Theme
Who feels like the room was built for them, and who is only visiting.
Journal entries
Sep 5, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 35–36, closing reflection
The 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.
Sep 4, 2026 · Field thinking · public and private school settings
The 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.
Sep 2, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 28–29
The people building the most useful support systems for Black autistic children and their families are not in the journals I was searching first.
Aug 29, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slide 18
A layer of shared knowledge, community, and communication that changed who could be heard — and who stopped being alone.
Aug 29, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, closing activity
I asked the room to name two or three norms at their workplace that might exclude someone with a different neurocognitive style. Then I had to answer it myself.
Aug 28, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slide 17
Jim Sinclair and Lorna Wing changed what I think a diagnosis is. And I have to admit that a small part of me grieved when my own child was diagnosed.
Aug 27, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 14–16
Three civil rights leaders who lived the intersection of race, disability, class, and gender — and one quote I have carried my whole life without knowing whose it was.
Aug 27, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, global impact
Before InLv and Autistics.org, many neurodivergent people lived in deep isolation and the true population ratio was simply unknown.
Aug 25, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, advocates
Jim Sinclair's 1993 essay reframed a sentence parents said constantly, and I have not been able to unhear it.
Aug 24, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Global Histories and Politics in Education, Week 6
Neurodivergence and neurodiversity are not two names for the same thing. One asks what is wrong with this person. The other asks what is wrong with the room.
Feb 18, 2026 · Group Work & Belonging
We keep asking why students disengage in the hall between classes. But the hallway is where the real sorting happens — and we've never once designed it.
Jan 24, 2026 · Research Design
I kept reaching for a survey, then stopped. A number can tell me a student feels safe on Tuesday. It cannot tell me why they stopped raising their hand by November.
Milestones
Now · Breakthrough
Narrowing from "does belonging matter?" to "what small structures create it?" — a much harder, better question.
Winter 2026 · Field experience
A week of observation turned "school culture" from a chapter title into a hallway I actually walk now.
Open questions
live
live
live
live
Research ideas
emerging
Racialized rigor: when white teachers and administrators place heavier demands on students of the global majority, believing they are preparing them for college and career, while white students in the same building are held to a lighter standard.
emerging
Lawrence Fung's strengths-based model and the LEANS curriculum both exist. The gap is institutional: what a building would have to stop doing to adopt them.
developing
A framework treating belonging as the product of maintained structures — schedule, ritual, space, interruption rights — rather than of individual warmth.
exploring
A possible dissertation site: passing periods as the least-designed, most-revealing part of the school day.
Projects
Field Experience Seminar · Winter 2026
Five days of structured observation of passing periods, coded for interruption rights, greeting patterns, and route choice.
Reading & influences
Book · bell hooks
Hooks names the move from silence into speech as an act of resistance — "talking back" to authority as daring to have an opinion. I read this as the scholarly version of my own story: I found my voice after fifty, and it still costs something every time I use it. Essential for the voice-and-silence thread.
Book · Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, Jill Mattuck Tarule
Maps how women experience themselves as knowers — including "silence," a position where women feel voiceless, deaf to their own thinking, and subject to external authority. It gave me a framework for what I lived: the years of listening were not empty; they were a way of knowing I had to grow through, not just out of.
Podcast · Maria Davis-Pierre
Education, advocacy training, and support for Black parents and families of autistic individuals. The expertise I most needed was not in the databases I searched first — it was in community-led work like this.
Article · Jim Sinclair, Autism Network International
The sentence that reorganized the presentation: wishing a child did not have autism is wishing for a different child. Not an appendage. I have stopped using "child with autism" as if the noun were detachable.
Book · Temple Grandin; Donna Williams
The point where lived-experience literature became a body of evidence. These are primary sources on the inside of an experience the clinical literature described only from outside.
Article · Dr. Sue Fletcher-Watson, Salvesen Mindroom Research Centre, Edinburgh
A curriculum that teaches neurodiversity to all students rather than about some of them. The clearest existing answer to "what would you actually do on Monday?"
Person · A paraprofessional at my fieldwork site
"The hallway is the only place the day is honest." Not published anywhere, and the single most influential sentence of my first year.
Book · Monique W. Morris
Corrects my default image of the punished student. Black girls are disciplined for being loud, unladylike, or insufficiently deferential — a standard that is racial and gendered at once. Reading this next to Crenshaw is what convinced me racialized rigor cannot be studied without intersectionality doing real analytic work.
Website · Sins Invalid
The movement that grew out of — and past — the disability rights framework I presented in Week 6. Its insistence on intersectionality, leadership of the most impacted, and anti-capitalist critique of "productivity" keeps surfacing in my thinking about who schools are built to reward. This is where disability rights stops being a checklist and becomes a lens.
Article · Article on neurodiversity-affirming teaching
Argues that neurodiversity should be taught to everyone in the room, not delivered as a service to a labeled few — the LEANS curriculum idea. If difference is ordinary, then the "extra" demands and "extra" grace in a classroom become visible as choices, and choices can be studied.