Rhonda Kraai
Associate Professor of Special Education
Expertise: Learning disabilities, Struggling readers and writers, Classroom management strategies, Metacognition, Academic service learning, Faith communities and disabilities and disability awareness training, Structured Literacy Training
About
Dr. Rhonda Vander Laan Kraai has worked with people with disabilities for her entire career. Initially trained as a speech-language pathologist, her work focused on speech and language disorders with students in the schools in four different states, working in healthcare in rehabilitation settings and serving as a professor in a university speech pathology program as well as serving as department chair for the first SLPA program in the U.S. Dr. Kraai also worked as a preschool special needs coordinator for a county cooperative as well as a special education teacher in an urban setting. She was an Academic Service Learning Fellow and also appointed as an Honors College Faculty Fellow at Eastern. She was awarded the Innovative Teaching Award by the EMU College of Education. Dr. Kraai received her Bachelor's degree in Speech Pathology and Audiology from Western Michigan University, a Master's Degree in Communication Disorders from Marquette University and an Ed.D. from Ball State University in Special Education, with a cognate in reading.
