Theme
Who is socialized to speak, who is socialized to listen, and what it costs to find your voice late.
Journal entries
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.
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.
Open questions
Research ideas
exploring
A developing frame for studying not only whether information is accessible online, but who produced it, whose knowledge authenticates it, which systems amplify it, and whether people can answer back.
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.
Book · Patricia Cranton
Cranton helps connect personal transformation to adult education. Her work lets me examine how encounters, reflection, and dialogue can unsettle an inherited assumption without pretending transformation happens all at once.
Article · Douglas Kellner & Jeff Share
This is the clearest scholarly foundation for what I am trying to say: digital literacy cannot stop at operating a tool or checking a source. It has to ask how media construct reality, how power shapes representation, and how learners can become producers rather than passive consumers. The emancipatory promise and the obligation to verify belong together.
Book · Mikhail M. Bakhtin
Bakhtin gives me a way to understand knowledge as many-voiced and unfinished. Meaning emerges between voices, histories, and contexts. That makes dialogue more than a teaching strategy: it is how knowledge is made, challenged, and changed.
Website · Khaby Lame
A primary digital artifact, not scholarly literature. His nearly wordless visual commentary travels across languages and borders, making him useful for thinking about audience, accessibility, platform power, and whose communication becomes globally legible without traditional knowledge keepers.
Article · Malik S. Henfield
Boys describing the daily labor of managing other people's assumptions in a mostly white school — deciding how loud to be, how smart to seem, when to let something go. The word navigating is the point: this is unpaid work the school assigns only to some students.
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 · Carol Gilligan
Gilligan's argument that women's moral reasoning was measured against a male standard and found deficient — when it was simply different — rhymes with everything I am learning about neurodivergence and about students measured against the white standard. The wrong yardstick is the story of my whole research life.
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 · 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.
Book · April Baker-Bell
Connects language to everything else I study: when we correct Black students' language 'for their own good,' we are doing benevolent harm in the register of grammar. Racialized rigor lives in red pens, not only in referrals.
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.
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 · 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 · 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.