Theme
Who feels like the room was built for them, and who is only visiting.
Journal entries
Oct 20, 2026 · Work focus · LEC workshop
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.
Oct 20, 2026 · Dissertation · Research direction
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.
Oct 17, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Research proposal draft
My 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.
Oct 7, 2026 · Dissertation · Research direction
My working title was too chunky and too broad, and my professor said so. Her suggestion narrows it to the crossroads I actually care about: BIPOC students at the intersection of neurodiversity, in my particular school, and how their sense of belonging influences achievement.
Oct 7, 2026 · Reading · Research direction
I love Gloria Ladson-Billings, and the Dreamkeepers chapter of her culturally relevant teaching work most of all. She found the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children and studied what they did. That is the standard I want my research measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry is the right method for it.
Oct 7, 2026 · Chapel reflection · Belonging
What I said about belonging is, for me, a chapel truth before it is a research finding: belonging is a quality of God. Living the quality of welcoming others is what makes others feel they belong — and that is expressing Love the way God expresses love. Love is a living verb.
Oct 5, 2026 · Teaching practice · Classroom dialogue
Teaching can be messy and should be, because life is. The planning is not there to prevent the mess — it is what makes the mess worth paying attention to when it shows up.
Oct 5, 2026 · Transformative learning · Personal reflection
A visit to California in 1993 disrupted the family script I had inherited: women cook and listen; men eat and talk. Mezirow, Cranton, Belenky, and hooks help me name the long movement from receiving knowledge quietly to speaking, learning, and leading.
Oct 5, 2026 · Writing practice with students · Unmasking AI
I often feel like my own bubble of energy, close to a social group but just outside its rhythm. This reflection asks what repeated moments of misfit teach me about belonging without confusing my experience with racism.
Sep 25, 2026 · Research idea · school demographic data
In 2018 our girls basketball team was predominantly white — I don't think there was a single Black player. For the past three to five years the team has been mainly Black, more highly skilled, and last year we won state for the first time in school history. I want to study the data behind that change.
Sep 16, 2026 · Dissertation thinking · a term I am trying to coin
A microaggression is something a student hears. A micro-assumption is the thing I believed a half-second before I opened my mouth. This entry is about well-meaning white adults — me included — and the daily arithmetic of small guesses that adds up to a mountain a student has to climb alone.
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
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Research ideas
developing
The constructive goal of the dissertation: a study-derived, buildable plan for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains its BIPOC and marginalized populations — including neurodivergent students and students marginalized for gender identity or any other way they are placed outside the bubble of normalcy.
developing
The direction my professor gave me when my first title proved too broad: study BIPOC students at the intersection of neurodiversity and the other crossroads that meet at my particular school — how that intersection relates to their sense of belonging, and how belonging influences achievement.
exploring
Ladson-Billings's Dreamkeepers teachers saw themselves as members of the community they taught in, and teaching as giving back to it. I want to think about what it would mean to incorporate culturally relevant teaching into the community around my school — and to use narrative inquiry, the method her book is built from, to do it.
emerging
A descriptive study of my own school's changing demographics since 2018 — enrollment, rosters, courses, clubs, discipline — sparked by watching the girls basketball team go from predominantly white in 2018 to mainly Black and state champions for the first time in school history.
emerging
Micro-assumption: the small, silent, usually unexamined inference a well-meaning adult makes about a student's ability, background, intent, or belonging before the student has supplied any evidence. The microaggression is what the student hears; the micro-assumption is what the adult believed a half-second earlier.
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 · Morgane Michael · Solution Tree Press
The prior use I owed my own phrase: Michael published A Blueprint for Belonging in 2024, a research-based guide for K-12 teachers and administrators on building school cultures of belonging, organized around her BUILD acronym — boundaries, understanding, integrity, listening, dependability. Her blueprint is a general school-culture framework; mine is a study-derived plan for a specific setting — predominantly white private schools — at the intersection of race, neurodivergence, and the other ways students are placed outside the bubble of normalcy. I can no longer claim the phrase as a coinage, and I should not. What I can claim is the construct: welcome, support, scaffold, retain, drawn from counterstories and growth evidence at one school, checkable against that school's actual hallways.
Article · AERA Annual Meeting paper · 2026
The closest prior use to my own setting: an AERA 2026 paper using an Afrofuturist lens and Spencer's PVEST framework to examine how Black high school students conceptualize college as mobility and possibility, centering youth voice and lived experience in a vision of college readiness grounded in affirmation, cultural identity, and resilience. It shares my population and my conviction that students' own accounts are evidence. Where it looks forward to college futures, my blueprint looks at the building the students are standing in now — who the school was drawn for, and how to redraw it. Author details still to be confirmed from the AERA program before citation.
Website · Sarah M. Scott · Digital Promise / RocketPD
A five-session professional learning series for K-12 educators on learner variability and inclusive education — the prior use that overlaps my neurodiversity angle most directly. Its premise is one I share: the question is not whether learner variability exists but whether the environment is designed to respond to it so every student feels they belong. It is a training series rather than a study, and it addresses neurodivergence without the race intersection — the crossing is still the gap.
Website · Teaching Empathy Institute
A Pre-K-12 self-study course translating belonging research into classroom culture: emotional safety, naming the world of learning (with an explicit Freire thread), community meetings, and emotional mapping. Useful to me as evidence that the blueprint metaphor already lives in professional development — and as a contrast, because its unit of change is the individual classroom, while my question is what the whole school would have to build.
Book · Patricia Cranton
Cranton helps connect personal transformation to adult education. Her work lets me examine how encounters, reflection, and dialogue can unsettle an inherited assumption without pretending transformation happens all at once.
Book · Joy Buolamwini
Buolamwini's account keeps my reflection on belonging accountable to power. Feeling socially outside is real, but it is not interchangeable with racialized and gendered exclusion. Her work asks who technology recognizes, whose intelligence receives legitimacy, and who bears the cost when systems reproduce an unequal gaze.
Article · Daniel Solórzano, Miguel Ceja, & Tara Yosso
Moves microaggressions out of the clinic and into the institution: focus groups showing students of color reading a racial climate through small daily slights. The methodological gift here is counter-storytelling — it is exactly the paired-account structure I want between teachers and students.
Article · Rita Kohli & Daniel Solórzano
A whole article on the mispronounced name, and it is devastating. The teacher means nothing by it; the student carries it for years. This is the cleanest example of a micro-assumption I have found — the assumption that a name is too hard to be worth learning — and it is squarely in K-12, not higher ed.
Article · Malik S. Henfield
Boys describing the daily labor of managing other people's assumptions in a mostly white school — deciding how loud to be, how smart to seem, when to let something go. The word navigating is the point: this is unpaid work the school assigns only to some students.
Article · Jackson A. Collins & Howard C. Stevenson
593 students of color in predominantly white independent schools — my exact setting, with numbers. It measures their confidence in noticing microaggressions, reframing them, and confronting them, and links school-climate perception to belonging through racial stress. The phrase "bracketed commitment to diversity" describes more independent schools than will admit it.
Dissertation · Asako Kurosaka-Jost
Thirty alumni of color from predominantly white independent schools describing hyper-visibility during race conversations and invisibility otherwise, inside a colorblind school culture that thinks of itself as kind. The title is the finding: neutral is a position, and students can feel it.
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.
Book · Gloria Ladson-Billings
The book I keep returning to. Ladson-Billings asked parents and principals to name the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children, then studied what those teachers did. They saw teaching as giving back to the community, believed every child could learn, and held academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness together. This is the standard I want my research to be measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry fits: the whole book is built from teachers' stories.
Article · Francis Boateng
Pushes on my intersectionality thread: Blackness is not one experience, and immigrant students negotiate identities schools rarely see. If I ask 'who is being held to the white standard,' I also have to ask which Blackness the standard is measuring.
Article · Derrick R. Brooms
Documents what it costs Black boys to succeed in schools like mine — resilience as a burden they should not have to carry. I want to ask the harder question: what if the school changed, instead of the student getting tougher?
Article · Carol Goodenow
One of the foundational belonging studies: students' felt membership predicts motivation and achievement. It anchors the private-school side of my question — belonging there is conditional and priced, so measuring it carefully matters.
Dissertation · S. Danielle Harley
A dissertation about exactly the world I work in: Black girls at a predominantly white independent school, and what the unwritten 'assignment' of surviving it costs them. This is both a model for my methodology and evidence that my questions are not hypothetical.
Article · Shirley Mthethwa-Sommers & Obed Kisiara
Documents how school culture itself — the rituals, the expectations, the unspoken rules — lands on African immigrant students. Reminds me that 'school culture' is the thing I am actually studying, and that it is legible to the people it excludes.
Article · Katherine Probherbs & Jody Freeman
One of the few sources that names private schools specifically: racial discrimination in independent schools has measurable mental-health costs. Closest to home of anything on this list — the harm I am studying is not abstract.
Article · Chinwe J. Uwah, H. George McMahon, & Christopher F. Furlow
Belonging predicting aspirations and self-efficacy for Black boys specifically — the students most exposed to racialized rigor in my own building. Gives my student-interview protocol a validated construct to listen for.
Article · Roy F. Baumeister & Mark R. Leary
The foundational claim underneath all belonging theory: belonging is not a preference or a school-climate nicety but a fundamental human motivation, and deprivation has real cognitive and emotional costs. If that is true, then a school that makes belonging expensive for some students is not just unkind — it is taxing the thing learning runs on.
Article · Karen F. Osterman
The review that moved belonging from social psychology into education: students who experience belonging are more engaged, more motivated, and more willing to ask for help — and the adults' behavior is a major determinant. That last part is the hook for my study: belonging is something teachers do or withhold, not something students bring.
Article · Gregory M. Walton & Geoffrey L. Cohen
The belonging-uncertainty experiments: Black students' achievement was dragged down not by ability but by persistent doubt about whether they fit — and a brief, well-timed intervention closed much of the gap. This is the mechanism my micro-assumptions idea needs: small daily signals accumulate into a verdict about whether you belong, and the verdict does academic damage.
Book · Terrell L. Strayhorn
Strayhorn defines belonging as students' perceived social support on campus — a felt sense of being cared about, accepted, and mattering — and shows it is especially consequential for marginalized students. His framework gives my interview protocol language for what to ask: not 'do you feel welcome' but 'who here would notice if you were gone.'
Article · Kelly-Ann Allen, Margaret L. Kern, Christopher S. Rozek, Dennis M. McInerney, & George M. Slavich
The meta-analytic check on my enthusiasm: belonging interventions work, but effects are modest and uneven, and teacher support is one of the strongest levers. Keeps me honest — belonging is real and measurable, not a magic variable, and the teacher's daily behavior is exactly where the effect lives.