A living learning journal
I work in education by day and I am an EdD student at the same time — a parallel quest to find out more about myself, to deepen my understanding of my own students, to grow in my craft, and to grow as a professional. 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 sticking with me and pulling me toward new questions and new queries.
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
My main focus at work right now is executive function skills — the foundational skills underneath all of life's activities, not just schoolwork. I study systems, and EF is a system we have to scaffold for our students in LEC workshop — until they can build systems of their own.
Read reflection
I have a name for what I want the dissertation to leave behind: a blueprint of belonging — a buildable plan for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains its BIPOC and marginalized students, including neurodivergent students and students pushed outside the bubble of normalcy for gender identity or any other reason.
Read reflectionMy first full draft of the research proposal is written: a counterstorytelling analysis of neurodivergent BIPOC students' academic and belonging experiences in a private Midwest school, pairing narrative inquiry with MAP growth data. It is a draft and will go through revisions — but it exists.
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
I keep coming back to four load-bearing walls: welcome, support, scaffold, retain. Welcome is arrival — the first morning, the name read right, the family letter that assumes membership. Support is what happens when a student struggles — whether help arrives as a normal part of the school or as a marked, stigmatized track. Scaffold is the teaching itself — whether the structure that helps a neurodivergent student or a student new to the work is built into the room or bolted on as an exception. Retain is the part schools like mine rarely examine — whether the students we welcomed are still here, still thriving, three years later, and who quietly left. The blueprint has to hold for every student the bubble of normalcy has pushed out: BIPOC students, neurodivergent students, students marginalized for gender identity, and the crossings between them. And it has to be checkable — a blueprint you cannot inspect against the building is just a wish.
live
My hunch is that belonging does not add to achievement so much as remove a tax on it — that a student spending part of every hour managing how they are being read has less of themselves left for the work, and that the tax is heavier when it comes from two directions. I do not yet know how to measure that without reducing a child to a data point, which is why the method keeps pulling me toward narrative inquiry: the student's own account of where their attention went is evidence, not decoration. What I need next is the literature that sits exactly at this crossroads — neurodiversity research that accounts for race, belonging research that accounts for neurodivergence — and I expect to find it thin.
(d) — Recurring