We are a collaborative, interdisciplinary team of researchers, educators, postdoctoral scholars, doctoral students, and undergraduate students from the University of California, Davis. Our overarching goal is to improve the educational experiences of learners on the autism spectrum by understanding the dynamic and transactional relationship between students and their classroom environment. We started as a small research group in 2016, coding videos of autistic students and their teachers within general and special education classrooms.

Our project investigates teacher cognition and learning in two core practices of classroom communication: leading discussions and eliciting student thinking. The project explores secondary English as language-rich, and elementary science where literacy gets backgrounded but is essential to practice. We also focus on linguistically diverse learners and their communicative repertoires that may be leveraged for learning.