Dosun Ko, Ph.D., earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Seoul National University of Education and completed his doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Education, within the Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education.
Dr. Ko’s research examines how intersecting social markers of difference (e.g., race, class, gender, disability, and language) shape intersectional power, privilege, and marginalization in special education referral and identification, and exclusionary school discipline. To develop equity-oriented solutions, his research also includes community-driven participatory design research. Participatory design research encourages local stakeholders from historically marginalized communities to engage in collective knowledge production and decision-making activities to address systemic contradictions that they experience regarding disproportionality within their local school contexts. He has disseminated his research through prestigious journals, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, including publications in Remedial and Special Education, Teachers College Record, Urban Education, Race, Ethnicity and Education, and Equity & Excellence in Education.
With a background as an elementary inclusive classroom teacher and teacher educator, Dr. Ko anchors his teaching philosophy in Vygotskian theories of human learning and development, utilizing asset-based pedagogies to organize possible and transformative futures for teacher candidates. To this end, Dr. Ko is committed to creating a learning space rich with transformative conceptual tools (e.g., disability critical race theory, universal design for learning, and decolonization), which are applied through multiple in-class and out-of-class activities. In his role as President, Dr. Ko is an active member of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC)’s Division for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Learners (DDEL), working tirelessly to dismantle persistent barriers to social justice and enhance the education and lives of culturally and linguistically diverse students with disabilities.