About our authors
Ann Turnbull is retired from the University of Kansas where she was the Ross and Marianna Beach Distinguished Professor of Special Education and Co-Founder & Co-Director of the Beach Center on Disability. She initially chose special education as a career in the 1960s to participate in the civil rights movement in focusing on students with disabilities who experienced discrimination. She did not know at the time that she would later have a son with intensive support needs. A highlight of her career is researching and teaching to foster trusting partnerships between educators and families. Her hope for you is that their book will launch your educational transformation from being a curious student to being an educational leader for an appropriately ambitious education for all students and for trusting partnerships with their families. She also hopes that you derive the profound gratification and joy from your career as she has experienced in hers.
Michael Wehmeyer is the Ross and Marianna Beach Distinguished Professor of Special Education, Chair of the Department of Special Education, and Director of the Beach Center on Disability at the University of Kansas. He began his career as a special educator in Oklahoma teaching adolescents with extensive support needs and also taught in Texas. A highlight of his career has been the opportunity to explore the importance of self-determination and positive psychology in the lives of students with disabilities. His hope for you is that their book helps you to see the dignity in every child you teach and to understand that all children belong.
Karrie Shogren is a Professor at the University of Kansas in the Department of Special Education and also leads lead the Kansas University Center on Developmental Disabilities, a research center that focuses on partnering with schools and people with disabilities and their families to identify evidence-based practices to support students with disabilities. Her work has always been shaped by her drive to make sure that all people with disabilities have equitable opportunities to live self-determined lives. A highlight of her career is supporting and mentoring emerging researchers and advocates with and without disabilities who will be future change agents in our schools and communities. Elevating the funds of knowledge that people with disabilities bring to their education and our schools is something she sees as essential to promoting equity and inclusion. Her hope is that this book supports you to think about how you can advocate for and support change as an educator, how you can support your students to become self-determined young people who make things happen in their lives, in their schools, and in their communities, and how you can constantly seek to grow, to learn, and to reflect on your educational practices.
Meghan Burke is a Professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She became interested in special education because of her brother, Ryan. Her parents advocated for Ryan to be included with his peers; their advocacy inspired her trajectory in special education. A highlight of her career is developing advocacy programs for parents of individuals with disabilities. These programs have supported families in advocating for: their own children with disabilities, other families, and legislative change. Upon reading their book, she hopes that you will become an advocate not only for your students but also for systemic change for all individuals with disabilities.
Rud Turnbull is the Ross and Marianna Beach Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Education of the University of Kansas, Lawrence and Co-Founder (1988) and former Co-Director (1988–2014) of the Beach Center on Disability. He was also a courtesy professor of law at that university (1980–2006). He did not choose special education as a profession; it chose him, in large part because of his son, Jay, who had a disability, and his wife, Ann, and in part because of his training as a lawyer. The highlight of his career is the use he made at federal, state, and local government levels of his own and others' peer-reviewed publications to create new law; he was privileged to be in the vanguard of the advocates who initiated and sustained the disability rights revolution. His hope is that you will understand that as much as special education is a profession entailing teaching and learning, it also is part of a civil rights movement and an expression of the ethical principle of dignity.
