Theme
How to study something that refuses to sit still for a survey.
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 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.
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 3, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 31–32
Where I stand shapes what I can see. And I would like us to retire the word neurotypical.
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, 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.
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
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.
emerging
A proposal to build something like ESSA's disaggregated reporting for a school that is not required to produce any — starting with the four levers Barth names (funding, curriculum, teachers, discipline) and adding the discretionary ones my own study is about: extensions, retakes, referrals, and who is offered a scaffold.
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
A convergence rather than a single theory: disability activism, disability studies, the social model of disability, critical theory, poststructuralism, and intersectional feminism.
exploring
A possible dissertation site: passing periods as the least-designed, most-revealing part of the school day.
established
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
A design memo arguing for repeated light-touch qualitative observation over a single instrument, with a proposed semester-long protocol.
Reading & influences
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 · Lindsay Pérez Huber & Daniel Solórzano
Insists microaggressions are not interpersonal accidents but the everyday surfacing of a racial hierarchy — structure appearing in a sentence. This is my defense against the objection that micro-assumptions are just individual bad habits. They are a system running through individual heads.
Article · Rui Fu, Stephen S. Leff, Ian C. Carroll, Shelby Brizzolara-Dove, & Kenisha Campbell
A systematic review focused on early adolescence, when racial-ethnic identity is forming and microaggressions do the most developmental damage. Useful to me as a map of what has already been measured in schools — and therefore as the place to check whether anyone has isolated the assumption rather than the act.
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.
Article · Dorothy E. Roberts
Complicates my thread in a useful way: silence is not only submission — it can be chosen, strategic, protective, a form of resistance. If I study silence in my students, I have to be careful not to read every quiet student as voiceless. Some are holding their voice on purpose.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV
This is the methodological spine of my dissertation. Researching the self, then the self in relation to others, then shifting from self to system — it is why the study is a self-study of my own classroom rather than an audit of somebody else's. The dangers I am least likely to see are my own.
Person · Lorna Wing
Her work is why we say spectrum. Neurodivergence presents uniquely, so a single checklist of characteristics was always going to mislabel somebody.
Talk · Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw
Multiple points of discrimination that intersect and do not operate independently. It moved from something I cited to something that constrains how I would sample and whom I would ask.
Book · Uta Frith
Frith reads Itard's own notes on Victor and argues the evidence points to autism. A reminder that the archive often already holds the observation, and only the interpretation arrives late.
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 · Seminar reading set, Fall 2025
Gave me permission to stop treating culture as a survey score. Culture is what people repeatedly do, and repeated doing can be observed.
Book · Course text
A quiet reframe of what I had been calling instinct. It deserves to be studied rather than simply trusted — that line rearranged my dissertation instincts.
Podcast · Podcast series
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
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.
Website · J.E. Morey
My own growing body of work in progress. Keeping it here as a placeholder and a promise — the citation list on this page should eventually end with things I wrote.
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.
Book · Tracey A. Benson & Sarah E. Fiarman
Written for working teachers like me and my colleagues: bias work as a developmental process, not a one-day training. Useful because my dissertation needs a frame my white colleagues can enter without feeling indicted — the door has to be open before the conversation can be honest.
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 · 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.
Website · National Center for Education Statistics
The demographic ground truth for my dissertation setting: who actually attends and teaches in U.S. private schools. When I write 'a mostly white faculty serving a diversifying student body,' this is the dataset I will cite.
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 · H. Richard Milner IV & Judson C. Laughter
The title is my dissertation in six words. Good intentions are the operating system of schools like mine — and they are not enough. This gives me the literature base for treating benevolence as a mechanism of harm, not a character trait.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV
Milner's case that teachers must build racial awareness as instructional practice, not as an add-on workshop. Pairs with his positionality work: who the teacher is, is part of the curriculum.
Book · H. Richard Milner IV
The title alone is discipline for me: begin with honest self-knowledge, but refuse to stay there. Milner follows teachers who genuinely care and still reproduce opportunity gaps — which means caring cannot be the evidence of my impact. His self-to-system moves are the backbone of my methodology.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV
Milner arguing that reflection is not neutral — what a teacher notices, names, and remembers is shaped by cultural context. For my decision logs this is the caution: my reflection can itself be a racialized act, so I pair it with student accounts and a critical friend.
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.
Article · Niki Tsangaridou & Ioanna Polemitou
A model for structured teacher reflection — how pre-service teachers' journals reveal what they notice and what they miss. Methodologically useful for designing my own teacher decision logs.
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.