Curt Dudley-Marling recently retired from Boston College after 33 years working as a teacher educator at universities in the US and Canada. He began his career as an elementary special education teacher teaching for 7 years in schools in Ohio and Wisconsin before earning his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Curt briefly returned to the classroom in the early 1990s, taking a one-year leave to teach 3rd grade. Over the course of his academic career, Curt taught courses in language and literacy including early reading and writing methods courses for prospective teachers. He has published over 100 articles and book chapters and 14 books, much of this work focusing on language and literacy, Disability Studies, and classroom talk. Overall, his scholarship stands as a critique of deficit perspectives that implicate the families, culture, and language of students living in poverty in their high levels of school failure. His most recent research examines the effect of evidence-based discussion in elementary classrooms, particularly for students who are presumed to be at risk for educational failure. In addition to his scholarly work, Curt has worked extensively in the schools helping teachers improve their practice with young readers and writers. Curt is a former co-editor of the NCTE journal Language Arts and former chair of NCTE’s Elementary Section. In 2014 he was honored as the first Kate Welling Distinguished Scholar in Disability Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Curt's webpage can be visited at https://sites.google.com/a/bc.edu/curt-dudley-marling-s-webpage/