"Only by being true to the full growth of all of the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself."  (John Dewey, 1900)
Julia in her garden
Teaching is not telling -- 
it's about my students, not me.
To teach is to provide the time, 
experiences, and supports 
necessary for learners to 
develop personally valued 
knowledge, understanding, 
and skills. My role as a 
university educator is to 
collaboratively construct 
and ferociously protect 
that learning space.



Julia Scherba de Valenzuela, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Special Education 
The University of New Mexico

Within Special Education, I work within the Concentration in Intellectual and Severe Disabilities: Studies in Educational Equity for Diverse Exceptional Learners

I also sit on the faculty of Bilingual Education/TESOL at UNM.


As of the end of the Spring semester, 2018, I will no longer be maintaining this website. Instead, I will be using other technology tools to provide access to teaching materials for students. If you are a current or former student, please contact me for access to infomration I previously provided on this website.

I have been a faculty member in the College of Education at UNM since 1998. My work is shaped around the notion of disability as a social construction. My work in this area includes:
  • bilingual special education (e.g. disproportionate representation, educational inequity),
  • language socialization and communication development among culturally and linguistically diverse populations,
  • portrayals of individuals with disability in the media, and
  • alternative assessment/evaluation.