Daniel J. (Dan) Boudah, Ph.D.
Affiliations:
Background and Interests:
I’ve been East. I’ve been West. I’ve been to the Midwest. I’ve also lived in Texas and now in the South. I think that living and teaching in many places around the country has enriched my perspective on people and education. Having been a general education teacher first and then a special education teacher has also shaped the way I look at the lives of teachers and students. My continuing opportunities to spend time in classrooms, conducting demonstration lessons and providing instructional coaching, as well as assisting school and district leaders, continues to enhance the way I think and what I do.
Now, I’m not a person who always wanted to be an educator. I thought I was going to be a rich and influential businessman. That’s the direction I started off as an undergraduate, but I had a change of heart, and I decided that investing in people, rather than dollars, was more important to me. I switched majors, completed my B.S. at the University of Vermont and started teaching English/Language Arts in a small, rural district in Vermont. After a few years, I became quite interested in the challenges faced by the students who were “mainstreamed” into my classes in the mid 1980s. As a result, I enrolled in and completed the Consulting Teacher/Learning Specialist master’s degree program at the University of Vermont. After that, my new bride and I decided to pack up the wagon, like the Beverly Hillbillies, and head west to California. There, I became a special education teacher, facilitated inclusive instruction for students with learning and behavioral disabilities, and began conducting professional development for teachers.
While in California, I first met Don Deshler and Jean Schumaker at a conference. I had valued their work for some time, and eventually decided to head to the University of Kansas to study for my doctorate and work at the Institute for Research on Learning Disabilities, which expanded and was renamed the Center for Research on Learning. Since being transformed as a person and professional at Kansas, I have worked at a couple of different universities in Texas and North Carolina.
Based on my years as an educator, particularly my years in public schools, there are a number of critical incidents that stand out in my memory; one, in particular, dramatically shaped my approach to what I now do. When I was teaching in public schools in California, a group of well-meaning researchers from a prestigious university asked several colleagues and me to participate in a research study. They treated us well and politely asked us to try out certain materials with our academically diverse classes. They soon returned, with clipboards in hand, to watch and take copious notes while we taught and students worked. After several weeks, with handshakes and sincere “thank-yous,” the researchers were gone, and never heard from again.
Thus, as a result of that and several other critical incidents, coupled with invaluable opportunities in many different places, the goals of my continuing work are as follows: first, to be field-based; second, to be collaborative in nature; third, to treat teachers and students not as subjects and outsiders, but as participants and partners; fourth, to make sure my work is useful, realistic, and sustainable; and fifth, to improve the lives of teachers, students with disabilities and others at-risk for failure, particularly at the secondary level.
My continuing professional interests focus on the following areas: programs and services for low-performing students and students with disabilities, learning strategies and instructional strategies, the Content Literacy Continuum, dropout prevention, and systems change. I continue to enjoy opportunities to be engaged in professional development, curriculum design, program evaluation, grant and foundation proposal development, and system change activities with public and private schools, as well as public and private agencies to develop and support services to low-performing and at-risk students.
Pamela (my wife) and I, with our two incredibly wonderful children, live in North Carolina.