Learning journal
Entries written close to the moment, before I have tidied the thinking up. Filter by theme to watch a preoccupation surface again and again.
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.
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.
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.
Where I stand shapes what I can see. And I would like us to retire the word neurotypical.
The people building the most useful support systems for Black autistic children and their families are not in the journals I was searching first.
How do we take all of these layers and move toward more equity for neurodiverse students in schools? Start with who gets identified — and who gets sent to me.
The world seems to divide along cultural paradigms about what neurodivergence means — and the older paradigm was never the deficit one.
Early in the research it was clear whose voices carried. I am trying not to judge — I just wonder.
A layer of shared knowledge, community, and communication that changed who could be heard — and who stopped being alone.
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.
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.
Two constructs at odds: a Global North paradigm that medicalized difference as defect, and Global South paradigms that had already integrated it.
Three civil rights leaders who lived the intersection of race, disability, class, and gender — and one quote I have carried my whole life without knowing whose it was.
Before InLv and Autistics.org, many neurodivergent people lived in deep isolation and the true population ratio was simply unknown.
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.
Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Donald Galloway did not treat disability rights and racial justice as adjacent causes. My own coursework had.
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.
My fledgling EdD (lowercase edd) thought: neurodivergent rights have evolved — but neurodivergent justice has transformed. Transformation has to be the goal.
Jim Sinclair's 1993 essay reframed a sentence parents said constantly, and I have not been able to unhear it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I walked in to manage a conversation. I walked out with a genuinely new question about whose expertise counts in a room.