Strunk Professor of Inclusive Education
- PhD, Syracuse University, New York
- MA, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India
- BA, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, India
Maya Kalyanpur, Ph.D., is Strunk Professor of Inclusive Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of San Diego having received her Ph.D. in Special Education from Syracuse University. She started her career as a teacher of children with intellectual disabilities in India. She was an international advisor in inclusive education to the Cambodian Ministry of Education under the World Bank-supported Global Partnership for Education program and received a Fulbright Foundation Senior Research Fellowship to study services for students with learning disabilities in India. In 2020, she was awarded the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Multicultural/Multiethnic Education Carlos J. Vallejo Memorial Award for Lifetime Scholarship and was Cognizant Foundation Visiting Professor and Chair at the Center of Excellence in Teacher Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She has conducted research on the intersections of culture and special education and international development and disability studies in India, the US and Cambodia, with a specific focus on international inclusive education policy and practice, and families of children with disabilities from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. She co-edited the book, Disability studies in South Asia: Redefining boundaries and extending horizons (Peter Lang, 2015), which presents an alternative analysis to disability appropriate to South Asia, authored the book, Development, education and learning disability in India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), which argues that, despite the inclusionary principles of Education For All, the label of learning disability is creating a marginalized group of students in India, and is a co-author on the book, The Politics of English language education and social inequality: Global pressures, national priorities and schooling in India (Routledge, 2023), which examines the problematic consequences of colonial legacies of language politics and English language education in the multilingual contexts of the global South. She co-founded the Proteep project, which supports girls to complete high school in Cambodia.
Scholarly Work
Books
Kalyanpur, M., Boruah, P. B., Molina, S. C. & Shenoy, S. (2023). The politics of English language education and social inequality: Global pressures, national priorities and schooling in India. Routledge.
Kalyanpur, M. (2022). Development, learning disability, and education in India. Palgrave Macmillan.
Rao, S. & Kalyanpur, M. (Eds.) (2015). South Asia and Disability Studies: Redefining boundaries and extending horizons. New York: Peter Lang.
Chapters and Journal Articles
Kalyanpur, M. (2024) Intersectionality of caste and class on perceptions of academic ability in multilingual classrooms in India. Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology, 2(2), pp. 263–289
Kalyanpur, M. (in press). Inclusive Education in India: Accomplishments and challenges. In T. Gonzalez & A. Tefera, (Volume Eds.) “Bodies and Different Ability”, M. T. Winn & L. T. Winn (Editors in Chief). The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Social Justice in Education.
Kalyanpur, M. (2020). Inclusive and special education in Asia. In U. Sharma and S. Salend (Eds.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Education. New York: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.ORE_EDU-01262.R1
Kalyanpur, M. (2020). Disrupting the narrative of universality of inclusive education: The new marginalization of low-income, English language learners in India. Educational Forum, 84 (4), 296-308. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131725.2020.1796071
Rao, S. & Kalyanpur, M. (2020) Universal notions of development and disability: Towards whose imagined vision? Disability and the Global South. 7(1), 1830-1851. ISSN 2050-7364 www.dgsjournal.org
Kalyanpur, M. (2019). Challenges in implementing Response to Intervention with culturally and linguistically diverse students. The International Journal of Diversity in Education, 19(2), 45-56. doi:10.18848/2327-0020/CGP/v19i02/45-56.
Kalyanpur, M. (2019) “What can we do if they are not getting?”: Perspectives of teachers on inclusive education in a low-fee paying private English medium school. In R. Setty, R. Iyengar, M. Witenstein, E. Byker, & H. Kidwai (Eds.) Teaching and Teacher Education South Asian Perspectives. (pp. 93-112). Palgrave Macmillan.
Kalyanpur, M. (2019). Just the bathwater, not the baby: Presenting an alternative framework to inclusive education in the global south. In A. Hilton, B. Hinnant, S. Platt & C. Newman (Eds.) Comprehensive Multicultural Education in the 21st Century: Increasing Access in the Age of Retrenchment, pp. 175–193. Information Age Publications.