Biography
Kathleen King Thorius is Professor of Special Education and Urban Education Studies and founding Executive Director of the Great Lakes Equity Center: an organizational hub for an array of research, technical assistance, and educational resource development projects, including the Region III Midwest and Plains (MAP) Equity Assistance Center. She is editor of Exceptional Children, the flagship special journal of the Council for Exceptional Children, and editor of Multiple Voices: Disability, Race, and Language Intersections in Special Education. Thorius is an internationally recognized critical special education scholar who develops and facilitates cultural historical approaches to teacher learning, largely with white/non-disabled educators, toward the goal of inclusive education: an intersectional education justice movement.
Thorius was a school psychologist before earning her Ph.D. as a USDOE-funded doctoral fellow in an interdisciplinary program to prepare culturally responsive special education professors. She is published extensively in practitioner and research outlets, including Harvard Educational Review, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and the International Journal of Inclusive Education, and presents nationally and internationally on race, language, and disability equity, and multi-tiered systems of support including culturally responsive school-wide discipline approaches. Her expertise undergirds past and current work with myriad US urban, rural, and suburban school districts and state departments of education. She has been awarded over $25 million in external funding, and is co-editor of Sustaining Disabled Youth, and Ability, Equity, and Culture: Sustaining Inclusive Urban Education Reform. Thorius is author of Equity Expansive Technical Assistance for Schools, in which she details approaches to partnering with educators and communities to eliminate education inequities.
Education:
- 2009 Ph.D., Curriculum & Instruction with emphasis in Special Education
- 1999 Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies, School Psychology
- 1998 Master of Education, School Psychology
- 1996 Bachelor of Arts, Psychology
Courses:
- EDUC-K 201 Schools, Society, and Exceptionality
- EDUC-K 306 Teaching Students with Special Needs in Secondary Classrooms
- EDUC-K 505 Introduction to Special Education for Graduate Students
- EDUC-K 548 Families, School, and Society
Expert:
- Racial and Linguistic Disproportionality in Special Education, Inclusive Education, Response to Intervention, Addressing Educational Equity in Teacher Professional Learning
Professional Associations:
- American Anthropological Association Council on Anthropology and Education
- American Educational Research Association, Division G: Social Context of Education, Division J: Post-secondary Education, Division K: Teaching and Teacher Education
- Council for Exceptional Children, Division for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Learners, Teacher Education Division