JJ.E. MoreyEdD · Cohort of 2029Read the journal

Working literature review

What the literature says, and where I stand in it

These sources are organized the way the dissertation needs them: by strand, not alphabetically. Each strand states the question it answers, what the sources say together, what is still missing — and how my own position shapes the way I read it.

A literature review is not a stack of summaries. It is a map of agreements, tensions, and missing voices.

How to read this page

Every strand ends with a paragraph in my own voice about what I can and cannot see from where I stand. Those paragraphs are part of the review, not decoration — they come out of my positionality statement and feed the dissertation proposal. The site-wide bibliography is on All sources · APA, and full APA citations are at the bottom of the page.

Strand 01

Racialized rigor and the discipline gap

When adults raise demands and consequences for students of the global majority, what does the research already show about where that happens and what it costs?

What the sources say

Across decades and datasets, the same finding keeps surfacing: the gap is not in student behavior, it is in adult interpretation. Skiba finds no evidence that Black students commit more serious infractions, but consistent overrepresentation in subjective categories — disrespect, defiance, excessive noise. Morris and Perry show that when you hold the infraction constant, the punishment still differs. Okonofua and Eberhardt trace the mechanism forward in time: a second infraction is read as a pattern for Black students and as a bad day for white students. Ferguson and Morris put faces and classrooms around the numbers. Dee adds the faculty side — who is in front of the student changes what the student is assumed to be.

What is missing

Almost all of this evidence comes from public schools with discipline data systems. Independent schools make the same judgment calls — late work, retakes, extensions, referrals — with no comparable public record. That absence is the opening for this study.

Where I stand in it

I am a white teacher in the room where these decisions get made. I have granted grace and withheld it, and I cannot claim to have done that evenly. Reading this literature is not neutral for me: it is reading my own decision log back to myself.

Read the full positionality statement

42 sources in this strand

Article

Blueprints for Belonging: Black Students' Aspirations and the Architecture of College Futures

AERA Annual Meeting paper · 2026

The closest prior use to my own setting: an AERA 2026 paper using an Afrofuturist lens and Spencer's PVEST framework to examine how Black high school students conceptualize college as mobility and possibility, centering youth voice and lived experience in a vision of college readiness grounded in affirmation, cultural identity, and resilience. It shares my population and my conviction that students' own accounts are evidence. Where it looks forward to college futures, my blueprint looks at the building the students are standing in now — who the school was drawn for, and how to redraw it. Author details still to be confirmed from the AERA program before citation.

#blueprint-of-belonging #belonging #racialized-rigor #educational-equity

Article

Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Implications for Clinical Practice

Derald Wing Sue, Christina M. Capodilupo, Gina C. Torino, et al.

The foundational taxonomy — microassault, microinsult, microinvalidation — and the source of the line I cannot stop thinking about: that the perpetrators are usually well-intentioned people unaware of the harm. This is the article my micro-assumptions idea has to argue with. Sue names what is said; I am trying to name what was assumed a half-second before.

#micro-assumptions #racialized-rigor #benevolence-and-harm #evidence-and-data

Article

Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate: The Experiences of African American College Students

Daniel Solórzano, Miguel Ceja, & Tara Yosso

Moves microaggressions out of the clinic and into the institution: focus groups showing students of color reading a racial climate through small daily slights. The methodological gift here is counter-storytelling — it is exactly the paired-account structure I want between teachers and students.

#micro-assumptions #belonging #method #racialized-rigor

Article

Racial Microaggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research

Lindsay Pérez Huber & Daniel Solórzano

Insists microaggressions are not interpersonal accidents but the everyday surfacing of a racial hierarchy — structure appearing in a sentence. This is my defense against the objection that micro-assumptions are just individual bad habits. They are a system running through individual heads.

#micro-assumptions #racialized-rigor #policy-vs.-practice #method

Article

Teachers, Please Learn Our Names! Racial Microaggressions and the K-12 Classroom

Rita Kohli & Daniel Solórzano

A whole article on the mispronounced name, and it is devastating. The teacher means nothing by it; the student carries it for years. This is the cleanest example of a micro-assumption I have found — the assumption that a name is too hard to be worth learning — and it is squarely in K-12, not higher ed.

#micro-assumptions #belonging #school-culture #racialized-rigor

Article

Racial Microaggressions: The Schooling Experiences of Black Middle-Class Males in Arizona's Secondary Schools

Quaylan Allen

High school, not college — and middle-class Black boys, which strips away the class explanation entirely. Their families' resources do not protect them from being read as a risk. Directly relevant to my private-school setting, where adults assume affluence solves belonging.

#micro-assumptions #racialized-rigor #deficit-thinking #teacher-expectations

Article

Black Male Adolescents Navigating Microaggressions in a Traditionally White Middle School: A Qualitative Study

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.

#micro-assumptions #belonging #voice-and-silence #racialized-rigor

Article

Racial Climate Reform in Independent Schools: How Coping Self-Efficacy Buffers Systemic and Proximal Racial Stress for Students of Color

Jackson A. Collins & Howard C. Stevenson

593 students of color in predominantly white independent schools — my exact setting, with numbers. It measures their confidence in noticing microaggressions, reframing them, and confronting them, and links school-climate perception to belonging through racial stress. The phrase "bracketed commitment to diversity" describes more independent schools than will admit it.

#micro-assumptions #belonging #school-culture #evidence-and-data #racialized-rigor

Article

At the Root of Their Stories: Black and Latinx Students' Experiences with Academic Microaggressions

Rosalie Rolón-Dow

Names academic microaggressions specifically — doubts about intellect, invisibility except when race is the topic, curriculum that never reflects you. This is the bridge between microaggression research and racialized rigor: the slights are not social, they are about whether you are believed to be capable.

#micro-assumptions #racialized-rigor #teacher-expectations #deficit-thinking

Article

Race, Culture, and Researcher Positionality: Working Through Dangers Seen, Unseen, and Unforeseen

H. Richard Milner IV

This is the methodological spine of my dissertation. Researching the self, then the self in relation to others, then shifting from self to system — it is why the study is a self-study of my own classroom rather than an audit of somebody else's. The dangers I am least likely to see are my own.

#positionality #method #racialized-rigor #evidence-and-data

Article

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Gave me the language and the picture for something my students live: discrimination arrives on several roads at once. Once I had the diagram I could not un-see it in placement decisions.

#intersectionality #equity #racialized-rigor

Article

The Punishment Gap: School Suspension and Racial Disparities in Achievement (2016)

Edward W. Morris & Brea L. Perry, Social Problems

The closest thing I have found to hard evidence for half of racialized rigor. Suspension is not just a response to an achievement gap, it helps produce one — the discipline itself removes learning time and then the lost time is read back as the student's deficiency. If demands are higher and consequences arrive faster, this is the mechanism that turns that into a transcript.

#racialized-rigor #discipline-gap #equity #evidence-and-data

Article

A Vicious Cycle: A Social-Psychological Account of Extreme Racial Disparities in School Discipline (2016)

Jason Okonofua, Gregory Walton & Jennifer Eberhardt, Perspectives on Psychological Science

This is the piece that keeps me from writing racialized rigor as a story about villains. Two identical infractions, same file, different name at the top — and by the second one the teacher already sees a pattern. It is stereotype plus discretion plus fatigue, looping. My question is whether the same loop runs in the opposite direction with academic demands: the student who is already read as needing toughening gets toughened.

#discipline-gap #teacher-expectations #racialized-rigor #policy-vs.-practice

Article

The Color of Discipline (2002)

Russell Skiba and colleagues, The Urban Review

The finding I quote most: Black students are not referred for more serious or more objective offenses, they are referred more often for the subjective ones — disrespect, defiance, excessive noise. Categories that require an adult to interpret tone. Twenty-plus years old and my building's referral codes still read like the list in this paper.

#discipline-gap #policy-vs.-practice #evidence-and-data #equity

Book

Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools (2015)

Amanda E. Lewis & John B. Diamond

The book that gave me the words opportunity hoarding in a school building rather than an economics paper. Well-resourced, self-consciously progressive school; white parents work the system for AP placements, exceptions, and second chances, and Black students meet the rules as written. The good intentions are real. So is the sorting. This is the private-school half of my question.

#opportunity-hoarding #benevolence-and-harm #racialized-rigor #school-culture

Book

Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (2000)

Ann Arnett Ferguson

Ethnography, so it shows the thing that referral data can only imply: adults deciding, in the moment, which eleven-year-old is being a kid and which one is being a problem. "Adultification" is the term I was missing. It also models the method I would need if I studied racialized rigor honestly — you have to be standing there.

#discipline-gap #fieldwork #method #racialized-rigor

Book

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (2016)

Monique W. Morris

Corrects my default image of the punished student. Black girls are disciplined for being loud, unladylike, or insufficiently deferential — a standard that is racial and gendered at once. Reading this next to Crenshaw is what convinced me racialized rigor cannot be studied without intersectionality doing real analytic work.

#discipline-gap #intersectionality #equity #belonging

Article

Benevolent Racism: Upholding Racial Inequality in the Name of Black Empowerment

Luigi Esposito & Victor Romano, The Western Journal of Black Studies

The theoretical name for the part of racialized rigor I find hardest to say out loud. Harm delivered sincerely, as help, by people who would fail any test of explicit bias. "I'm hard on him because the world will be" is a sentence I have said myself. I need to be able to critique it without pretending I stood outside it.

#benevolence-and-harm #racialized-rigor #positionality #deficit-thinking

Talk

From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt (2006)

Gloria Ladson-Billings, AERA Presidential Address

Reframes the whole vocabulary. A gap sits between two groups and implies somebody should catch up; a debt sits on the institution and implies somebody owes. If I am going to coin a term, this is the standard — the name should locate the problem in the right place. Racialized rigor has to point at the adults.

#deficit-thinking #equity #evidence-and-data #racialized-rigor

Article

Stop Talking About 'Gaps' in Education — Talk About Harm (2023)

Bettina L. Love, Education Week

Short, and it stung. Gap language keeps the conversation comparative and comfortable; harm language forces a question about who did what to whom. It is also a warning for me — a coined phrase can become another polite euphemism if I let it.

#racialized-rigor #benevolence-and-harm #equity

Article

Teachers, Race, and Student Achievement in a Randomized Experiment

Thomas S. Dee

Evidence that being assigned a teacher of one's own race measurably changes achievement for Black and white students. Directly relevant to my mostly white faculty: if teacher race shapes outcomes at scale, then the interpretation and grace decisions inside a classroom are never race-neutral, no matter how kind the teacher.

#racialized-rigor #teacher-expectations #evidence-and-data #equity

Article

Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Gloria Ladson-Billings

The 1995 foundation: academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness — all three, not one. It gives me a way to ask whether our rigor is actually rigorous, or just more compliance in whiter packaging.

#racialized-rigor #equity #teacher-expectations #policy-vs.-practice

Book

The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children

Gloria Ladson-Billings

The book I keep returning to. Ladson-Billings asked parents and principals to name the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children, then studied what those teachers did. They saw teaching as giving back to the community, believed every child could learn, and held academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness together. This is the standard I want my research to be measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry fits: the whole book is built from teachers' stories.

#racialized-rigor #equity #teacher-expectations #belonging #method

Article

African Immigrant Youth Negotiating Blackness in U.S. Schools

Francis Boateng

Pushes on my intersectionality thread: Blackness is not one experience, and immigrant students negotiate identities schools rarely see. If I ask 'who is being held to the white standard,' I also have to ask which Blackness the standard is measuring.

#intersectionality #belonging #racialized-rigor

Article

Growth Mindset and Intellectual Risk-Taking: Disentangling Conflated Concepts

Sarah Clark & Megan Soutter

A useful caution for my research vocabulary: schools love 'growth mindset' talk, but demanding risk-taking from students who are punished more harshly for mistakes is not mindset work — it is racialized rigor wearing a motivational poster.

#racialized-rigor #deficit-thinking #policy-vs.-practice #evidence-and-data

Book

Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy

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.

#racialized-rigor #benevolence-and-harm #voice-and-silence #equity

Book

Unconscious Bias in Schools: A Developmental Approach to Exploring Race and Racism

Tracey A. Benson & Sarah E. Fiarman

Written for working teachers like me and my colleagues: bias work as a developmental process, not a one-day training. Useful because my dissertation needs a frame my white colleagues can enter without feeling indicted — the door has to be open before the conversation can be honest.

#racialized-rigor #policy-vs.-practice #method #benevolence-and-harm

Article

Black Males' Academic Resilience in Predominantly White Schools

Derrick R. Brooms

Documents what it costs Black boys to succeed in schools like mine — resilience as a burden they should not have to carry. I want to ask the harder question: what if the school changed, instead of the student getting tougher?

#racialized-rigor #belonging #teacher-expectations #deficit-thinking

Book

Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice

Geneva Gay

The theory side of the same coin as Ladson-Billings: teaching through students' cultural frames of reference is not lowering the bar — it is the only way most students ever reach it. A direct counter to the 'rigor means ignoring culture' instinct.

#racialized-rigor #equity #teacher-expectations #neurodiversity

Article

Classroom Belonging Among Early Adolescent Students: Relationships to Motivation and Achievement

Carol Goodenow

One of the foundational belonging studies: students' felt membership predicts motivation and achievement. It anchors the private-school side of my question — belonging there is conditional and priced, so measuring it carefully matters.

#belonging #evidence-and-data #racialized-rigor #method

Dissertation

Understanding the Assignment: The Lived Experiences of Black Girls at a Predominantly White Independent School

S. Danielle Harley

A dissertation about exactly the world I work in: Black girls at a predominantly white independent school, and what the unwritten 'assignment' of surviving it costs them. This is both a model for my methodology and evidence that my questions are not hypothetical.

#racialized-rigor #belonging #method #intersectionality

Book

Life in Classrooms

Philip W. Jackson

Where the 'hidden curriculum' comes from — the lessons school teaches that are never in the syllabus: waiting, compliance, being evaluated. Racialized rigor is a hidden curriculum finding, which is why this old book is still on my desk.

#policy-vs.-practice #ritual #racialized-rigor #fieldwork

Website

Characteristics of Private Schools in the United States: Results from the 2023–24 Private School Universe Survey

National Center for Education Statistics

The demographic ground truth for my dissertation setting: who actually attends and teaches in U.S. private schools. When I write 'a mostly white faculty serving a diversifying student body,' this is the dataset I will cite.

#evidence-and-data #racialized-rigor #method

Article

But Good Intentions Are Not Enough: Preparing Teachers to Center Race and Poverty

H. Richard Milner IV & Judson C. Laughter

The title is my dissertation in six words. Good intentions are the operating system of schools like mine — and they are not enough. This gives me the literature base for treating benevolence as a mechanism of harm, not a character trait.

#benevolence-and-harm #racialized-rigor #method #policy-vs.-practice

Article

Race to Improve Teacher Education: Building Awareness for Instructional Practice

H. Richard Milner IV

Milner's case that teachers must build racial awareness as instructional practice, not as an add-on workshop. Pairs with his positionality work: who the teacher is, is part of the curriculum.

#positionality #method #racialized-rigor #teacher-expectations

Book

Rac(e)ing to Class: Confronting Poverty and Race in Schools and Classrooms

H. Richard Milner IV

Milner takes poverty seriously without treating it as destiny, and insists the curriculum is where race gets taught whether we mean to or not. This is where my private-school setting fits: affluence on campus does not exempt students from race — it just changes the mechanism.

#racialized-rigor #benevolence-and-harm #policy-vs.-practice #equity

Article

Teacher Reflection and Race in Cultural Contexts: History, Meanings, and Methods in Teaching

H. Richard Milner IV

Milner arguing that reflection is not neutral — what a teacher notices, names, and remembers is shaped by cultural context. For my decision logs this is the caution: my reflection can itself be a racialized act, so I pair it with student accounts and a critical friend.

#method #positionality #racialized-rigor #evidence-and-data

Article

African Immigrant Students' Experiences with U.S. School Culture

Shirley Mthethwa-Sommers & Obed Kisiara

Documents how school culture itself — the rituals, the expectations, the unspoken rules — lands on African immigrant students. Reminds me that 'school culture' is the thing I am actually studying, and that it is legible to the people it excludes.

#belonging #intersectionality #ritual #racialized-rigor

Article

Diversity in Private Education: The Impact of Racial Discrimination on Students' Mental Health

Katherine Probherbs & Jody Freeman

One of the few sources that names private schools specifically: racial discrimination in independent schools has measurable mental-health costs. Closest to home of anything on this list — the harm I am studying is not abstract.

#racialized-rigor #belonging #evidence-and-data #equity

Article

Teachers' Implicit Bias and Student Outcomes: A Study of Large-Scale Data

Jordan G. Starck, Travis Riddle, Stacey Sinclair, & Natasha Warikoo

Large-scale evidence linking county-level implicit teacher bias to racial achievement gaps. This is the quantitative spine for my claim that perception gaps between teachers and students are not just interpersonal noise — they pattern, at scale.

#racialized-rigor #evidence-and-data #teacher-expectations #equity

Article

School Belonging, Educational Aspirations, and Academic Self-Efficacy Among African American Male High School Students

Chinwe J. Uwah, H. George McMahon, & Christopher F. Furlow

Belonging predicting aspirations and self-efficacy for Black boys specifically — the students most exposed to racialized rigor in my own building. Gives my student-interview protocol a validated construct to listen for.

#belonging #racialized-rigor #teacher-expectations #evidence-and-data

Article

A Question of Belonging: Race, Social Fit, and Achievement

Gregory M. Walton & Geoffrey L. Cohen

The belonging-uncertainty experiments: Black students' achievement was dragged down not by ability but by persistent doubt about whether they fit — and a brief, well-timed intervention closed much of the gap. This is the mechanism my micro-assumptions idea needs: small daily signals accumulate into a verdict about whether you belong, and the verdict does academic damage.

#belonging #micro-assumptions #racialized-rigor #evidence-and-data #teacher-expectations

Strand 02

Micro-assumptions, microaggressions, and the well-meaning adult

What does the research say about harm done in small daily increments by adults who are certain they are not racist — and has anyone named the assumption underneath the act?

What the sources say

Pierce named offensive mechanisms in 1970; Sue and colleagues built the taxonomy that made microaggressions researchable, and stressed that perpetrators are usually well-intentioned people unaware of the harm. Solórzano, Ceja, and Yosso moved the frame from the clinic to the institution, and Pérez Huber and Solórzano insisted these are structure surfacing in a sentence rather than interpersonal accidents. In K-12, Kohli and Solórzano make the mispronounced name a case study in whose effort is worth spending; Allen and Henfield document Black adolescent boys in white schools doing constant unpaid work to manage other people's assumptions; Rolón-Dow names academic microaggressions specifically, which is where this strand meets racialized rigor. Daftary and colleagues interviewed staff who consider themselves anti-oppressive and still found students' cultural styles pathologized. For my setting, Collins and Stevenson give 593 students of color in predominantly white independent schools and Kurosaka-Jost gives thirty alumni describing a colorblind culture that thinks of itself as kind.

What is missing

The literature measures the utterance and its effects with real rigor. It does not isolate the silent inference that precedes the utterance — the half-second guess about ability, resources, intent, or belonging — as a separate, auditable unit. That is the gap I am proposing to name micro-assumption, and the one part of this a white teacher can examine privately before harm leaves their mouth.

Where I stand in it

I am the well-meaning white adult in every one of these studies. I have made these guesses, and my intentions came back clean every time I checked them, which is precisely why intentions are useless as evidence. I can only audit my decisions, and this literature is what tells me which decisions to write down.

Read the full positionality statement

4 sources in this strand

Article

Racial Microaggressions and Anti-Racism: A Review of the Literature with Implications for School-Based Interventions and School Psychologists

Rui Fu, Stephen S. Leff, Ian C. Carroll, Shelby Brizzolara-Dove, & Kenisha Campbell

A systematic review focused on early adolescence, when racial-ethnic identity is forming and microaggressions do the most developmental damage. Useful to me as a map of what has already been measured in schools — and therefore as the place to check whether anyone has isolated the assumption rather than the act.

#micro-assumptions #evidence-and-data #method #equity

Article

"Did I Hear That Right?": A CRT Analysis of Racial Microaggressions in K-12 Schools

Ashley-Marie Hanna Daftary, Debora Ortega, Ceema Samimi, & Annahita Ball

Interviews faculty and staff who consider themselves anti-oppressive — and still documents the pathologizing of students' cultural and communication styles. That is the whole argument for micro-assumptions in one study: good intentions are not a control variable.

#micro-assumptions #benevolence-and-harm #positionality #school-culture

Dissertation

Neutral Doesn't Work: The Importance of Educators' Active Engagement in Creating Racially Inclusive Spaces for Students of Color at Predominantly-White Independent Schools

Asako Kurosaka-Jost

Thirty alumni of color from predominantly white independent schools describing hyper-visibility during race conversations and invisibility otherwise, inside a colorblind school culture that thinks of itself as kind. The title is the finding: neutral is a position, and students can feel it.

#micro-assumptions #belonging #school-culture #benevolence-and-harm

Book

Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice

Kevin Kumashiro

The book that says the 'commonsense' practices — the routines, the praise, the grading — are precisely where oppression hides, because they feel natural to the people they work for. My micro-assumptions idea is downstream of this: the assumption feels like common sense, which is exactly why it has to be written down and examined.

#decolonizing-knowledge #micro-assumptions #benevolence-and-harm #policy-vs.-practice

Strand 03

Good intentions, high expectations, and opportunity hoarding

How does harm get done by adults who believe, sincerely, that they are helping?

What the sources say

This strand explains the motive behind racialized rigor. Lewis and Diamond show well-meaning progressive schools reproducing inequality through a thousand small advocacy decisions. Tilly gives the structural name — durable inequality built from ordinary hoarding. Esposito and Romano name benevolent racism directly: inequality upheld in the language of empowerment. Milner, Love, and Ladson-Billings each turn the frame from student deficit to institutional debt — Milner in Start Where You Are follows caring teachers who still reproduce opportunity gaps, and his interest-convergence argument explains why institutions adopt the language of equity far faster than its practice. Clark and Soutter show how even growth mindset can be repackaged as a demand placed on the student rather than the system.

What is missing

The literature is strong on describing benevolence and thin on what it feels like to receive it. Students are rarely asked whether the extra push landed as belief in them or as a test they did not agree to take.

Where I stand in it

This is the strand that implicates me most directly. I have been the teacher who pushed harder because I believed in a student. I need this literature precisely because it will not let me treat my intentions as evidence of my impact.

Read the full positionality statement

11 sources in this strand

Book

In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development

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.

#voice-and-silence #deficit-thinking #equity #evidence-and-data

Article

Young, Gifted, and Black: Inequitable Outcomes of Gifted and Talented Programs

Krystal Cohen, Princeton University

Race and maternal education showing up as factors in gifted identification. This is opportunity hoarding with a nomination form attached — the same discretion I keep circling in my racialized rigor question, only pointed upward instead of downward.

#opportunity-hoarding #equity #teacher-expectations #evidence-and-data

Article

On older, non-Western understandings of neurological difference

Akhund

Reminded me that acceptance is not the new idea. Medicalization is. Communities have held neurodivergent people with reverence for as long as there have been humans; the deficit paradigm is a recent import.

#decolonizing-knowledge #neurodiversity #deficit-thinking

Book

Durable Inequality (1998)

Charles Tilly

Where opportunity hoarding comes from originally. Inequality lasts because it gets built into the ordinary categories organizations use to sort people — not because anyone renews their prejudice each morning. Useful to me because it explains how a school can change every adult in the building and keep producing the same pattern.

#opportunity-hoarding #school-culture #evidence-and-data

Book

Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance (2013)

Prudence L. Carter & Kevin G. Welner, editors

My reference shelf for the inputs side. Useful counterpressure on my own idea: much of the harm is under-resourcing and low expectations, not over-demanding. Racialized rigor only earns its keep if it names something these chapters do not already cover — that is the test I keep failing to fully pass.

#teacher-expectations #equity #opportunity-hoarding #evidence-and-data

Book

Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students with Special Needs Succeed in School and Life

Thomas Armstrong

The practical companion to the conceptual work. Armstrong's "positive niche construction" — changing the environment to fit the learner instead of fixing the learner to fit the environment — is exactly the move racialized rigor refuses to make: it demands the student adapt to a standard instead of asking whether the standard is just.

#neurodiversity #deficit-thinking #policy-vs.-practice #equity

Book

The Power of Neurodiversity: Unleashing the Advantages of Your Differently Wired Brain

Thomas Armstrong

Armstrong's broader statement of the strengths-first case: neurological differences carry advantages, not just deficits. This sits underneath my whole neurodiversity thread — the spectrum image from my first presentation is, at heart, this argument.

#neurodiversity #deficit-thinking #teacher-expectations

Article

The Analysis of Linguistic Borrowing

Einar Haugen

A classic from linguistics that I use sideways: when a school borrows the language of equity ('rigor,' 'grit,' 'belonging') but keeps the old structure, the words are loanwords that never assimilate. Language change without structural change.

#policy-vs.-practice #benevolence-and-harm #decolonizing-knowledge

Book

Start Where You Are, But Don't Stay There: Understanding Diversity, Opportunity Gaps, and Teaching in Today's Classrooms

H. Richard Milner IV

The title alone is discipline for me: begin with honest self-knowledge, but refuse to stay there. Milner follows teachers who genuinely care and still reproduce opportunity gaps — which means caring cannot be the evidence of my impact. His self-to-system moves are the backbone of my methodology.

#benevolence-and-harm #positionality #method #teacher-expectations

Article

Critical Race Theory and Interest Convergence as Analytical Tools in Teacher Education Policies and Practices

H. Richard Milner IV

The uncomfortable one: institutions — and people — move toward racial justice when it also serves their interests. Milner applies Derrick Bell's interest convergence to teacher education itself. It explains why schools like mine adopt the language of equity easily and the redistribution of grace slowly.

#benevolence-and-harm #policy-vs.-practice #opportunity-hoarding #evidence-and-data

Article

Students' Need for Belonging in the School Community

Karen F. Osterman

The review that moved belonging from social psychology into education: students who experience belonging are more engaged, more motivated, and more willing to ask for help — and the adults' behavior is a major determinant. That last part is the hook for my study: belonging is something teachers do or withhold, not something students bring.

#belonging #school-culture #teacher-expectations #evidence-and-data

Strand 04

Educational equity: from civil rights law to what each student needs

If fairness and equity are not the same thing, what does a school have to do differently — and how would anyone know whether it had?

What the sources say

The idea comes out of the civil rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education declared education a right which must be made available to all on equal terms, and the Office for Civil Rights still describes its task as keeping open the doors those laws forced open. Barth supplies the working distinction the field uses: equality is students treated the same with access to similar resources, equity is each student receiving what they need to graduate prepared for success after high school — and the brief names the four levers research connects most strongly to outcomes: funding, curriculum, teachers, and discipline policies. ESSA turns the same idea into a reporting obligation by disaggregating results by subgroup, so a claim of fair treatment becomes a number anyone can look up. Carter and Welner reframe the question as an opportunity gap rather than an achievement gap; Ladson-Billings pushes it into debt accrued; Lewis and Diamond show a well-intentioned school reproducing the difference anyway; Tilly names the hoarding underneath. Together the strand moves the question from intent to distribution: not whether a school means well, but who is actually given what.

What is missing

The framework is built for public systems under legal obligation. Independent schools sit largely outside the reporting machinery that makes equity measurable, so this literature offers language and almost no instrument. What an independent school would have to count, who would see it, and what looking would cost are not settled anywhere I have found — and that silence is a finding in itself.

Where I stand in it

I came to this by way of fairness, and fairness turned out to be the harder thing to give up. My instinct is to be even-handed, and even-handedness is the most comfortable form of inequality: it lets me feel just while the student who needed more still receives the same. I teach in a school whose student body has changed faster than its habits. I want the version of equity that costs something — scaffolds assigned by need rather than by my guess about a child — not the version that only revises a mission statement.

Read the full positionality statement

3 sources in this strand

Article

Educational Equity: What Does It Mean? How Do We Know When We Reach It?

Patte Barth · Center for Public Education

The cleanest working definition I have found: equality is students treated the same with access to similar resources, equity is each student receiving what they need to graduate prepared for life after high school. The brief also names the four levers research connects most strongly to student outcomes — funding, curriculum, teachers, and discipline policies — and the last one is exactly where my dissertation lives. It is written for public school boards, which is why I have to translate it for an independent school where none of those levers is counted in public.

#educational-equity #equity #evidence-and-data #policy-vs.-practice

Website

The Impact of Civil Rights Laws

U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights

The federal government's own account of what the civil rights laws did in schools: enforcement removed barriers that had legally shut doors, and the Office for Civil Rights exists to keep those doors open. I am reading it for the distinction it forces on me — the language is almost entirely about access, and access is the floor of equity, not the finish. A page dated August 2025 is also a reminder that enforcement priorities shift with administrations, so a school that treats federal pressure as its only reason to look will stop looking the moment the pressure lifts.

#educational-equity #policy-vs.-practice #evidence-and-data

Website

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

U.S. Department of Education

ESSA is where equity becomes a reporting obligation: results are broken out by subgroup, so a claim that everyone is treated fairly turns into a number anyone can look up. That is the discipline I want for my own building. The catch is jurisdiction — the testing-and-reporting machinery attaches to public schools and the agencies that fund them, and most independent schools sit outside it. In my school nobody is required to count anything, which means equity work has to be chosen rather than compelled. That is a harder and more interesting question than compliance.

#educational-equity #evidence-and-data #policy-vs.-practice

Strand 05

Belonging, school culture, and the unwritten rules

What makes a student feel that a school is theirs — and what makes asking for help feel expensive?

What the sources say

Baumeister and Leary supply the foundation: belonging is a fundamental human motivation, not a school-climate nicety. Osterman brings it into education — belonging predicts engagement and help-seeking, and adult behavior is a major determinant. Walton and Cohen name the mechanism this study depends on: belonging uncertainty, the accumulating doubt about fit that drags achievement down even when ability does not. Goodenow establishes belonging as measurable and predictive rather than sentimental; Strayhorn reframes it as perceived social support and mattering; Allen and colleagues keep the field honest with a meta-analysis showing real but modest effects, with teacher support among the strongest levers. Jackson's hidden curriculum names the part of school nobody writes down: the pace, the queues, the acceptable ways to ask. Harley's study of Black girls at a predominantly white independent school is nearly my exact setting, and Brooms, Uwah, and Boateng show belonging doing real academic work for students who are read as outsiders. Together they suggest that help is not simply offered or withheld — it is priced, and the price is set by culture.

What is missing

Belonging is usually measured at the level of the school. The decisions that create or deny it happen at the level of a single task, a single extension request, a single Tuesday.

Where I stand in it

I belong in my school without effort. Its unwritten rules were written by people like me, which means I am the worst possible judge of how visible those rules are — and the best possible person to be asked about them, if I answer honestly. I want our BIPOC community members to feel that they are the school rather than visitors to it — the community sitting in this room, beautifully diverse, and better for it — and I treat that as a standard I can be held to, not a wish I get to announce. I want all students to feel it the moment they get here, before they have earned anything, and I do not think belonging is earned at all: it is up to the community to embrace you and bring the belonging to you, not the other way around. The community lives belonging — the older students carry it as role models for the younger ones, who do not earn it; they arrive into a practice that is already underway. That points my attention at arrival rather than assembly — the welcome, the name read correctly, the late student greeted instead of assessed — and it puts the burden on the school, not the newcomer. Underneath the theory, for me, is a chapel truth: belonging is a quality of God, and living the quality of welcoming others is expressing Love the way God expresses love — love as a living verb, existing only in the doing of it. The numbers at my school keep this honest: the high school campus is still largely white, and by my working count only about five to seven percent of our teachers are BIPOC — an estimate, not an official report, because nobody is required to publish one. We have work to do, and the literature on belonging tells me what the work is for. We also need representation at all levels, not only in the classrooms: the counseling office, the front office, the coaching staff, the leadership team, the board, the committees that hire. A student reads the whole building, and the people who approve a course or call a family home are part of what belonging looks like from the outside.

Read the full positionality statement

28 sources in this strand

Book

A Blueprint for Belonging: Building a Positive School Culture From the Ground Up

Morgane Michael · Solution Tree Press

The prior use I owed my own phrase: Michael published A Blueprint for Belonging in 2024, a research-based guide for K-12 teachers and administrators on building school cultures of belonging, organized around her BUILD acronym — boundaries, understanding, integrity, listening, dependability. Her blueprint is a general school-culture framework; mine is a study-derived plan for a specific setting — predominantly white private schools — at the intersection of race, neurodivergence, and the other ways students are placed outside the bubble of normalcy. I can no longer claim the phrase as a coinage, and I should not. What I can claim is the construct: welcome, support, scaffold, retain, drawn from counterstories and growth evidence at one school, checkable against that school's actual hallways.

#blueprint-of-belonging #belonging #school-culture

Website

Blueprint for Belonging: Research-Based Strategies for Supporting Neurodiverse Learners

Sarah M. Scott · Digital Promise / RocketPD

A five-session professional learning series for K-12 educators on learner variability and inclusive education — the prior use that overlaps my neurodiversity angle most directly. Its premise is one I share: the question is not whether learner variability exists but whether the environment is designed to respond to it so every student feels they belong. It is a training series rather than a study, and it addresses neurodivergence without the race intersection — the crossing is still the gap.

#blueprint-of-belonging #belonging #neurodiversity

Website

A Blueprint for Belonging: A Self-Study Course

Teaching Empathy Institute

A Pre-K-12 self-study course translating belonging research into classroom culture: emotional safety, naming the world of learning (with an explicit Freire thread), community meetings, and emotional mapping. Useful to me as evidence that the blueprint metaphor already lives in professional development — and as a contrast, because its unit of change is the individual classroom, while my question is what the whole school would have to build.

#blueprint-of-belonging #belonging #school-culture

Book

Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning

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.

#voice-and-silence #leadership #positionality

Book

Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning

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.

#voice-and-silence #leadership #belonging

Book

Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines

Joy Buolamwini

Buolamwini's account keeps my reflection on belonging accountable to power. Feeling socially outside is real, but it is not interchangeable with racialized and gendered exclusion. Her work asks who technology recognizes, whose intelligence receives legitimacy, and who bears the cost when systems reproduce an unequal gaze.

#belonging #intersectionality #critical-digital-literacy #evidence-and-data

Book

The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change

Aldon D. Morris

Morris's Indigenous Perspective explains collective action through the institutions, leadership, relationships, and resources developed within Black communities. Here indigenous means internally generated, not Indigenous or Native identity. This helps me read digital organizing as strategy and infrastructure rather than spontaneous crowd behavior.

#critical-digital-literacy #decolonizing-knowledge #evidence-and-data #school-culture

Book

Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

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.

#voice-and-silence #positionality #intersectionality #belonging

Book

Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind

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.

#voice-and-silence #method #positionality #belonging

Podcast

Autism in Black

Maria Davis-Pierre

Education, advocacy training, and support for Black parents and families of autistic individuals. The expertise I most needed was not in the databases I searched first — it was in community-led work like this.

#disability-justice #intersectionality #belonging

Person

Advocating 4 Kids

Cheryl Poe

Grassroots advocacy training for Black families navigating school systems. Her work shows what support looks like when it is built by the community that needs it rather than delivered to them.

#disability-justice #equity #school-culture

Article

"Don't Mourn for Us" (1993)

Jim Sinclair, Autism Network International

The sentence that reorganized the presentation: wishing a child did not have autism is wishing for a different child. Not an appendage. I have stopped using "child with autism" as if the noun were detachable.

#neurodiversity #belonging #disability-justice

Article

Decolonizing neurodiversity

Marium Akhund, PhD, licensed psychotherapist

Reframed demand avoidance as intuitive dissent and clock-based time as an erasure of neurodivergent pacing. It made me look at my building's bell schedule as a cultural artifact rather than a neutral container.

#decolonizing-knowledge #neurodiversity #ritual

Book

Emergence: Labeled Autistic (1986) and Nobody Nowhere (1992)

Temple Grandin; Donna Williams

The point where lived-experience literature became a body of evidence. These are primary sources on the inside of an experience the clinical literature described only from outside.

#neurodiversity #method #belonging

Article

LEANS · Learning About Neurodiversity at School

Dr. Sue Fletcher-Watson, Salvesen Mindroom Research Centre, Edinburgh

A curriculum that teaches neurodiversity to all students rather than about some of them. The clearest existing answer to "what would you actually do on Monday?"

#neurodiversity #school-culture #belonging

Article

Culture as practice, not climate

Seminar reading set, Fall 2025

Gave me permission to stop treating culture as a survey score. Culture is what people repeatedly do, and repeated doing can be observed.

#school-culture #method

Book

The wisdom of practice

Course text

A quiet reframe of what I had been calling instinct. It deserves to be studied rather than simply trusted — that line rearranged my dissertation instincts.

#method #leadership

Person

A twenty-minute hallway conversation

A paraprofessional at my fieldwork site

"The hallway is the only place the day is honest." Not published anywhere, and the single most influential sentence of my first year.

#belonging #fieldwork

Article

The critics of distributed leadership

Assorted articles

Useful corrective. Distributing leadership without distributing time is just distributing work, and I had been sloppy about the difference.

#leadership #equity

Website

10 Principles of Disability Justice

Sins Invalid

The movement that grew out of — and past — the disability rights framework I presented in Week 6. Its insistence on intersectionality, leadership of the most impacted, and anti-capitalist critique of "productivity" keeps surfacing in my thinking about who schools are built to reward. This is where disability rights stops being a checklist and becomes a lens.

#disability-justice #intersectionality #equity #belonging

Article

Rewiring How Neurodiversity Is Taught in Classrooms

Article on neurodiversity-affirming teaching

Argues that neurodiversity should be taught to everyone in the room, not delivered as a service to a labeled few — the LEANS curriculum idea. If difference is ordinary, then the "extra" demands and "extra" grace in a classroom become visible as choices, and choices can be studied.

#neurodiversity #policy-vs.-practice #belonging #equity

Article

The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation

Roy F. Baumeister & Mark R. Leary

The foundational claim underneath all belonging theory: belonging is not a preference or a school-climate nicety but a fundamental human motivation, and deprivation has real cognitive and emotional costs. If that is true, then a school that makes belonging expensive for some students is not just unkind — it is taxing the thing learning runs on.

#belonging #evidence-and-data #school-culture

Book

College Students' Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for All Students

Terrell L. Strayhorn

Strayhorn defines belonging as students' perceived social support on campus — a felt sense of being cared about, accepted, and mattering — and shows it is especially consequential for marginalized students. His framework gives my interview protocol language for what to ask: not 'do you feel welcome' but 'who here would notice if you were gone.'

#belonging #school-culture #method #evidence-and-data

Article

Effects of School Belonging on Academic and Psychosocial Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Educational Interventions

Kelly-Ann Allen, Margaret L. Kern, Christopher S. Rozek, Dennis M. McInerney, & George M. Slavich

The meta-analytic check on my enthusiasm: belonging interventions work, but effects are modest and uneven, and teacher support is one of the strongest levers. Keeps me honest — belonging is real and measurable, not a magic variable, and the teacher's daily behavior is exactly where the effect lives.

#belonging #evidence-and-data #method #school-culture

Article

A Better Way to Teach the Civil Rights Movement

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.

#civil-rights-history #decolonizing-knowledge #positionality #voice-and-silence #school-culture

Podcast

Teaching Hard History (podcast series)

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.

#civil-rights-history #decolonizing-knowledge #positionality #voice-and-silence #school-culture

Book

Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement

Hasan Kwame Jeffries

Jeffries helps me see curriculum as a sequence of choices rather than a neutral container. If I begin with only the most recognizable leaders and the most violent photographs, students can leave knowing that injustice existed without understanding how ordinary people organized against it. This work is pushing me to rebuild the unit around agency, strategy, contested ideas, and the movement's unfinished life.

#civil-rights-history #positionality #decolonizing-knowledge #school-culture

Article

Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory

John D. McCarthy & Mayer N. Zald

Resource mobilization theory gives me a direct challenge to accounts of protest as irrational crowd behavior. Movements acquire resources, build organizations, cultivate relationships, make strategic choices, and sustain action under pressure. Teaching that infrastructure restores thought and agency to people whom a cleaned-up curriculum too often presents only as victims or symbols.

#civil-rights-history #evidence-and-data #decolonizing-knowledge #school-culture

Strand 06

Voice, silence, and who gets to speak

Who has been taught not to speak, how were they taught it, and what does it take to unlearn?

What the sources say

hooks treats speaking as a political act rather than a personality trait. Belenky and Gilligan document how women's knowing gets discounted as too personal to count as knowledge. Olsen catalogues the silences that circumstance imposes on writers. Roberts and Baker-Bell push the frame further, showing that silence is not distributed evenly by gender alone — race and language decide whose speech is heard as competence and whose is heard as noise.

What is missing

Classroom silence is usually read as a student trait. Very little of this work asks what the room did to produce it.

Where I stand in it

I was raised to cook and listen. I found my voice after forty, and really after fifty, and it was not easy. That history is why I notice quiet students — and why I have to guard against assuming their silence means what mine did.

Read the full positionality statement

9 sources in this strand

Article

Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education

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.

#critical-digital-literacy #decolonizing-knowledge #evidence-and-data #voice-and-silence

Book

The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays

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.

#critical-digital-literacy #voice-and-silence #decolonizing-knowledge

Website

Khaby Lame on TikTok

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.

#critical-digital-literacy #voice-and-silence

Book

Silences

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.

#voice-and-silence #positionality

Article

The Paradox of Silence: Some Questions About Silence as Resistance

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.

#voice-and-silence #method #intersectionality #evidence-and-data

Book

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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.

#critical-digital-literacy #decolonizing-knowledge #method #policy-vs.-practice #voice-and-silence

Talk

Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Understanding Society

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.

#decolonizing-knowledge #method #policy-vs.-practice #voice-and-silence

Article

Toward a Theory of Anti-Oppressive Education

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.

#decolonizing-knowledge #voice-and-silence #method #policy-vs.-practice

Article

From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter

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.

#civil-rights-history #critical-digital-literacy #decolonizing-knowledge #voice-and-silence #positionality #evidence-and-data

Strand 07

Neurodiversity and disability justice

Whose nervous system was the school designed around, and who has to survive that design?

What the sources say

Sinclair and the disability justice tradition reframe the question from support to power: nothing about us without us. Wing, Frith, and Williams show the clinical picture being built, and being built narrowly. Armstrong, the LEANS materials, and the Stanford advocacy work translate the frame into classroom practice, while Davis-Pierre, Poe, and Autism in Black name who was left out of the diagnostic picture entirely — Black and brown children, girls, and families without access to evaluation.

What is missing

Neurodiversity and racial equity are still largely separate literatures in school practice, even though they meet in the same student, in the same referral, on the same Tuesday.

Where I stand in it

I came to this work through neurodiversity first. That path shapes what I see easily and what I almost missed — which is that the same interpretive judgment that produces a discipline gap also decides which child gets evaluated and which gets called lazy.

Read the full positionality statement

7 sources in this strand

Person

The autism spectrum

Lorna Wing

Her work is why we say spectrum. Neurodivergence presents uniquely, so a single checklist of characteristics was always going to mislabel somebody.

#neurodiversity #method

Talk

"Nobody is free until everybody's free" (1971 speech)

Fannie Lou Hamer

I have heard this line my whole life without knowing whose it was. Knowing she said it while living at the intersection of race, gender, poverty, and disability — including a forced hysterectomy — changes what the sentence weighs.

#intersectionality #disability-justice #equity

Book

Autism: Explaining the Enigma (1989)

Uta Frith

Frith reads Itard's own notes on Victor and argues the evidence points to autism. A reminder that the archive often already holds the observation, and only the interpretation arrives late.

#neurodiversity #method

Podcast

Autism in Black · Advocating 4 Kids

Maria Davis-Pierre, LMHC; Cheryl Poe, M.A. Urban Ed.

Where I go to correct the whiteness of my reading list. Advocacy and clinical practice in the same voice, aimed at families the research literature keeps under-describing.

#intersectionality #equity #neurodiversity

Person

The Strengths-Based Model of Neurodiversity

Dr. Lawrence Fung, Stanford Neurodiversity Project

Proof that a strengths-based frame can survive contact with an institution. Useful counterweight to my instinct that reframing is only rhetorical.

#neurodiversity #equity

Video

Empowering Black Neurodivergent Kids (with Cheryl Poe and Maria Davis-Pierre)

Cheryl Poe & Maria Davis-Pierre

Two Black advocates naming what the mainstream neurodiversity conversation leaves out: that Black families fight a different battle for diagnosis, services, and belief. It grounds the "missing voices" slide from my presentation — the internet built community for many neurodivergent people, but access to that community, and to being heard in it, was never evenly distributed.

#neurodiversity #intersectionality #disability-justice #evidence-and-data

Article

Stanford Neurodiversity Project: Advocacy and Neurodiversity-Affirming Practice

Stanford Neurodiversity Project

The advocacy arm of the Stanford work — moving neurodiversity from a research topic into institutional practice: hiring, teaching, and campus culture. A model of what it looks like when a university treats neurodivergent people as a community to include rather than a problem to remediate.

#neurodiversity #disability-justice #policy-vs.-practice

Strand 08

Critical digital literacy, dialogue, and the politics of knowledge

Who produces and authenticates knowledge online, which systems amplify it, and what becomes possible when learners can answer back?

What the sources say

Kellner and Share define critical media literacy as an inquiry into representation, power, ideology, and the possibility that learners become producers rather than passive consumers. Bakhtin makes knowledge dialogic and many-voiced; Foucault binds knowledge to the institutions and systems authorized to circulate it; Freire turns reflection into praxis. Morris adds an account of organized collective action built through a community's own institutions and resources, challenging theories that reduce movements to irrational crowds. Šavrič, Patterson, and Jenny make the construction visible through cartography: even a familiar map is a chosen projection that enlarges some things and compresses others. Together these works show why access matters and why access alone cannot authenticate what a platform delivers.

What is missing

The democratic language around digital access often underplays paywalls, unequal connectivity, platform ownership, algorithmic amplification, moderation, and the labor of verification. More voices can enter without power becoming evenly distributed.

Where I stand in it

I was educated through versions of knowledge that often felt complete because I did not know what had been omitted. Digital access lets me find the missing voices, but my freedom to choose a feed is not the same as freedom from its design. My responsibility is to ask who made the representation, what it enlarges, what it minimizes, and why it reached me.

Read the full positionality statement

2 sources in this strand

Book

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977

Michel Foucault

Foucault keeps me from treating information as separate from authority. Who can name something, classify it, publish it, suppress it, or make it searchable is part of what that knowledge becomes. Digital platforms distribute voice, but they also build new and often invisible forms of control.

#critical-digital-literacy #evidence-and-data #decolonizing-knowledge #policy-vs.-practice

Article

The Equal Earth Map Projection

Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, & Bernhard Jenny

A map is a powerful lesson in constructed knowledge. Every projection enlarges, compresses, or distorts something; the familiar view only feels neutral because I learned it first. Equal Earth gives me a concrete visual analogy for reading a news feed: ask what the representation makes large, what it makes small, and who chose the frame.

#critical-digital-literacy #evidence-and-data #decolonizing-knowledge

Strand 09

Teaching the Civil Rights Movement as the long game

What changes when the Civil Rights Movement is taught as organized, internally resourced, many-voiced, and unfinished rather than spontaneous, leader-centered, and safely past?

What the sources say

Jeffries and Anderson challenge the compressed classroom narrative built around a few heroes, spectacular violence, and a tidy legislative ending. Morris replaces older collective-behavior accounts of irrational crowds with an Indigenous Perspective: movements draw agency from institutions, leadership, culture, creativity, and resources developed within oppressed communities. McCarthy and Zald likewise direct attention to organization and resource mobilization. Read together, these works return strategy and humanity to organizers including Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin, and Brad Lomax, while showing continuity between the mid-century movement and later struggles for racial justice.

What is missing

Curriculum research is clear about what the familiar story omits, but teachers still need practical ways to audit how their own first images, opening questions, timelines, and categories quietly reproduce that story. The gap is between knowing the fuller history and redesigning what students encounter first.

Where I stand in it

I am a white teacher who inherited and repeated parts of the cleaned-up account even while believing I was teaching for justice. My task is not to replace one heroic list with a longer one. It is to examine how my choices frame organizers as thinkers or as scenery, and to let the evidence change both me and the unit on paper.

Read the full positionality statement

No sources filed here yet — this strand is still being built.

Strand 10

Intersectionality and decolonizing the frame

Whose knowledge counts as knowledge, and who set that standard?

What the sources say

Crenshaw gives the analytic tool: systems overlap, and people living at the overlap fall through categories built for one axis at a time. Freire and Kumashiro locate the classroom itself as a site of either domestication or liberation; Kumashiro's anti-oppressive education pushes further — the common sense of a school, its routines and defaults, is where Othering hides most comfortably, because it never has to announce itself. Akhund's work on ancient understandings of difference makes the historical point that the clinical, Global North account of neurodivergence is recent and local, not universal. Hamer, Haugen, and the disability justice writers keep the frame anchored in movements rather than theory alone.

What is missing

Intersectional analysis is common in the literature and rare in school policy, which still mostly sorts students one category at a time.

Where I stand in it

I sit on the privileged side of the race axis and the marginalized side of others. Intersectionality is not a suffering ledger, and I use it here to be precise about which hardships are mine to speak from and which are not.

Read the full positionality statement

1 source in this strand

Talk

Intersectionality as a lens on colliding power

Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw

Multiple points of discrimination that intersect and do not operate independently. It moved from something I cited to something that constrains how I would sample and whom I would ask.

#intersectionality #equity #method

Strand 11

Method: self-study, narrative inquiry, and what counts as evidence

How do I study my own practice without making myself the hero of the finding?

What the sources say

Milner's framework for researching race through self-study is the methodological spine: research the self, research the self in relation to others, engage in reflection and representation, shift from self to system — and his warning that reflection is itself culturally situated is why reflection alone is never my evidence. Narrative inquiry and the qualitative-methods sources give me paired protocols — teacher and student accounts of the same task — while the policy-versus-practice literature and the NCES data supply the structural backdrop against which those accounts get read.

What is missing

Self-study risks becoming confession. The literature is clear that it only earns its keep when the analysis moves from my experience to the system that produced it.

Where I stand in it

Every methodological choice here is a guardrail against my own comfort: paired accounts so students can contradict me, decision logs so I cannot revise my memory, a critical friend so my blind spots have a witness.

Read the full positionality statement

3 sources in this strand

Podcast

Conversations on qualitative design

Podcast series

What I listen to while driving to the fieldwork site. The episode on abandoning your first coding scheme arrived at exactly the right week.

#method #fieldwork

Website

Research Portfolio (ResearchGate)

J.E. Morey

My own growing body of work in progress. Keeping it here as a placeholder and a promise — the citation list on this page should eventually end with things I wrote.

#positionality #method

Article

Exploring Pre-Service Classroom Teachers' Reflections on Teaching in Physical Education

Niki Tsangaridou & Ioanna Polemitou

A model for structured teacher reflection — how pre-service teachers' journals reveal what they notice and what they miss. Methodologically useful for designing my own teacher decision logs.

#method #fieldwork #positionality

Strand 12

Toward a blueprint of belonging

If the study documents where belonging fails, what would it take for the findings to become a plan a school could actually build from?

What the sources say

This strand is where the other eleven converge — and it begins with an acknowledgment. The phrase blueprint for belonging is already in the literature: Morgane Michael's A Blueprint for Belonging (2024) offers K-12 educators a research-based school-culture framework built on her BUILD acronym — boundaries, understanding, integrity, listening, dependability — and variations of the phrase appear in a 2026 Drexel dissertation on caregiver belonging, an AERA paper on Black students' college aspirations, and a Smith College student-engagement model. Michael's blueprint is a general culture framework; the construct I am developing is narrower and more specific: a study-derived plan for predominantly white private schools, at the crossings of race, neurodivergence, and gender identity. The belonging research (strand 05) establishes that belonging is fundamental, measurable, and decided largely by adult behavior. The equity strand (04) insists that what is not counted cannot be claimed. The micro-assumptions and racialized rigor strands (01, 02) name what the plan has to dismantle; the neurodiversity and intersectionality strands (07, 10) name who the plan has to hold at the crossings — BIPOC students, neurodivergent students, students marginalized for gender identity, everyone the bubble of normalcy has pushed out. Ladson-Billings and the community strand show what it looks like when a teacher belongs to the community she serves rather than visiting it. Together they point at something the field rarely delivers: not another account of the problem, but a buildable plan — a blueprint of belonging, used here with attribution to Michael's prior work — for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains the students it has historically placed outside.

What is missing

The literature is rich on why belonging matters and thin on how a specific school constructs it on purpose. Independent schools in particular get language — mission statements, diversity commitments — without architecture. A blueprint with measurements, checkable against the actual building, is the piece I have not found written for my setting.

Where I stand in it

I ran the prior-use search before claiming this term, and the answer was humbling: the phrase belongs to the field, not to me. What I can claim is the intent and the specificity. I do not want my dissertation to end as one more document a school can agree with and shelve. I want it to end as a drawing with measurements — welcome, support, scaffold, retain — that my school, and schools like it, could hold up against their own hallways and see where the plan and the building disagree. Michael's book gives the general case; my study would give the drawing for one specific site, made from that site's students.

Read the full positionality statement

No sources filed here yet — this strand is still being built.

Themes tie these back to the rest of the journal — see how the ideas connect.

References · APA 7th edition

Full citations

The same sources, formatted for coursework and the dissertation proposal. Entries markedverifystill need a detail checked — a year, a page range, or an edition — against the original.

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