Theme
Locating the problem inside the child so the system never has to answer for itself.
Journal entries
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 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.
Reading & influences
Book · Carol Gilligan
Gilligan's argument that women's moral reasoning was measured against a male standard and found deficient — when it was simply different — rhymes with everything I am learning about neurodivergence and about students measured against the white standard. The wrong yardstick is the story of my whole research life.
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 · Luigi Esposito & Victor Romano, The Western Journal of Black Studies
The theoretical name for the part of racialized rigor I find hardest to say out loud. Harm delivered sincerely, as help, by people who would fail any test of explicit bias. "I'm hard on him because the world will be" is a sentence I have said myself. I need to be able to critique it without pretending I stood outside it.
Talk · Gloria Ladson-Billings, AERA Presidential Address
Reframes the whole vocabulary. A gap sits between two groups and implies somebody should catch up; a debt sits on the institution and implies somebody owes. If I am going to coin a term, this is the standard — the name should locate the problem in the right place. Racialized rigor has to point at the adults.
Book · Thomas Armstrong
The practical companion to the conceptual work. Armstrong's "positive niche construction" — changing the environment to fit the learner instead of fixing the learner to fit the environment — is exactly the move racialized rigor refuses to make: it demands the student adapt to a standard instead of asking whether the standard is just.