Theme

Fieldwork

What I only learn by standing in the building.

Journal entries

Feb 7, 2026 · Leading in Schools

What a principal hears in silence

After a whole week of observation I realized the office is the busiest room in the building, and the only one with no doors to open. Leadership here is mostly listening.

Milestones

Winter 2026 · Field experience

Fieldwork begins

A week of observation turned "school culture" from a chapter title into a hallway I actually walk now.

Open questions

resolving

How do you study something that refuses to hold still?

Research ideas

exploring

The unowned four minutes

A possible dissertation site: passing periods as the least-designed, most-revealing part of the school day.

established

Studying the building you work in

Positionality work on insider research: what I can see that an outsider cannot, and what I will never be able to see at all.

Projects

Research Design · Winter 2026

Methods memo: studying a moving target

A design memo arguing for repeated light-touch qualitative observation over a single instrument, with a proposed semester-long protocol.

Field Experience Seminar · Winter 2026

Field observation set: transitions

Five days of structured observation of passing periods, coded for interruption rights, greeting patterns, and route choice.

Reading & influences

Person · A paraprofessional at my fieldwork site

A twenty-minute hallway conversation

"The hallway is the only place the day is honest." Not published anywhere, and the single most influential sentence of my first year.

Podcast · Podcast series

Conversations on qualitative design

What I listen to while driving to the fieldwork site. The episode on abandoning your first coding scheme arrived at exactly the right week.

Book · Ann Arnett Ferguson

Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (2000)

Ethnography, so it shows the thing that referral data can only imply: adults deciding, in the moment, which eleven-year-old is being a kid and which one is being a problem. "Adultification" is the term I was missing. It also models the method I would need if I studied racialized rigor honestly — you have to be standing there.