Master of Arts [M.A] [Special Education: Learning Disabilities] From American University

This intensive and data-based method of teaching emphasizes teachers’ sensitivity to their students’ individual needs and learning styles. Graduate students in the program learn how to assess students’ individual strengths and weaknesses, based on their understanding of child development in language, cognition, motor, and social domains. Additionally, our teachers learn how to use a variety of instructional approaches to teach to students' strengths while remediating weaknesses.

The program faculty recognize the interaction of cultural, linguistic, and environmental background factors on students’ individual learning needs; and the program is designed to prepare teachers to embrace and address these diversity factors. By increasing the awareness and appreciation of diversity in our graduate students, the program prepares specialists who differentiate between behaviors associated with cultural, linguistic, and/or environmental factors, and learning disabilities.

These principles of acceptance, understanding, and embracing of diversity factors are reflected in the American University's School of Education's organizing principles and professional commitments for all its teacher education programs.

Students receive training and supervision by master teachers at The Lab School of Washington, a pioneering, arts-based scholastic day school for students (grades K–6 primarily) with severe learning disabilities that was founded by Sally L. Smith in 1967.

Our faculty members are respected specialists in their fields, all deeply involved in special education research and practice. Instruction is collaborative and team-based. Graduate students are immersed in a creative approach to teaching grounded in solid practical knowledge, the combination of which prepares them to be highly qualified and imaginative teachers.

Graduates are putting their expertise to work around the world and across the educational spectrum. Alumni work in public schools, private schools, independent schools, clinics, treatment centers, government organizations, and research institutions with positions as classroom teachers, professors, adult educators, bilingual teachers, tutors, researchers, program heads, policy makers, arts coordinators, curriculum specialists, and educational game designers.