Theme
Neurological variation as part of human biodiversity — not a defect to be fixed.
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 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.
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.
Sep 5, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 35–36, closing reflection
The prompt I gave the room at the end of the presentation, and the norms question I want every adult in a school to sit with.
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.
Sep 2, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 28–29
The people building the most useful support systems for Black autistic children and their families are not in the journals I was searching first.
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 29, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slide 18
A layer of shared knowledge, community, and communication that changed who could be heard — and who stopped being alone.
Aug 29, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, closing activity
I asked the room to name two or three norms at their workplace that might exclude someone with a different neurocognitive style. Then I had to answer it myself.
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.
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 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 26, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 13 & 23
The history of neurodiversity is not one line. There is a parallel pathway bubbling up underneath it — intersectionality — and I cannot tell the first story honestly without 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.
Aug 25, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, advocates
Jim Sinclair's 1993 essay reframed a sentence parents said constantly, and I have not been able to unhear it.
Aug 24, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Global Histories and Politics in Education, Week 6
Neurodivergence and neurodiversity are not two names for the same thing. One asks what is wrong with this person. The other asks what is wrong with the room.
Aug 24, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Week 6, key figures and pioneers
Itard believed empathy and language separated men from beasts. Ninety years later the Supreme Court decided Carrie Buck's rights did not matter. The same logic runs through both.
Milestones
Open questions
live
live
live
Research ideas
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.
exploring
If neurotypical is a norm a society constructed and then called neutral, then every deficit measured against it is measuring distance from power.
emerging
Lawrence Fung's strengths-based model and the LEANS curriculum both exist. The gap is institutional: what a building would have to stop doing to adopt them.
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
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.
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.
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.
Article · Jim Sinclair, Autism Network International
The sentence that reorganized the presentation: wishing a child did not have autism is wishing for a different child. Not an appendage. I have stopped using "child with autism" as if the noun were detachable.
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 · 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.
Podcast · Maria Davis-Pierre, LMHC; Cheryl Poe, M.A. Urban Ed.
Where I go to correct the whiteness of my reading list. Advocacy and clinical practice in the same voice, aimed at families the research literature keeps under-describing.
Person · Dr. Lawrence Fung, Stanford Neurodiversity Project
Proof that a strengths-based frame can survive contact with an institution. Useful counterweight to my instinct that reframing is only rhetorical.
Article · Dr. Sue Fletcher-Watson, Salvesen Mindroom Research Centre, Edinburgh
A curriculum that teaches neurodiversity to all students rather than about some of them. The clearest existing answer to "what would you actually do on Monday?"
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.
Video · Cheryl Poe & Maria Davis-Pierre
Two Black advocates naming what the mainstream neurodiversity conversation leaves out: that Black families fight a different battle for diagnosis, services, and belief. It grounds the "missing voices" slide from my presentation — the internet built community for many neurodivergent people, but access to that community, and to being heard in it, was never evenly distributed.
Article · Article on neurodiversity-affirming teaching
Argues that neurodiversity should be taught to everyone in the room, not delivered as a service to a labeled few — the LEANS curriculum idea. If difference is ordinary, then the "extra" demands and "extra" grace in a classroom become visible as choices, and choices can be studied.
Article · Stanford Neurodiversity Project
The advocacy arm of the Stanford work — moving neurodiversity from a research topic into institutional practice: hiring, teaching, and campus culture. A model of what it looks like when a university treats neurodivergent people as a community to include rather than a problem to remediate.
Book · Thomas Armstrong
Armstrong's broader statement of the strengths-first case: neurological differences carry advantages, not just deficits. This sits underneath my whole neurodiversity thread — the spectrum image from my first presentation is, at heart, this argument.
Book · Geneva Gay
The theory side of the same coin as Ladson-Billings: teaching through students' cultural frames of reference is not lowering the bar — it is the only way most students ever reach it. A direct counter to the 'rigor means ignoring culture' instinct.