Christopher J. Cormier

Associate Professor Loyola Marymount University

  • Los Angeles CA

christopher.cormier@lmu.edu

Contact

Loyola Marymount University

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Biography

Dr. Christopher J. Cormier is a former special education teacher and an Associate Professor of teaching and learning in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University. He has taught first through 12th in Title 1 schools in the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area. His research program focuses on the social and cultural contexts of minoritized learners and teachers in special education. Under this overarching theme, he has two lines of scholarship. The first is on the professional and socio-emotional lives of minoritized teachers. The second is on culturally informed identification of minoritized students in special education. Dr. Cormier brings a comparative lens to both of his research lines with studies in national and international contexts. He has served as the President of the Division for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Learners (DDEL) of the Council for Exceptional Children and was a Director-at-Large for Kappa Delta Pi Incorporated.

Current research projects include the following:

•Special education teacher burnout, stress, and mental health, and how it changes over the school year.

•The experiences of children with disabilities and their families in the Christian church (documentary in production).

Education

Stanford University

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

PhD

Special Education

Pepperdine University

MAEd w/emphasis in Psychology

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Areas of Expertise

Education Policy
Equity in Education
History of Education
International and Comparative Education
Psychchology
Race and Ethnicity
Sociology
Special Education
Teachers and Teaching

Industry Expertise

Education/Learning
Research
Public Policy

Affiliations

  • Council for Exceptional Children
  • American Educational Research Association
  • British Educational Research Association
  • Toastmasters International
  • The Authors Guild

Media Appearances

Dr. Phil Show

Paramount Studios  tv

2022-12-20

Learning Loss During Lockdown: Are There Solutions?

Courses

Research in Transformative Education

EDTL 6618

Context of Schooling

EDUR 6102

Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion in Education

EDUR 6002

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Articles

Introduction to the special issue - Removing shade from their light: Magnifying minoritized 2e learners with strategies for practice

TEACHING Exceptional Children (advance online publication)

Cormier, C. J., Lindo, E. J., Ford, D.

2025-08-20

This special issue is needed because of the neglect of race in conversations surrounding disability and giftedness—the proverbial elephant in the room. This long-standing and pervasive neglect led to the calls for and created problems in the production of this special issue. Journal editors often consider proposals for developing special issues with an eye toward soliciting robust scholarly discussion on topics that have received limited attention. With numerous conversations about 2e students, scholars and schools continue to divorce the conversation from race, thus perpetuating the narrative that special education and frequently, education overall can be implemented without grappling with discussions about race and racial inequities. The intersections of a child’s race and disability status often exacerbate the issues that 2e students experience, yet scholars and schools seldom consider these intersections when determining identification, strategies, placement, and policies.

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Achieving a more diverse special education teacher workforce: Guiding questions for researchers and policymakers

Multicultural Learning and Teaching, 19(2), 151-172.

Cormier, C. J., Scott, L. A., Cornelius, K., Rosenberg, M.

2024-09-11

Attracting, supporting, and retaining special education teachers of color (SETOCs) is critical in shaping a diverse special education teacher workforce in the United States. However, efforts to diversify this workforce are fraught with challenges at the federal, state, and local levels. This paper reviews what is currently known about efforts to attract, support, and retain SETOCs, and provides guidance for policy makers and researchers regarding what still needs to be done to realize a more diverse special education teacher workforce in the US. Four critical domains serve as the foundation for our guiding considerations: funding priorities, strategies to attract SETOCs, the role of educator preparation programs, and strategies to retain SETOCs.

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A comparison of measurement of stability and predictors of special education burnout and work engagement

Remedial and Special Education, Advance online publication

Ruble, L., Cormier, C. J., McGrew, J., Dueber, D.

2024-03-04

Special education teacher (SET) stress and burnout is a significant problem. A total of 490 SETs were surveyed across the United States. The purpose of this study was to: (a) assess and compare three measures of burnout / work engagement, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI), and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) and
examine change over the course of a school year during the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost 90% of teachers fell within the dangerous/at risk level of burnout. Significant measurement quality issues were observed for the MBI and OLBI, including questionable convergent validity. Burnout of SETs was found to be highly stable for the MBI and OLBI. Teachers experienced little mean change in burnout over the shool year, and perceptions of the effects of COVID, and demographic and school variables were generally not predictive of change in burnout for any measure. Implications are discussed.

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