Scanlan, M., Khurana, A., Martin, T., & Melendez, C. (2026). Mentoring coaches toward communities of practice advancing inclusion. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 15(3), 292–306. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMCE-09-2025-0139
Ph.D. · Curriculum, Instruction & Educational Leadership · Boston College
Reimagining education systems so every learner belongs.
I am an educator and a researcher of inclusive special education. My scholarship connects organizational improvement, evidence-based leadership, and educational systems evaluation to turn research into everyday practice for students with disabilities.
0Publications
0Conference talks
0Awards & fellowships
0Countries presented in
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Educational Leadership and Policy
College of Education
The University of Texas at Austin
01
About me
I began my career in Indian classrooms, first as an elementary teacher and then as a special educator, and quickly learned that even the most devoted teacher cannot out-teach a system that wasn't designed for all of its learners. That realization has shaped my path in education.
I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin, where I study how school leaders build intervention structures for students with disabilities. Alongside the fellowship, I consult for Pratham Education Foundation's ENABLE project and serve on a Department of School Education & Literacy, Ministry of Education working committee developing a national teacher training module on inclusive education that adopts a tiered approach to intervention.
I hold a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, with a specialization in Educational Leadership, from Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development. My dissertation identified the system-level conditions of moral authorization and organizational capacity that make inclusion last. Before that, I partnered with Boston Public Schools on special education reform and led assessment research at Pratham's ASER Centre, including the Assessment for All tool for children with disabilities.
Throughout this work runs one consistent question: how do education systems, not just individual classrooms, become genuinely inclusive, and stay that way?
Research journey
01 / 06
-
Fall 2026 – present
Postdoctoral Fellow
Educational Leadership and Policy, College of Education, The University of Texas at Austin
- Co-leading a professional development initiative with a public school district in Texas that prepares principals to use evidence-based special education practices and build structures for including students with disabilities.
- Studying instructional leadership in another public school district in Texas with Dr. Sarah Powell and Dr. David DeMatthews: how the district supports schools, and how schools build intervention structures for students with disabilities.
- Conducting a literature review on district improvement and preparing manuscripts from current projects.
-
September 2026 – present
Consultant, ENABLE Project
Pratham Education Foundation, India
- ENABLE (Equity in Accessing Numeracy and Basic Literacy Education) embeds inclusion in early childhood and foundational learning for historically marginalized children, including those with developmental delays and disabilities.
- Serve in a technical advisory role, overseeing its inclusive education work for alignment with current research and evaluating its resources, with Universal Design for Learning embedded across curriculum, materials, and assessments.
- Build training for teachers, Anganwadi workers, special educators, and community workers, and mentor the inclusive education team.
-
June 2026 – present
Working Committee Member, Inclusive Teacher Training
Department of School Education & Literacy, Ministry of Education, Government of India
- Developing a national 5-day in-service teacher training module on inclusive education, built on a tiered approach to intervention, to build the capacity of public school teachers across India.
- Wrote modules on Universal Design for Learning, Specially Designed Instruction, and High-Leverage Practices for master trainers, with state and district rollout beginning October 2026.
- Designed the inclusive lesson plan template for nationwide use, with a lesson design framework, teacher checklist, and exemplar lessons.
-
2025 – 2026
Dissertation: Realist Evaluation of Inclusive Education Reform
Boston College · Archdiocese of Milwaukee
- Studied the Archdiocese of Milwaukee's inclusive education reform to explain what works, for whom, and under what conditions.
- Found that supportive system conditions build moral authorization and organizational capacity, which together shape who enrolls and what inclusion looks like day to day.
- Developed individual school summaries to support each school's ongoing inclusion work.
-
2022 – 2025
Research–Practice Partnership
Boston College · Boston Public Schools
- Partnered with district administrators to refine a Theory of Action for including students with disabilities.
- Co-developed an inclusion planning guidebook, an evaluation tool, and classroom observation instruments.
- Supported professional development for inclusion coaches, leading to book chapters, a journal article on mentoring coaches, and a NEERO best-paper nomination.
-
2018 – 2021
Research (Assessment) Associate
ASER Centre, Pratham Education Foundation, India
- Led the design of the UDL-grounded Assessment for All tool, assessing foundational learning for children with disabilities in 16 regional languages.
- Ran large-scale surveys and cognitive labs to validate the assessment design.
- Developed the ASER 2019 tool and the PAL Network's ELANA assessment, used across 13 low- and middle-income countries.
02
Publications
Peer-reviewed scholarship on inclusive education reform, UDL, and equity-centered leadership. Full list in my CV and on Google Scholar.
Khurana, A. (in press). From fragmentation to cohesion: A narrative review of system-level inclusive education reforms. Journal of Special Education Leadership.
Khurana, A. (2022). Converting physical spaces into learning spaces: Integrating universal design and universal design for learning. Frontiers in Education, 7, Article 965818. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.965818
Works under review and in preparation
Khurana, A. (under review). Inclusion as an emergent property of the system: Unpacking system-level conditions for sustained special education reform in Catholic schools. Journal of Educational Change.
Khurana, A., & Gates, E. (in preparation). Realist approach as a methodology for studying school improvement for students with disabilities. American Journal of Evaluation.
Khurana, A., Quesnell, D., & Anderson, M. (in preparation). The making of an inclusive school: A case of a Catholic school. Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership.
Mountford, M., Wallace, L. E., & Khurana, A. (in press). Wicked problems: Conceptual foundations and contemporary significance. In M. Mountford & L. E. Wallace (Eds.), School boards and superintendents: Navigating a wicked terrain (Research on the Superintendency Series, Vol. 3). Information Age Publishing.
Mountford, M., Wallace, L. E., & Khurana, A. (in press). Wicked is as wicked does. In M. Mountford & L. E. Wallace (Eds.), School boards and superintendents: Navigating a wicked terrain (Research on the Superintendency Series, Vol. 3). Information Age Publishing.
Mountford, M., Wallace, L. E., & Khurana, A. (in press). No rest from the wicked. In M. Mountford & L. E. Wallace (Eds.), School boards and superintendents: Navigating a wicked terrain (Research on the Superintendency Series, Vol. 3). Information Age Publishing.
Khurana, A., & Scanlan, M. (2025). Reforming special education service delivery in Boston Public Schools with research-practice partnership. In K. Zenkov, D. Polly, & L. Rudder (Eds.), Boundary-spanning in school-university partnerships. Information Age Publishing.
Khurana, A., Scanlan, M., Bott, J., & d'Ablemont Burnes, E. (2023). Research–practice partnership to reform special education service delivery in Boston Public Schools. In J. Barnes, M. J. Stevens, B. Z. Ekelund, & K. Perham-Lippman (Eds.), Inclusive leadership: Equity and belonging in our communities (pp. 107–120). Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2058-880120230000009010
Dalton, E. M., Jackson, R. M., Bracken, S., Satar, A. A., Aabi, M., Khurana, A., Nicholas, L., Power, O. K., & Plantin Ewe, L. (2023). Creating an international collaboratory for leadership in universally designed education: INCLUDE as a global community of practice. In K. Koreeda, M. Tsuge, S. Ikuta, E. M. Dalton, & L. Plantin Ewe (Eds.), Building inclusive education in K-12 classrooms and higher education: Theories and principles (pp. 1–20). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-7370-2.ch001
Khurana, A. (2019). UDL practices in India: Paving a path from equality to equity in learning. In S. L. Gronseth & E. M. Dalton (Eds.), Universal access through inclusive instructional design: International perspectives on UDL (pp. 103–110). Routledge.
Khurana, A. (2026, April). Transforming systems for inclusion: Advancing reform for students with disabilities [Paper presentation]. American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Khurana, A. (2026, April). Unpacking system-level conditions for sustained reform in Catholic schools [Paper presentation]. American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Khurana, A. (2026, January). What makes inclusion "sticky"? Unpacking system-level conditions for sustained reform in Catholic schools [Paper presentation]. International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI), Doha, Qatar.
Khurana, A. (2026, March). Beyond isolated practices: A systemic four-part framework for inclusive education reform [Poster presentation]. Council for Exceptional Children Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, UT, United States.
Khurana, A. (2026, March). Leading for lasting inclusion: System reform in Catholic school networks [Poster presentation]. Council for Exceptional Children Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, UT, United States.
Khurana, A. (2025, November). Leading inclusive reform: Building resilience through collaboration and community [Paper presentation]. Graduate Student Symposium, University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) Annual Convention, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Khurana, A. (2025, November). Examining system-level variation in inclusive education across Catholic schools [Symposium presentation]. Jackson Scholars Symposium, University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) Annual Convention, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Scanlan, M., & Khurana, A. (2024, April). A research-practice partnership for dismantling social injustices and advancing organizational transformation for inclusive education [Paper presentation]. AERA Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
Dalton, E., & Khurana, A. (2020). Making assessments inclusive. In D. Schmidt-Crawford (Ed.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 1975–1979). AACE.
Khurana, A., & Apoorva, P. (2019). Relearning of the teachers: Effect of training in Universal Design for Learning on teacher's knowledge and skills and learners' achievement. In Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 1471–1481). AACE.
Dalton, E., Gronseth, S., Anderson, C., Anderson, K., & Khurana, A. (2019). Inclusive instructional design efforts around the world. In K. Graziano (Ed.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 2579–2581). AACE.
+ 14 more peer-reviewed papers, posters, and symposia at AERA, UCEA, ICSEI, NEERO, CIES, ICEQ, and the International Conference on Education (2019–2025). See the full CV.
Khurana, A. (2026). Inclusion that sticks: Unpacking system-level conditions for Catholic schools educating students with disabilities [Doctoral dissertation, Boston College]. https://ur.bc.edu/islandora/inclusion-sticks
Podcast: Inclusion that sticks
0:00 / 21:56
Dyer, C., Bhattacharjea, S., Ramanujan, P., Khurana, A., & Alcott, B. (2023). Continuity, discontinuity, and progression in the early years' numeracy curriculum in India. Ideas for India.
Khurana, A. (2020, June 1). E-learning challenges in India. International Collaboratory for Leadership in Universally Designed Education (INCLUDE) Blog.
Flood, M. (Host). (2022, May 25). Episode 9: Talking flexible learning spaces with Aashna Khurana [Audio podcast episode]. In Talking about all things inclusion.
03
Teaching
A decade of teaching across two continents, from elementary classrooms in India to graduate seminars in Boston.
Teaching philosophy
I teach with one lesson from my own classroom years in view: good intentions collapse quickly when teachers lack time, usable strategies, and coordinated support. Most of my students are practicing educators and emerging leaders who need something that works on Monday morning. So I teach the way I believe professional judgment is built, close to practice, oriented toward improvement, and disciplined by evidence. Each unit opens with a real problem of practice, such as a co-teaching model launched without the staffing to sustain it, or a school whose inclusive enrollment outpaced its capacity. We then work backward to the theory, the evidence, and the method, so that students learn to look past whether a practice worked and ask why it worked, for which learners, and in what settings.
My approach is deliberately eclectic. It is student-centered, because adults learn best when the curriculum grows from the problems they already carry; it is constructivist, treating the classroom as an exchange where my research meets the authority of my students' practice; and it is rigorous about the core knowledge every leader must master, from evidence use and assessment to systems thinking. Whether in person or online, I design courses in which working educators feel individually supported, and I choose cases that reflect the real intersections of disability, language, and culture. Above all, I want students to leave able to read a learner, read a system, and act to improve both.
University teaching
Teaching Fellow, EDUC7438: Educating Children with Disabilities
Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College
Taught seminars, developed course materials, and mentored graduate students in special education theory and practice.
Guest Lecturer, T560: Universal Design for Learning: Theory, Practice, and Innovation
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Invited annually to lecture on UDL in international and systems-change contexts.
Guest Lecturer, Instructional Technology & Society
University of Houston, College of Education
Lectured on inclusive instructional design and technology for diverse learners.
Guest Lecturer, Developing Leadership Capacity Through Reflective Practice
Royal Roads University, Victoria, Canada
Taught reflective practice approaches for building equitable leadership capacity.
K–12 teaching
Special Educator
DAV Public School, New Delhi, India
Supported students with disabilities through individualized instruction and inclusive classroom practices.
Elementary Educator
Kendriya Vidyalaya (Central School of India), Secunderabad, Telangana, India
Taught elementary learners in one of India's largest public school systems.
04
Leadership & service
Service across research associations, practitioner organizations, and national education policy.
UT Austin (The University of Texas at Austin)
DoSEL, Ministry of Education (Department of School Education & Literacy, Ministry of Education, Government of India)
AERA (American Educational Research Association)
UCEA (University Council for Educational Administration)
ICSEI (International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement)
INCLUDE (International Collaboratory for Leadership in Universally Designed Education)
Pratham Education Foundation
CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology)
SITE (Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education)
- Member
Working Committee, Department of School Education & Literacy, Ministry of Education, Government of India
Contributing expertise in evidence-based practice to a national initiative that builds the inclusive-teaching capacity of India’s public school teachers.
2026 – present - Co-Chair
Generational Renewal, Inclusion and Diversity (GRID) Committee, ICSEI
Support emerging scholars across a global research community and help review ICSEI’s Ethical Diversity Statement each year to keep inclusion and belonging in focus.
2025 – present - Co-Chair
Division A Connect Series, AERA
Designed and run a webinar series connecting graduate students with faculty across institutions on educational leadership research, the job market, and AI in education.
2025 – present - Consultant
Pratham Education Foundation
A long collaboration, from assessment research at the ASER Centre (2018–2021) to my current technical advisory role on the ENABLE project, where I oversee its inclusive education work for alignment with current research, evaluate its resources, and flag where the evidence base needs further testing or adaptation.
2024 – present - Representative
Graduate Student Representative, Leadership for School Improvement SIG, AERA & Researcher Development Program, UCEA
Represented graduate students and helped coordinate the Researcher Development Program, which pairs doctoral students with faculty mentors on real scholarly projects.
2023 – 2025 - Steering
Steering Committee Member, INCLUDE
Helped guide a global community of practice for leadership in universally designed education, contributing to its collaborative scholarship and blog.
2019 – 2025 - Intern
UDL Summer Intern, CAST
Worked on Universal Design for Learning with the organization that developed the UDL framework.
2022 - Co-Chair
SITE Learner Variability SIG (formerly UDL SIG)
Co-led the special interest group bringing Universal Design for Learning and learner variability into teacher education and technology research.
2021 – 2023
05
Awards & fellowships
David L. Clark Scholar
Competitive national fellowship for emerging scholars in educational leadership. Sponsored by UCEA and AERA Divisions A & L.
Roche Center Research Fellowship
$5,000 fellowship with research travel support for scholarship on Catholic schools. Lynch School of Education, Boston College.
Jackson Scholar, UCEA
Recognizes doctoral students advancing equity-focused educational research.
UCEA Graduate Student Fellowship
Collaborative fellowship with the UCEA Joint Program Center for the Study of the Superintendency & District Governance.
ICSEI Junior Scholar Fellowship
Recognizing emerging scholars in educational research, from the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement.
Doctoral Student Research Fund
Lynch School of Education research stipend supporting dissertation research and travel.
Researcher Development Program Fellow
A UCEA–AERA program that mentors emerging researchers in school improvement.
Best Paper Nomination, NEERO
For "System Efforts to Reform Special Education Service Delivery in Boston Public Schools."
Inclusive Learning Network Award, ISTE
Honored by the International Society for Technology in Education PLN for contributions to inclusive learning practices.
Let's connect
Working toward creating schools
where everyone belongs?
So am I.
I'm always glad to talk about inclusive education, leadership, and systems reform, and about research collaborations, speaking, or consulting.