Theme
Where I stand determines what I can see, and what I will miss unless I check.
Journal entries
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 · Chapel reflection · Belonging
What I said about belonging is, for me, a chapel truth before it is a research finding: belonging is a quality of God. Living the quality of welcoming others is what makes others feel they belong — and that is expressing Love the way God expresses love. Love is a living verb.
Oct 6, 2026 · Educational equity · Career reflection
My whole career has been about growing in my understanding of fairness versus equity. Fair treatment is not necessarily equitable treatment — students need scaffolds that help them reach their best potential — and I want to understand what that requires in the elite school where I teach.
Oct 5, 2026 · Transformative learning · Personal reflection
A visit to California in 1993 disrupted the family script I had inherited: women cook and listen; men eat and talk. Mezirow, Cranton, Belenky, and hooks help me name the long movement from receiving knowledge quietly to speaking, learning, and leading.
Oct 5, 2026 · Writing practice with students · Unmasking AI
I often feel like my own bubble of energy, close to a social group but just outside its rhythm. This reflection asks what repeated moments of misfit teach me about belonging without confusing my experience with racism.
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 16, 2026 · Dissertation thinking · a term I am trying to coin
A microaggression is something a student hears. A micro-assumption is the thing I believed a half-second before I opened my mouth. This entry is about well-meaning white adults — me included — and the daily arithmetic of small guesses that adds up to a mountain a student has to climb alone.
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 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 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 · 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 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.
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.
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
Book · Jack Mezirow
Mezirow gives me language for the change beneath my movement from listener to learner to leader. The important shift was not simply gaining confidence; it was recognizing and revising a frame of reference that had made women's silence feel natural.
Article · Ashley-Marie Hanna Daftary, Debora Ortega, Ceema Samimi, & Annahita Ball
Interviews faculty and staff who consider themselves anti-oppressive — and still documents the pathologizing of students' cultural and communication styles. That is the whole argument for micro-assumptions in one study: good intentions are not a control variable.
Book · bell hooks
Hooks names the move from silence into speech as an act of resistance — "talking back" to authority as daring to have an opinion. I read this as the scholarly version of my own story: I found my voice after fifty, and it still costs something every time I use it. Essential for the voice-and-silence thread.
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.
Book · Tillie Olsen
Olsen catalogues the silences imposed on writers — especially women, especially mothers — by the structure of their lives: the cooking, the listening, the caring that consumes the hours a voice requires. It is the literary evidence for what I felt in my own family structure. Silence is not an absence; it is something done to people.
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.
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.
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.
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 · 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.
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.