Provider Bio

Lark Barker is a special education teacher with over 20 years of experience in the education field. Originally a secondary school educator, she has held numerous roles in schools, including vice-principal, literacy chair and most recently as a special education resource teacher. She has spent the last decade teaching in Toronto, mostly in the Education Community Partnership Program. Her experience teaching in a northern Manitoba Indigenous community and in Mexico provoked her interest in culturally relevant pedagogy and curriculum. She began researching and focusing on teaching reading in 2014, when her son was diagnosed with a specific learning disability in reading phonemics (dyslexia). Since then, she has become a certified structured literacy classroom teacher (CERI) and recently finished an Orton Gillingham associate-level practicum. She has served as President of Decoding Dyslexia Ontario and a member of EQAO's Modernization in Measurement Advisory Panel.