Fieldwork begins

Related journal entries

• The undercurrent: executive function skills

  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.

• Naming the destination: the blueprint of belonging

  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.

• First draft: the research proposal, on paper

  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.

• The title my professor gave me

  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.

• The Dreamkeepers, and the teachers I want to learn from

  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.

• Morning chapel: belonging as a quality of God

  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.

• Fair is not the same as equitable

  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.

• Room for the mess

  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.

• Transformation of self: listener to learner to leader

  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.

• Belonging threads

  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 gym tells the truth: watching my school change since 2018

  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.

• Micro-assumptions: the guess that comes before the slight

  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.

• Finding my voice after fifty

  Women have been socialized to cook and to listen for millennia. That was the family structure I grew up in. I did not find my voice until after forty — really after fifty — and it was not easy.

• Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, Donald Galloway: living the intersection

  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.

• "Don't mourn for us" — and the grief I had to unlearn

  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.

• The internet let separated people find each other

  A layer of shared knowledge, community, and communication that changed who could be heard — and who stopped being alone.

• Grassroots expertise: Cheryl Poe and Maria Davis-Pierre

  The people building the most useful support systems for Black autistic children and their families are not in the journals I was searching first.

• What I first thought · I learned that · I wonder if

  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.

• Racialized rigor: pushed harder, punished faster, measured against a standard nobody names

  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.

• From "othered" to included: the words came before the science

  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.

• "Not an appendage": the year the subject started writing

  Jim Sinclair's 1993 essay reframed a sentence parents said constantly, and I have not been able to unhear it.

• The internet did not create neurodivergent community — it removed the barriers

  Before InLv and Autistics.org, many neurodivergent people lived in deep isolation and the true population ratio was simply unknown.

• Not broken — differently attuned

  Two constructs at odds: a Global North paradigm that medicalized difference as defect, and Global South paradigms that had already integrated it.

• Norms around us: the exercise I could not answer cleanly about my own building

  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.

• The hallway is a curriculum

  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.

• What a principal hears in silence

  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.

• Why I can't just measure belonging

  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.