Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 50 Year Retrospective Series Introduction
Season 5, Episode 1 — 28 August 2025
About this episode
Today we begin a five-part series of episodes recognizing the 50th anniversary of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities (or RPSD). In this first episode of our podcast series Dr. Craig Kennedy, the editor of RPSD, introduces the series, explaining this year-long retrospective examination of four outstanding publications in the history of research on inclusion for people with disabilities and how they impacted the field.
About the presenters
Craig H. Kennedy is a professor of educational psychology and pediatrics at the University of Connecticut. He received his terminal degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara (Education), master’s degree from the University of Oregon (Special Education), and bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara (Experimental Psychology). He spent much of his academic career at Vanderbilt University where he was a professor of special education and pediatrics and served as Department Chair and Senior Associate Dean. He has also served as Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of Connecticut and Dean of Education at the University of Georgia.
He is a board-certified behavior analyst whose research focuses on health conditions and challenging behavior in people with autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities. His early research focused on establishing and developing video modeling and peer support strategies as evidence-based practices. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities and is a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and Journal of Behavioral Education. He is a long-time member of the American Psychological Association (APA), Association for Behavior Analysis, and TASH. He is also the inaugural recipient of the B. F. Skinner New Researcher Award from the APA and Alice H. Hayden Early Career Award from TASH. During his career he has published over 180 scholarly papers and secured over $17M in extramural support for his teaching, research, and service.
Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning equity, inclusion and opportunity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives.
Today we begin a five-part series of episodes recognizing the 50th anniversary of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities (or RPSD). In this first episode of our podcast series Dr. Craig Kennedy, the editor of RPSD, introduces the series, explaining this year-long retrospective examination of four outstanding publications in the history of research on inclusion for people with disabilities and how they impacted the field.
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Craig Kennedy: Greetings. My name is Craig Kennedy and I’m the Editor-in-Chief of TASH’s research journal, Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, which also goes by the Initialism, RPSD.
RPSD is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and few journals in the history of special education have reached this milestone and we are thrilled to be able to celebrate the journal and TASH’s successes. When TASH was created, the organization’s first president and his colleagues, Norris Herring, Wayne Saylor, Doug Guess and Lou Brown, created a research journal that would blend research, policy and advocacy, and that became RPSD. This configuration of emphases, the research, policy and advocacy was unique at the time, but has become commonplace in applied social sciences. So, like many instances, RPSD and TASH were ahead of their time.
Many of the papers published have changed the way we think about, and support people with extensive support needs. Importantly, RPSD is a peer-reviewed journal, and what that means is that papers that are submitted for possible publication in the journal undergo a rigorous peer review process in which independent experts comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the paper and whether or not, with revisions, it could be published. The papers published are typically very rigorous and very innovative. And most submissions do not meet that standard. In fact, about 20% of the articles submitted to RPSD are eventually published. That makes RPSD a very selective peer-reviewed research journal. And scholars know that if a paper is published in RPSD, the paper is innovative and rigorous.
To celebrate our 50th anniversary, we wanted to highlight the impact RPSD articles have had on the field. People correctly say that research innovation is a methodical and long process. And it is. From the kernel of an idea, to its testing, to its refinement, its replication, and eventually its recognition as an evidence-based practice is a long process.
However, there are sometimes papers published that simply change the way we think about how to support people with extensive support needs, that the moment you read the paper, you realize that I wasn’t thinking this way about the field or what we could do, and this paper is showing me a new way to improve practices or think about ability, disability. And we wanted to celebrate some of those seminal high-impact articles the journal has published.
To do this, the senior editorial board, myself, Fred Spooner, Sarah Ballard, Elizabeth Biggs, Megan Burke, Rob Pennington, Jenny Root, and Zach Rosetti, the associate editors and statistical consultants for the journal, decided to select one high-impact article to highlight in each of the four issues of RPSD being published in its 50th year. Now, we knew it would be a difficult task because there have been many very significant papers published in RPSD over its history. So to identify article articles, we adopted a Delphi technique, a technique which has been used since the 1960s in an effort to canvas the articles published and guide our selection process. Ultimately, after several months of work as a group, we arrived, through consensus, on the four articles to highlight. Those articles are:
Lou Brown and colleagues, 1983, entitled “Opportunities Available When Severely Handicapped Students Attend Chronological Age Appropriate Regular Schools” [Volume 8, Issue 1]. This paper made the case that students with extensive support needs should attend the same schools as their siblings and neighbors, something that rarely occurred in this period of time. And it set in motion many efforts we now refer to as inclusion or inclusive education.
The second paper by Tom Haring and his colleagues in 1987 was entitled “Adolescent Peer Tutoring and Special Friend Experiences” [Volume 12, Issue 4]. This was the first study to test how we can facilitate social relationships between students with and without disabilities in inclusive schools. It showed the different approaches like peer tutoring or friendship networks each had benefits and produced positive outcomes for students with and without disabilities.
The third paper by Rob Horner and his colleagues in 1990 entitled “Toward a Technology of “Nonaversive” Behavioral Support” [Volume 15, Issue 3] ushered in an era of proactive and positive interventions to support people with extensive support needs who engaged in challenging behaviors. This publication presaged the development of functional behavioral assessment, comprehensive support plans and Positive Behavior Supports, all of which were eventually included in IDEA as evidence-based practices.
The final paper we chose, by Diane Browder and her colleagues from 2006, entitled “Aligning Instruction with Academic Content Standards: Finding the Link” [Volume 31, Issue 4], in this paper, a process for identifying instructional objectives for IEPs that were based on general education curriculum, but that were modified for individual student support needs was outlined. It facilitated the inclusion of students with extensive support needs by aligning their curricular goals with that of other students in the general education classroom.
And it’s important to remember that there were many other papers we could have chosen because of their significance, but these four truly rose to the top.
To help contextualize these articles, we asked three to four individuals to comment on a particular article’s impact from their perspective. We asked three distinct generations of researchers: early career, mid-career, and senior investigators, who are active in publishing research in RPSD to comment and how the focal article impacted them. Then, when possible, we asked an advocate or self-advocate to also comment on the impact of the article from their vantage point.
Each of the selected articles will be featured in an issue of RPSD in 2025, along with the commentary pieces. We hope this helps highlight the profound effect of RPSD and the research it publishes on the field of extensive support needs. We hope you enjoy and learn from these special sections of the journal.
And finally, I would like to thank Mike Brogioli, the Executive Director of TASH and the TASH Executive Board for their ongoing support of RPSD. Their support is critical to the Journal’s success. So I hope you enjoy this podcast series and its parallel RPSD articles and hope it provides the opportunity to reflect on how research impacts our everyday practices and improves the lives of people with extensive support needs.
Thank you.
Announcer: You’ve been listening to TASH Amplified. For more about the series, including show notes, links to articles discussed, a complete transcript and a schedule of episodes, visit tash.org/amplified. You can subscribe through iTunes or your favorite Android podcast app to have the series delivered automatically to your device so you never miss an episode. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with your friends and on your social networks.
Today Dr. Craig Kennedy introduced our four-part retrospective on key publication in the field of research on inclusion. You can read the original articles as well as the retrospectives at SAGE’s archive of RPSD issues. If you are a TASH member, you can access the SAGE RPSD archive by first logging in to your membership account at TASH.org.
TASH is a values and research-based advocacy association with a 50-year record advocating for the rights of people with disabilities. TASH is a coalition that unites researchers, educators, people with disabilities, family members, service providers, and others in the cause of guaranteeing that people with disabilities are able participate in all aspects of life. In addition to Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, we offer a practitioner journal, Inclusive Practices, local chapters coving a number of states, a series of webinars our annual legal symposium, and our annual conference. The 2025 TASH Conference will be in Denver, Colorado, from December 4th through 6th, and will feature about 700 attendees and 300 presentations by researchers, self-advocates, family members, educators, agency personnel and other experts and advocates. You can learn more and register for the conference at tash.org/2025TASHConf. You can receive updates from TASH on this podcast and our other activities by following us on Facebook, LinkedIn, BlueSky or other social network.
Music for TASH Amplified is an original composition and performance by Sunny Cefaratti, the Co-Director and Autistic Self Advocacy Mentor at the Musical Autist. You can learn more about the Musical Autist at www.themusicalautist.org.
This has been a sample of the colleagues and conversations available through TASH. It is only because of the excellent work that our members do that we can bring you this information. For more resources such as this and to become a member, visit tash.org/join.
We’ll hear from another outstanding advocate again soon.
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This interview was originally recorded on 28 January 2025.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Do you have an idea for an episode? We would like to hear from you! Fill out our suggestion form and let us know.
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