Rate My Professor Amanda Miller

Amanda Miller is an Associate Professor of Special Education in the Teacher Education Division of the College of Education at Wayne State University, where she also serves as an Affiliated Research Associate with the Michigan Developmental Disabilities Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in Special Education from the University of Kansas in 2019 as an ACCESS Scholar, her M.Ed. in Special Education from Northern Arizona University in 2007 as a SKIES Scholar, and her B.A. in Elementary Education with a Life Science Concentration from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2000. Miller's research centers on equity, justice, and access in education, particularly how institutions respond to difference impacting multiply-marginalized youth such as girls of color with complex support needs in middle and high school. She investigates how teachers cultivate pedagogy grounded in educational equity, justice, and liberation for these youth, and how trusting, reciprocal, transformative family-school-community partnerships are developed with their families. Her expertise encompasses youth perspectives, inclusive education, intellectual and developmental disabilities, disability-centered culturally sustaining pedagogies, disability studies, DisCrit, critical qualitative inquiry, discourse analysis, visual methodologies, youth participatory action research, and community-based participatory research.

Miller has garnered recognition through awards including the Faculty Community Engagement Scholarship Award and Faculty Research Innovation Award from Wayne State University's College of Education in 2023, along with nominations for the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program, TASH Early Career Researchers Award, Wayne State University Academy of Scholars’ Junior Faculty Award, and others. She leads major funded projects, such as a $3.75 million U.S. Department of Education grant in 2025 for collaborative special education leadership preparation with the University of Kansas and University of Arizona, and a $50,000 grant in 2023 to train educators in disability-centered culturally sustaining teaching practices. Her publications include 'Rightful presence? Teacher candidates navigating inclusive education for youth with complex support needs' (Exceptional Children, 2025), 'Teachers’ insights on cultivating inclusive education for students with complex support needs' (Teachers College Record, 2024), 'Toward disability-centered, culturally sustaining pedagogies in teacher education' (Critical Studies in Education, 2023), 'Disabled girls of color excavate exclusionary literacy practices and generate promising sociospatial-textual solutions' (International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2023), and book chapters such as 'Contemporary complexities of inclusive education in the United States' (Routledge, 2025) and 'Photovoice and cartography as activist tools' (Berghahn Books, 2025). Miller employs methods like photovoice and cartography to amplify disabled girls of color's voices in reimagining schooling.