Providing every child with an equitable opportunity to learn has been a continuous challenge in education. According to previous literature, the curriculum in our K-12 classrooms teaches a set of ideas and principles that centers a white majority, enacting violence through acts of erasure, assimilation techniques etc. As a result of this violence, my research will survey the range of literature that shows how the white-majority curriculum enacts violence and provide the implementation and incorporation of Ethnic Studies and an intervention. The central question of my research asks, “How can secondary English and U.S. History teachers understand Ethnic Studies as a way to combat curriculum violence towards students of color?” To answer this, my research gathers data from interviews with current secondary English and U.S. History teachers. During these interviews, I will use a qualitative approach as I pose questions to generate whether the participants' understand the curriculum as violent, and if so, what they think of Ethnic Studies as an intervention. I anticipate that my results will first, offer insight into what teachers think in a post-Trump era, especially as it pertains to the evolution of Ethnic Studies. Next, this research will inform curricular development as it will provide a solution to the violent curriculum, and lastly, provide support for an Ethnic Studies centered curriculum in the classroom, reconstructing public school education as we know it. Given these findings, the implications of my research look to give credence to the incorporation of Ethnic Studies into K-12 curricula.

Identifying a student as culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) is to categorize them under an umbrella term that encompasses students from a variety of backgrounds. Culturally, this can include students who practice unique customs and traditions that distinguish them as a minority from their peers. Linguistically, this can include those who are raised in non-English or limited-English speaking households. The students that are identified as CLD are disproportionately represented in the population of students receiving special education services in the U.S. public education system. The disproportional representation has many contributing factors; each will be analyzed and addressed in this paper. In consideration of this disproportionality, practices such as the implementation of Response to Intervention (RTI) and culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) may prove to be most effective when used in conjunction with one another. In this review, I will examine relevant literature involving RTI and CRP within the realm of special education in order to investigate the adequate level of support that is needed to provide special education services to a CLD student. I hypothesize that the results from this review will prove the necessity of providing each student with a free appropriate public education (FAPE) through the use of RTI and CRP.

School aged children find most of their academic success through their early literacy skills. This increases the need for effective early literacy interventions such as co-reading and reading skills. Previously it was theorized that socioeconomic status and access to resources was a major indicator of literacy. Looking forward it is suggested that parent-child interaction and reading is more effective when looking at literacy and vocabulary development. During this summer experience, executive functioning videos will be coded as a control group to see how parents will read to their children when put in a lab setting. Compared to the other group which includes three separate sessions and dialogic reading interventions. Research Question: Does dialogic reading instruction assist parents in becoming more skilled co-readers?