Kathleen King Thorius

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis | IUPUI · School of Education

As we write the introduction to this journal issue, former Vice President, Joe Biden, has been elected as the 46th president of the United States and Senator Kamala Harris is making history as the first female, first Black, and first South Asian vice president. A new day is dawning; a new era is beginning. However, this is not a time to let our gua...

As Multiple Voices’ new editorial team, we are committed to producing a journal that counters and provides promising alternatives to troubling legacies in the education of students with disabilities: especially students of Color, im/migrant students, and those who are emergent English learners. In doing so, we will continue the work of past editors...

Despite the U.S. government’s funding and provision of technical assistance as a prevailing approach to remedy special education racial disproportionality, and considerable research on the explanations, causes, and frameworks for addressing the phenomenon, there is little documentation of research or technical assistance efforts for actually doing...

In this essay, I discuss three key ideas related to the construction and treatment of “difference” in and around schools and schooling. First, just as difference is most commonly located within marginalized populations at the intersections and along the lines of race, disability, social class, national origin, sexuality, sex, language, and religion...

We reviewed three existing reviews of literature: two related to cultural and linguistic diversity in well-regarded special education research outlets including Advances in Special Education, and the third regarding constructions of culture, race, disability, and risk in early childhood and early childhood special education (ECSE) literature. Some...

This case study documents a professional learning community (PLC) comprised of urban elementary educators working toward equitable education for students with dis/abilities. We employ an equity-expansive learning frame to evoke and then examine tensions and contradictions that emerged during the PLC and mediated learning as evidenced by participant...

Despite the push for inclusive mathematics education, students with disabilities continue to lack access to, and achievement in, rich mathematics learning opportunities. The authors assert that mathematics teacher educators have a central role in addressing these contradictions, including enacting facilitative moves during mathematics teacher profe...

Here Kathleen A. King Thorius and Federico R. Waitoller respond to Harvard Educational Review's Spring 2017 forum on their 2016 article “Cross-Pollinating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning: Toward an Inclusive Pedagogy That Accounts for Dis/Ability.” The forum invited six scholars from the field of disability studies...

This article discusses a research-based reading intervention called peer-assisted learning strategies in reading (PALS) and includes practical suggestions for educators concerned with literacy as a tool to reposition and empower students of color, English learners, and students with disabilities in schools and society. Following a rationale informe...

In the review, we examine what is known about disproportionality with the intention of informing the direction of policy and practice remedies. We outline the definition, contours, and characteristics of disproportionality and examine some of the prevailing explanations as to why the issue persists. We then pivot the review to consider how policy,...

In this article, Federico R. Waitoller and Kathleen A. King Thorius extend recent discussions on culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) in order to explicitly account for student dis/ability. The authors engage in this work as part of an inclusive education agenda. Toward this aim, they discuss how CSP and universal design for learning will benefit f...

This brief is about building reciprocal, authentic, and productive family-school partnership with the CRPBIS framework. The CRPBIS framework aims at re-mediating school cultures that reproduce behavioral outcome disparities and marginalization of nondominant students and families (Bal, 2011).

I examine special educators’ professional identity emergence and tensions within a researcher-facilitated teacher learning community. I introduced tools to evoke and challenge inequities in educational systems and via which participants examined and planned general education instruction for students with dis/abilities. Initially, professional ident...

This Brief examines the critical role of addressing and supporting behavior and socialization in schools as educators, students, families, schools, and communities embrace the waves of diversity that surge through our schools and institutional systems. Diversity is a vital resource for systemic transformation. The Brief presents the features of PBI...

All children deserve access to high quality educators. Many definitions of “high quality” teachers over-emphasize student achievement outcomes and do not sufficiently consider other important factors of schooling and educator practices that may lead to those outcomes. This brief offers an equity-oriented framework that defines a high quality educat...

School communities that develop a process for engaging in careful consideration of both policies as written and policies as practiced will be better equipped to promote equity. This brief offers some considerations for the creation of such a process.

In this article, Federico R. Waitoller and Kathleen A. King Thorius extend recent discussions on culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) in order to explicitly account for student dis/ability. The authors engage in this work as part of an inclusive education agenda. Toward this aim, they discuss how CSP and universal design for learning will benefit f...

In this article, we provide commentary on the ‘state of play’ of inclusive education in the United States. We focus on the promises and limitations of inter-related accountability- and market-driven policies and Response to Intervention (RTI) (Vaughn and Fuchs, 2003). We argue that these policies and practice have ‘hopscotched’ their way through in...

In this brief we provide educational stakeholders with a set of research-informed considerations for policy and practice by exploring and expanding upon existing teacher quality frameworks. (e.g., Guarino, Santibañez, & Daley, 2006), and by foregrounding equity within three key domains: personal qualities, practice, and student outcomes.

In 2013 and 2014, the Great Lakes Equity Center prepared a series of Equity Dispatch newsletters, each highlighting a historically underserved population and raising equity issues for those populations. The four part series focused on American Indian students, immigrant students (Chen et al., 2013b), students with dis/abilities (Chen et al., 2014b)...

This qualitative case study focuses on factors mediating an urban school's enactment of Response to Intervention (RTI). Over one school year, we (a) observed weekly RTI meetings, (b) debriefed observations weekly, (c) interviewed RTI team members, and (d) examined procedural documents. Analyses included post-observation debriefing and coding fieldn...

Our commentary responds to the five articles of the special issue on multidisciplinary collaboration to support struggling readers. From our perspectives informed by experiences working with diverse student and family populations in urban settings, preparing pre- and in-service educators and specialists to do the same, and working in federally fund...

Since 1997, revisions to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) have shown promise for addressing special education equity concerns: For example, states have the option to use response to intervention (RTI) for determining and thus reducing inappropriate disability determination, and states and districts are required to assess and a...

There are ample research and position papers advocating response-to-intervention (RTI) frameworks to address the academic struggles of students identified as English language learners (ELLs) and to prevent inequitable outcomes such as overrepresentation in special education. However, some scholars have questioned how RTI is conceptualized and imple...

Little research has been conducted regarding the disproportionate representation of minority learners in programs for students with Emotional/Behavioral Disorders (E/BD). To date, the majority of the disproportionality literature examines multiple eligibility categories, most frequently the high incidence disabilities of Mild Intellectual Disabilit...

The construct of culture has been largely invisible in the research and long-standing debates in the learning disabilities (LD) field, such as those pertaining to the definition of LD and how research knowledge is used in local settings. When used, the idea of culture tends to be defined as unrelated to LD and studied as restricted to individual/gr...

The emergence of Response to Intervention (RTI) anticipates a different future for all students, particularly learners from racial minority backgrounds and students with disabilities. RTI is being widely adopted in school districts as a viable alternative to enhance learning opportunities; hence, some education scholars argue it promises a much-nee...

Special education is a field formed in the wake of the civil rights movement and built on the ideals of equitable opportunity for students with disabilities; yet, it has been criticized for its marginalization of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds since its inception. In this article, we examine common conceptualization...

This review of the research on college access programs between 1997 and 2007 examines: (a) target populations of students served; (b) assumptions and value judgments of researchers and program staff about participants in connection with participants' diverse backgrounds; and (c) views of access held by college access programs, based on analysis of...

Many principals across the U.S., working with regional assistance centers like the Equity Alliance, are presently engaged in exploring and improving the quality of learning opportunities for students who are culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD). The need for such work has been recognized in the fields of special and gifted education. The Sco...

This article examines the cultural nature of research. This is a consequential idea as research knowledge is expected to inform professional practices for our increasingly multicultural society. We highlight theoretical and methodological limits of the traditional practice of research on cultural groups and outline research as situated cultural pra...

The purpose of this article is to present an argument for the need for culturally responsive Response to Intervention (RTI) as an approach for reducing disproportionate minority representation in Special Education Programs for Students with Emotional Disturbances. We present an overview of the RTI model as initially intended for use in determining...