Dr. Marcia Rock, a professor in UNC Greensboro’s Department of Specialized Education Services, served as an editor of the recent publication Transforming the Special Education Workforce: Research and Complex Systems Perspectives. The volume was written for the American Educational Research Association and is the first work that unifies special education workforce recruitment, preparation, retention, and leadership within a whole-systems thinking framework supported by implementation and improvement sciences.
Throughout the four-section text, the publication argues that challenges faced in special education – including not strengthening recruitment, preparing and retaining educators, strengthening the workforce pipeline, and creating research that is needed to improve learning and overall outcomes – can only be solved by creating interconnected strategies.
The idea for the publication rose out of a research mini conference in 2019. That session witnessed collaboration between researchers, practitioners, and policy makers and generated new ways to think about, and improve, the special education workforce crisis. Arguments were made that current ideas were ineffective due to treating them as individual problems instead of part of a larger system.
The central focus of the work is on children and youth with disabilities, especially those in rural and urban settings, who are greatly impacted by these challenges.
Rock assisted with editing three of the four sections of the publication and co-authored six chapters as well as the editors’ introduction and afterword. Dr. Morgan Chitiyo, current dean of the School of Education, also co-authored a chapter of the volume.
