First draft: the research proposal, on paper

The proposal now has a real title, and it is the one my professor pointed me toward: a counterstorytelling analysis of neurodivergent BIPOC students' academic and belonging experiences in a private school in the Midwest — a narrative inquiry or mixed methods examination of MAP growth data and student experience. The school appears under a pseudonym, Inverness Academy, because the students and colleagues in it are real and the study has not yet been through IRB.

The draft opens where the story has to open: seventy-two years after Brown v. Board of Education, with the history of segregation and white flight in Saint Louis, the decades of nearly all-white private school enrollment in the county, and the rapid diversification of my own school over the past ten years. The faculty has not diversified at the same pace — by my working count, of roughly forty-two teaching adults in the high school, about 81% are white. That gap between the student body and the faculty is one of the things the study has to look at honestly.

The middle sections are the ones I have been building toward on this site for months: race, neurodiversity, and belonging as three strands that meet in actual students. The draft describes the Learning Engagement Center workshop — the scaffolded support class — and the uncomfortable language around it: how students who choose optional help announce out loud that they are "not in LEC," how required support becomes the "irregular" study hall, and how students who are warm with the learning specialists in class sometimes do not acknowledge them in the hallway. I am asking whether the program creates belonging or unintentionally creates inequity through the explicit and hidden curriculum.

The literature review carries Goodenow's foundational belonging research, Uwah and colleagues on Black male students and authentic adult relationships, Brooms on Black males' academic resilience, Dee on teacher-student racial matching, Starck and colleagues on teacher implicit bias, Boateng and Mthethwa-Sommers and Kisiara on African immigrant students' distinct experiences, Skiba on discipline disproportionality, and Du Bois's 1935 insistence that what students need is education, full stop. Griffin and colleagues' warning sits over all of it: a school that talks about belonging but will not name racism directly cannot actually be race-neutral.

What is still to come is written at the end of the draft as plainly as I could put it: the MAP growth longitudinal analysis, the systems of intervention, and the narrative inquiry with current students and recent graduates. The IRB process is a lot of work, and it should be — the students in this study are my students, and the protections are the point. This is draft one. It will change. But it exists, and that is not nothing.