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.
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.
I have a name for what I want the dissertation to leave behind: a blueprint of belonging — a buildable plan for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains its BIPOC and marginalized students, including neurodivergent students and students pushed outside the bubble of normalcy for gender identity or any other reason.
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.
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.
I love Gloria Ladson-Billings, and the Dreamkeepers chapter of her culturally relevant teaching work most of all. She found the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children and studied what they did. That is the standard I want my research measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry is the right method for it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 2018 our girls basketball team was predominantly white — I don't think there was a single Black player. For the past three to five years the team has been mainly Black, more highly skilled, and last year we won state for the first time in school history. I want to study the data behind that change.
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.
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.
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.