Joseph Passi, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Special Education

Introduction

Joseph Passi is an Assistant Professor of Special Education. He teaches courses on special education law, inclusion practices, assessment, and assistive technology.

Research Overview

Passi’s research and teaching centers on inclusion, family engagement, special education law, and sociocultural understandings of disability.

Before joining PNW, he worked as a high school special education teacher in Chicago Public Schools for 16 years. His experiences as a teacher and struggling student led to a critical examination of how educational systems and structures reflect and reproduce the stigmatization, medicalization, and segregation of disability.

This has led to numerous institutional and societal inequities for individuals with disabilities and limited their access to social, intellectual, and cultural resources that could lead to improved outcomes. Research has shown that high-quality practices that emphasize inclusion and universal design for learning (UDL) can begin to ameliorate these barriers.

In my spare time, I enjoy playing music, travelling, riding my bike around Chicago, and taking long walks with my dog.