Theme
My working coinage: a buildable plan for how a predominantly white school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and keeps the students it has historically placed outside the bubble of normalcy.
Journal entries
Open questions
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.
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.