Theme
The unwritten agreements that outlast any initiative.
Journal entries
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 4, 2026 · Field thinking · public and private school settings
The demand is heavier, the grace is thinner, and the whole arrangement is delivered as care. I am trying to describe how racialized rigor actually shows up in a building — because until it is describable, it is deniable.
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 · 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 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.
Feb 18, 2026 · Group Work & Belonging
We keep asking why students disengage in the hall between classes. But the hallway is where the real sorting happens — and we've never once designed it.
Feb 7, 2026 · Leading in Schools
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 · Presentation
Ten minutes on how one school's "rigor" was really comfortable distance. A stranger asked the question I hadn't answered.
Winter 2026 · Field experience
A week of observation turned "school culture" from a chapter title into a hallway I actually walk now.
Fall 2025 · Course
Read culture theory against a building I already knew — two very different pictures of the same school.
Fall 2025 · Semester
Walked in with a list of problems. Left with a list of questions, which felt like the first real progress.
Open questions
live
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Research ideas
emerging
Racialized rigor: when white teachers and administrators place heavier demands on students of the global majority, believing they are preparing them for college and career, while white students in the same building are held to a lighter standard.
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.
developing
A framework treating belonging as the product of maintained structures — schedule, ritual, space, interruption rights — rather than of individual warmth.
emerging
An intellectual rabbit hole: how the language of rigor gets used to justify withholding support.
Projects
Organizational Culture & Change · Fall 2025
A semester-long audit mapping the stated values of one building against its observable routines, using documents, schedules, and three staff interviews.
Reading & influences
Person · Cheryl Poe
Grassroots advocacy training for Black families navigating school systems. Her work shows what support looks like when it is built by the community that needs it rather than delivered to them.
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?"
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 · Amanda E. Lewis & John B. Diamond
The book that gave me the words opportunity hoarding in a school building rather than an economics paper. Well-resourced, self-consciously progressive school; white parents work the system for AP placements, exceptions, and second chances, and Black students meet the rules as written. The good intentions are real. So is the sorting. This is the private-school half of my question.
Book · Charles Tilly
Where opportunity hoarding comes from originally. Inequality lasts because it gets built into the ordinary categories organizations use to sort people — not because anyone renews their prejudice each morning. Useful to me because it explains how a school can change every adult in the building and keep producing the same pattern.