Curt Dudley-Marling recently retired from Boston College after 33 years working in schools of education at universities in the US and Canada. Curt began his career as an elementary special education teacher working for 7 years in schools in Ohio and Wisconsin before earning his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Curt briefly resumed his classroom teaching career in the early 1990s, taking a one-year leave from his duties at York University in Toronto to teach 3rd grade. Over the course of his academic career, Curt Dudley-Marling 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.