Amy Papacek

Amy M. Papacek is a clinical assistant professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher's College. Professor Papacek has more than 15 years of experience working with individuals with and without special needs in a variety of settings. She was a director of research and training at a private school for children with autism and other developmental disabilities prior to joining Arizona State University.

Professor Papacek is an interdisciplinary scholar and has engaged in research projects that explore the unique relationships among special education, inclusive classroom practices, and culturally responsiveness in various contexts, specifically exploring the persistent tensions that arise as social inequalities continue to be reproduced in classrooms. A motivating force behind her research is to promote opportunities to bring together special education and general education policymakers, researchers, practitioners, children, and families to transform the systems of care and education that are broken, incomplete, and often times exclusionary.

Professor Papacek serves as vice-president on the executive board of The Jirnai Project, a grass-roots nonprofit organization serving children in Kenya providing for their educational needs. Her research interests include pre-service teacher education, professional development for teachers, autism spectrum disorder, and inclusive education. Professor Papacek is an educator in teacher preparation interested in understanding how intersectionality helps to explain the ways in which ability, culture, language, race and other dimensions of human variation intersect in particular ways to complicate the structural and hegemonic forces that produce and maintain deficit views of children and adults. She utilized video-cued ethnography to complete interviews with siblings of an individual labeled on the autism spectrum as well as their parents to investigate how these factors impact their daily lives. She feels that the success of students is critically impacted by the lens in which their teachers approach curriculum and classroom activities and that providing future teachers with the views of families will begin to make systematic changes to inclusive education.