A living learning journal
I work in education by day and I am an EdD student by question. This journal is where my thinking stays unfinished on purpose — the courses, the field notes, the moments where I changed my mind, and the ideas that keep pulling me back.
Updated · after EDOC 7120, Week 6
Neurodiversity did not begin as a diagnosis; it began as a claim about who gets to count as normal. Building the Week 6 presentation moved my question from "how do we support neurodivergent students" to "whose norms are we asking them to survive?" Belonging still looks to me like infrastructure — but now I can see that the infrastructure was designed around one nervous system and then called neutral.
(a) — Reflections
A recorded walk-through of the history of neurodiversity. This is a first draft, not a finished piece — I am posting it so the revisions have something to revise.
Read reflectionThe prompt I gave the room at the end of the presentation, and the norms question I want every adult in a school to sit with.
Read reflectionThe demand is heavier, the grace is thinner, and the whole arrangement is delivered as care. I am trying to describe how racialized rigor actually shows up in a building — because until it is describable, it is deniable.
Read reflection(b) — The thread
Ten minutes on how one school's "rigor" was really comfortable distance. A stranger asked the question I hadn't answered.
Narrowing from "does belonging matter?" to "what small structures create it?" — a much harder, better question.
A co-presentation with Diana Gaukel for EDOC 7120, Global Histories and Politics in Education — and the first assignment that changed my research question rather than answered it.
(c) — Unfinished
live
Silence gets mistaken for compliance, respect, even contentment. But Dorothy Roberts warns it can also be chosen resistance, so I cannot simply read quiet as harm. The honest question is double: who is being silenced, and who is choosing silence — and can I even tell the difference from the front of the room? This may become a strand of the dissertation self-study: tracking who speaks, who is called on, who is praised for listening.
live
I think racialized rigor describes demands placed on students of the global majority that exceed what white students in the same building carry, justified as preparation for college and career and enforced through punishment rather than support. I am asking for feedback: does this phrase already exist under another name, and what would disprove it?
(d) — Recurring