reflecting on the ways that IDEA eligibility assessments of students of color did or did not contribute to their over- or under-representation in special education: a phenomenon referred to as “disproportionality”.  In relation to my professional role, I considered ways in which assessments, including IQ tests, may have unfairly disadvantaged Black and Latino students in the evaluation process, and noted and tried to address weaknesses in the validity of bi-lingual evaluations with students who were learning English as a new language. I thought about how crucial it was to account for the quality of the opportunities to learn of students referred for special education eligibility evaluations, and wondered if I had given this ample consideration in my practice. Yet it wasn’t until my doctoral program in special education that I really began to think about how my whiteness contributed to disproportionality. Read more

Taucia Gonzalez is a student at Arizona State University pursing a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in Special Education. Prior to becoming a full time graduate student, she taught in a culturally rich school community that promoted and supported bilingualism and biliteracy. Her research interests focus on the intersections of culture, language, and disability within an urban context; with particular interest in how ideologies create and control spaces.

If you ask my daughter, Camila, about her teacher, she will tell you, “He is the best teacher in the world.”  I had heard other kids praise Mr. Bandera as well.  Last January I spent two weeks launching a poetry inquiry in their class.  The kids were taking turns sharing out something they held in their heart.  One boy enthusiastically threw his fist in the air and shouted, “Mr. Bandera because he’s the best teacher ever!”  Wow, I looked over at the small statured teacher with the disheveled button up shirt; his tie a little off center, wondering what it was that made him the best teacher ever.

What do kids know about good teaching? Honestly, I had yet to see guided reading groups in his classroom, so I had my own critiques of his teaching.  I knew that the school was under a lot of pressure to raise their test scores, so I thought that might be a way for me to convince Mr. Bandera to incorporate guided reading.  Maybe there were a few things I could teach him, being that he was a fairly new teacher. Read more

Cynthia has a passion for teaching and working with school leaders and teachers as they address issues of equity in schools. As the Assistant Director of NIUSI-LeadScape, she works closely with principals and teachers to engage in professional learning that leads to making schools inclusive of all students. Cynthia worked as a teacher in elementary and middle schools in Phoenix for thirteen years before deciding to continue her learning at Arizona State University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy.

Recently, I’ve taken on new endeavors that have opened my eyes to things I haven’t noticed before…namely the power and privilege that is associated with being a white person and the marginalization I sometimes experience as a lesbian. I grew up as a relatively privileged person and I still am in many ways. I come from a middle class home, with both parents as career professionals who possess graduate degrees. Thinking back on my childhood, I can’t even remember a time that I felt marginalized. Even as a tomboy who would rather play touch-football than have to even LOOK at Barbies, I rarely felt like I didn’t fit in. Maybe I was just oblivious, but this indicates to me that privilege was certainly present in my life. You don’t think about privilege when you have it, only when you don’t. Read more

JoEtta has a passion for equity that has been present all her life.  As the Director of the Equity Alliance at ASU, she connects with educational leaders who want to engage change and transformation.  With a blend of humor, sensitivity, and professional insight, she has helped hundreds of individuals develop the dispositions necessary to use an equity lens for decision-making related to student achievement.  A talented speaker and workshop leader, she has worked with school systems across the United States in addressing issues of equity.

Most of the time when school administrators and professional developers get together to discuss the practice of teaching, the talk turns to technique. They’ll debate for hours on end regarding the best way to teach students to read and make meaning of text. They’ll talk about fluency, decoding skills and a lot of specific strategies and/or programs that teachers should use to facilitate this learning. At times, the conversations even extend to “evidence-based practice” – which by the way, may or may not mean there is evidence that pertains to the specific population of students in which they are referring.

One subject that rarely comes up, though, is heart. That’s a shame too, because while a teacher with a strong repertoire of skills is valuable to have on staff, it’s the teacher with heart that reaches more students and motivates them to achieve more than they ever thought they could.  Indeed, teachers with heart are the best teachers in the school. Teaching for equity comes naturally to these teachers, as they possess the dispositions and mind-sets that actively enlist students to achieve at – or sometimes even beyond – their potential. As a former principal, I’ve seen this first hand. Read more

Christine E. Sleeter, PhD. is Professor Emerita in the College of Professional Studies at California State University Monterey Bay, where she was a founding faculty member. She currently serves as President of the National Association for Multicultural Education. Her research focuses on anti-racist multicultural education and multicultural teacher education. She has published over 100 articles in edited books and journals such as Journal of Teacher Education, Race Ethnicity & Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Curriculum Inquiry. Her recent books include Professional Development for Culturally Responsive and Relationship-Based Pedagogy (Peter Lang) and Teaching with Vision (with Catherine Cornbleth; Teachers College Press. She has been invited to speak in most U.S. states as well as several countries. Awards for her work include the American Educational Research Association Social Justice Award, the California State University Monterey Bay President’s Medal, and the Central Washington University Distinguished Alum.

You have probably recently witnessed class sizes in schools surpassing reasonable thresholds, teachers losing their jobs, and university tuition increasing. For example, California Watch reports that not only have California’s class sizes risen by an average of 5 students at the primary level and 3 at higher grade levels (making 31 students the new average in classrooms from fourth grade on up), but almost 60% of the state’s school districts have shaved days off the school year. You have probably also witnessed pensions erode, libraries close, and social safety nets for impoverished families shrink. Read more

Marleen C. Pugach is a Professor of Teacher Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she has been responsible for the preparation of teachers for urban elementary and middle schools since 1986.  Her areas of expertise include teacher education reform, collaboration in the preparation of special and general education teachers, and urban school-university partnerships. She is currently exploring how programs of dual certification in general and special education address diversity and the degree to which they represent substantial, transformative changes in teacher education.

This week I meet my first classes of the semester, one of which is a seminar for prospective teachers. These students are reaching the halfway mark in their teacher education programs and one of my most important goals is to create a sense of energy and motivation as they—for the first time—take on the responsibility of working with small groups and organizing instruction for whole classrooms of students in Milwaukee’s high needs urban schools. My seminar ties together courses students will be taking in the academic curriculum, assessment, and disability with their experiences in the field and places this all within a strong equity and urban-oriented focus that is the hallmark of our programs. Read more

Beth Ferri, associate professor in teaching and leadership programs, is the coordinator of the Doctoral Program in Special Education. She teaches courses in adapting instruction for diverse learners as well as graduate seminars in Disability Studies, including a course on Race and Disability and a course on Gender, Disability and Sexuality. Her research interests focus on inclusive education, disability studies, and narrative inquiry. In her 2006 book, Reading Resistance: Discourses of Exclusion in Desegregation and Inclusion Debates (Peter Lang), she and coauthor David J. Connor explore how the entanglement of race and disability worked to create and maintain new mechanisms of exclusion after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision.

As any educator will tell you, the pendulum of reform rarely stays in one place very long. There is always something new: new ideas, new theories, and new paradigms. Certainly my own field of special education has been at the epicenter of many educational reforms (i.e. inclusion, positive behavior support, phonemic-awareness). Yet, given this penchant for reform, how is it that the more education changes, the more it seems to remain the same?

One reason for pendulum swings, at least in terms of special education practice, is that the foundational assumptions of the field remain deeply entrenched. The idea that students come in two types, one “special” and one “regular,” for instance, remains an unstated assumption across a range of reforms. We know, of course, that students share a range of abilities, motivations, interests, identities, and backgrounds—all of which cannot be reduced to a simple binary. Yet, because we have yet to challenge this core assumption, we continue to assume that students who are deemed “special” or disabled are different in fundamental and essential ways from their non-disabled peers. Read more

Dr. Anne Hynds is a Pākeha Researcher / Senior Lecturer in the School of Educational Psychology and Pedagogy, Faculty of Education at Victoria University of Wellington. She is also a Research Associate for the Jessie Herrington Research Centre at the Faculty of Education. As a teacher, Anne taught in primary, intermediate and secondary school settings, and in mainstream and Deaf education. Anne has a real interest in collaborative research / action research methodologies and has worked in a number of bi-cultural evaluation projects including the National Evaluation of Te Kotahitanga; the coordination of the Quality Teaching Research and Development in Practice Project (QTR&D) and the National Evaluation of Te Kauhua: Maori in the mainstream pilot project.

What is teacher collaboration really?

There are different terms associated with teacher collaboration, including collegiality, professional learning communities, and partnership work to name but a few. It is important to draw distinctions between teacher congeniality and collegiality. Congeniality refers to the comfortableness of teachers’ social relationships, while collegiality refers to the quality and impact of professional relationships and shared responsibility for change across classrooms through collaboration.

In culturally responsive schooling contexts, teacher collaboration must extend beyond the staff-room door, because the development of culturally responsive practices requires teachers to form reciprocal learning relationships with diverse groups of students and their parent/caregiver communities.  Friend and Cook (1992) state that “…collaboration is a style of direct interaction between at least two co-equal parties voluntarily engaged in shared decision making as they work toward a common goal” (p. 5). Teacher collaboration implies collective responsibility for improving all student outcomes within culturally responsive and inclusive environments. This means challenging deficit thinking and low expectations within classrooms and schools that prevent all students from realizing their full potential. Read more

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