Executive Director, Great Lakes Equity Center

Professor, Indiana University School of Education Indianapolis

Editor, Exceptional Children

Editor, Multiple Voices: Disability, Race, and Language Intersections in Special Education

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.