Theme
Global North paradigms of deficit, and the Global South paradigms that never accepted them.
Journal entries
Sep 28, 2026 · Reading reflection · Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement was not a spontaneous eruption led by a few famous people, and it did not end neatly. I am reconsidering the first words, images, and people in my own unit — and what those choices have taught students to see.
Sep 27, 2026 · Reading reflection · Critical digital literacy
Reading more deeply about critical digital literacy has changed how I understand the production, authentication, and circulation of knowledge. Every account arrives through a lens; digital literacy asks who shaped that lens, who benefits from it, and what becomes possible when more people can answer back.
Sep 24, 2026 · Reading · A Better Way to Teach the Civil Rights Movement
I grew up on a civil rights movement with one leader and a lady on a bus. Anderson and Morris are teaching me what my textbooks left out — Rosa Parks' training, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin — and what that omission trained me to believe about whose stories get kept.
Sep 10, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Recorded presentation · Draft 1
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.
Aug 31, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 20–22
The world seems to divide along cultural paradigms about what neurodivergence means — and the older paradigm was never the deficit one.
Aug 30, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slide 19
Early in the research it was clear whose voices carried. I am trying not to judge — I just wonder.
Aug 28, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, decolonizing neurodiversity
Two constructs at odds: a Global North paradigm that medicalized difference as defect, and Global South paradigms that had already integrated it.
Aug 25, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, postwar psychology
After WWII the cause of autism shifted from biological to psychological — and landed squarely on mothers. Rimland pushed back. But the voices I found first were all white, male, and old.
Aug 25, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, the shift that reorganized my thinking
My fledgling EdD (lowercase edd) thought: neurodivergent rights have evolved — but neurodivergent justice has transformed. Transformation has to be the goal.
Milestones
Open questions
Research ideas
emerging
A structured review of the first names, images, questions, and verbs in my Civil Rights Movement unit — testing whether the curriculum presents people as organizers with agency or as icons and suffering bodies.
exploring
A developing frame for studying not only whether information is accessible online, but who produced it, whose knowledge authenticates it, which systems amplify it, and whether people can answer back.
Projects
EDOC 7120 · Global Histories and Politics in Education · Fall 2026 · Week 6
A co-presentation with Diana Gaukel tracing neurodiversity from 18th-century institutionalization through Buck v. Bell, IDEA, and the self-advocacy movement, into decolonizing critiques and present-day school practice — closing with positionality and a norms exercise for the room.
Reading & influences
Article · Douglas Kellner & Jeff Share
This is the clearest scholarly foundation for what I am trying to say: digital literacy cannot stop at operating a tool or checking a source. It has to ask how media construct reality, how power shapes representation, and how learners can become producers rather than passive consumers. The emancipatory promise and the obligation to verify belong together.
Book · Mikhail M. Bakhtin
Bakhtin gives me a way to understand knowledge as many-voiced and unfinished. Meaning emerges between voices, histories, and contexts. That makes dialogue more than a teaching strategy: it is how knowledge is made, challenged, and changed.
Book · Michel Foucault
Foucault keeps me from treating information as separate from authority. Who can name something, classify it, publish it, suppress it, or make it searchable is part of what that knowledge becomes. Digital platforms distribute voice, but they also build new and often invisible forms of control.
Book · Aldon D. Morris
Morris's Indigenous Perspective explains collective action through the institutions, leadership, relationships, and resources developed within Black communities. Here indigenous means internally generated, not Indigenous or Native identity. This helps me read digital organizing as strategy and infrastructure rather than spontaneous crowd behavior.
Article · Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, & Bernhard Jenny
A map is a powerful lesson in constructed knowledge. Every projection enlarges, compresses, or distorts something; the familiar view only feels neutral because I learned it first. Equal Earth gives me a concrete visual analogy for reading a news feed: ask what the representation makes large, what it makes small, and who chose the frame.
Article · Akhund
Reminded me that acceptance is not the new idea. Medicalization is. Communities have held neurodivergent people with reverence for as long as there have been humans; the deficit paradigm is a recent import.
Article · Marium Akhund, PhD, licensed psychotherapist
Reframed demand avoidance as intuitive dissent and clock-based time as an erasure of neurodivergent pacing. It made me look at my building's bell schedule as a cultural artifact rather than a neutral container.
Book · Paulo Freire
From my first presentation: Freire's banking model is the ancestor of every 'sit still and receive' classroom. Dialogue is not a nicety — it is the method. This is why my dissertation treats teacher and student perceptions as data to be put in conversation, not scores to be ranked.
Article · Einar Haugen
A classic from linguistics that I use sideways: when a school borrows the language of equity ('rigor,' 'grit,' 'belonging') but keeps the old structure, the words are loanwords that never assimilate. Language change without structural change.
Talk · Kevin Kumashiro
Kumashiro's lecture framing Freire for educators now — including his argument that real learning is a form of crisis, and comfort is not the goal. It steadied my thinking on hard conversations: the discomfort of dialogue is a feature, not a failure.
Article · Kevin Kumashiro
Kumashiro's four approaches to anti-oppressive education — education for the Other, about the Other, critical of privileging and Othering, and education that changes students and society. The last two are where my dissertation lives: the problem is not only what students learn about others, but what they learn about themselves as the default.
Book · Kevin Kumashiro
The book that says the 'commonsense' practices — the routines, the praise, the grading — are precisely where oppression hides, because they feel natural to the people they work for. My micro-assumptions idea is downstream of this: the assumption feels like common sense, which is exactly why it has to be written down and examined.
Article · Melinda D. Anderson
The article that made me audit my own history education. Anderson follows teachers who abandoned the textbook version — a few famous heroes and a tidy ending — for the fuller story: grassroots organizers, churches, women, and nuanced portraits of figures like Parks and King. It is where I finally learned that Rosa Parks was a trained organizer, not a tired seamstress, and it sent me to Aldon Morris next. Read it as a teacher of any subject: the question is not whether your textbook is wrong but what its tidiness is protecting.
Article · Aldon Morris
Morris — the sociologist of the civil rights movement as an organized, indigenous, strategic effort — traces the line from Emmett Till and Rosa Parks through to Black Lives Matter. Two things I keep turning over: his account of Bayard Rustin, a brilliant tactician of the March on Washington who could not safely be made the public face of the movement because he was gay; and the dismantling of the collective-behavior picture of protest as spontaneous emotion. Movements succeed through planning and discipline. Whoever gets described as irrational gets managed instead of heard — which is exactly the mechanism my racialized rigor work studies at classroom scale.
Podcast · Learning for Justice, Southern Poverty Law Center
I am listening to this little by little, and it is the sustained version of what Anderson's article started for me: scholars taking apart the cleaned-up story a season at a time — the organized, strategic history underneath the heroes-and-holidays version. What I appreciate most as a teacher is that every episode ends with classroom-ready guidance, so the fuller story does not stay a private correction; it becomes something I can actually teach. This is the audio companion to my own unlearning.
Book · Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Jeffries helps me see curriculum as a sequence of choices rather than a neutral container. If I begin with only the most recognizable leaders and the most violent photographs, students can leave knowing that injustice existed without understanding how ordinary people organized against it. This work is pushing me to rebuild the unit around agency, strategy, contested ideas, and the movement's unfinished life.
Article · John D. McCarthy & Mayer N. Zald
Resource mobilization theory gives me a direct challenge to accounts of protest as irrational crowd behavior. Movements acquire resources, build organizations, cultivate relationships, make strategic choices, and sustain action under pressure. Teaching that infrastructure restores thought and agency to people whom a cleaned-up curriculum too often presents only as victims or symbols.