established
Studying the building you work in
Positionality work on insider research: what I can see that an outsider cannot, and what I will never be able to see at all.
- —This one has settled. I know what I think and I can defend it.
- —Keeping it here because every other idea depends on it.
developing
A blueprint of belonging for predominantly white private schools
The constructive goal of the dissertation: a study-derived, buildable plan for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains its BIPOC and marginalized populations — including neurodivergent students and students marginalized for gender identity or any other way they are placed outside the bubble of normalcy.
- —Why a blueprint and not a finding: racialized rigor names the problem and micro-assumptions names the mechanism, but a dissertation that only diagnoses leaves the next teacher with no tools. The blueprint of belonging is the name I am giving the destination — the thing the research questions are for.
- —The four load-bearing walls: welcome (arrival — the first morning, the name read right, the family letter that assumes membership), support (help that arrives without stigma), scaffold (structure built into the room rather than bolted on as an exception), and retain (whether the students we welcomed are still here and thriving years later — the part schools like mine rarely examine).
- —The blueprint has to hold at the crossings, not one axis at a time: BIPOC students, neurodivergent students, students marginalized for gender identity, and every student the bubble of normalcy has pushed out. A plan built for a single category will fail the student living at the intersection.
- —A blueprint is checkable. That is the standard I want to be held to: each element should be something a school can inspect against its own building — the first week, the support class, the discipline conversation, the hiring committee — rather than a value it can simply announce.
- —Connection to the dissertation: the counterstories and the MAP growth strand are the evidence; the blueprint is what the evidence is assembled into. Students' accounts of where they felt like the school was theirs — and where they felt like guests — are the measurements the drawing is built from.
- —Guardrail: the phrase is not mine to coin. The prior-use search found Morgane Michael's A Blueprint for Belonging (Solution Tree, 2024), a Drexel dissertation on caregiver belonging, an AERA paper on Black students' college aspirations, and school-district uses. I use the phrase with attribution; the contribution is the construct — study-derived, school-specific, built on welcome, support, scaffold, retain — not the words.
- —Guardrail: a blueprint drawn from one school's students is a plan for that school's site, not a universal design. What transfers is the method of drawing it, not the drawing itself.
developing
BIPOC students at the intersection of neurodiversity: belonging and achievement at my school
The direction my professor gave me when my first title proved too broad: study BIPOC students at the intersection of neurodiversity and the other crossroads that meet at my particular school — how that intersection relates to their sense of belonging, and how belonging influences achievement.
- —Why the narrower frame is better: it says who (BIPOC students who are also neurodivergent), where (my own school, with its actual demographics and habits), and what is being related (belonging and achievement). The broad version named a problem; this version names a study.
- —The intersection is the contribution. Neurodiversity research rarely accounts for race; belonging research rarely accounts for neurodivergence; the micro-assumptions a student meets do not arrive one at a time — they compound. The literature at this exact crossroads is thin, which is either a gap worth filling or a warning to read harder first.
- —The belonging mechanism I want to test: belonging does not add to achievement so much as remove a tax on it. A student spending part of every hour managing how they are being read — as a BIPOC student, as a neurodivergent student, as both at once — has less of themselves left for the work.
- —Method fits what already exists here: narrative inquiry braided with self-study. The student's own account of where their attention went during a shared task is evidence, not decoration — and it keeps the study from reducing a child to a data point.
- —Connection to the rest of the site: this is where the neurodiversity strand, the belonging standard, the micro-assumptions taxonomy, and the demographic-change study converge. Racialized rigor remains the name for the problem; this is the frame for the dissertation itself.
- —Guardrail: small numbers. At a school like mine, the population at this intersection is small enough that any table could identify a child. Narrative methods, consent, and head-of-school conversations come before any counting.
- —Guardrail: I study neurodiversity as a parent and a teacher, not a clinician. My own evaluation is in process and nothing is official; the study is about students' experiences, not about diagnosing anyone, including myself.
developing
Belonging as designed infrastructure
A framework treating belonging as the product of maintained structures — schedule, ritual, space, interruption rights — rather than of individual warmth.
- —Four candidate structures so far: who may interrupt, who is scheduled, who owns space, who is greeted by name.
- —Needs a serious literature pass before it is anything more than a useful hunch.
exploring
Culturally relevant teaching as a community practice, not a classroom technique
Ladson-Billings's Dreamkeepers teachers saw themselves as members of the community they taught in, and teaching as giving back to it. I want to think about what it would mean to incorporate culturally relevant teaching into the community around my school — and to use narrative inquiry, the method her book is built from, to do it.
- —The three commitments have to travel together: academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. A version of culturally relevant teaching that keeps only the first is not the thing she described.
- —The Dreamkeepers teachers were identified by the community itself — parents and principals named them before researchers observed them. That is a method lesson: the community already knows who its successful teachers are.
- —Narrative inquiry fits because the knowledge lives in stories: teachers' accounts of their practice, students' accounts of the same classrooms, families' accounts of the school. My dissertation already braids self-study with student narratives; this extends the braid outward.
- —Open question: what does 'community' mean for an independent school whose students commute from many neighborhoods? The community may have to be built, not just joined.
- —The aim in one line: BIPOC students, families, and colleagues feel that they are the school rather than visitors to it — the community sitting in this room, beautifully diverse, and better for it. That feeling is what culturally relevant teaching in community is meant to make structural rather than seasonal.
- —And it starts at arrival: I want all students to feel they belong the moment they get here. That makes the first week — the welcome letter, the name in the grade book, the first email home, the student who walks in late and is greeted rather than assessed — part of culturally relevant teaching in community, not a separate orientation task handed to someone else.
- —Guardrail: culturally relevant teaching is not a program a school can purchase or a unit it can add in February. Ladson-Billings is describing a stance toward students and their communities, held over years.
exploring
Critical digital literacy as dialogue, access, and power
A developing frame for studying not only whether information is accessible online, but who produced it, whose knowledge authenticates it, which systems amplify it, and whether people can answer back.
- —Bakhtin supplies dialogue and many-voiced meaning; Foucault supplies power/knowledge; Freire supplies praxis; Kellner and Share bring those questions into media education.
- —A feed is not neutral access. Paywalls, platform ownership, algorithms, moderation, broadband, and language all shape whose knowledge travels.
- —Morris's Indigenous Perspective names the internal organizations and resources that make collective action possible. It should not be confused with Indigenous or Native ways of knowing.
- —Possible classroom connection: ask students to compare accounts of the same event, trace authorship and evidence, identify what each representation enlarges or minimizes, and document how the platform delivered it to them.
- —Guardrail: greater access does not equal greater accuracy. Empowerment and authentication have to remain in the same sentence.
exploring
"Neurotypical" as a political tool, not a baseline
If neurotypical is a norm a society constructed and then called neutral, then every deficit measured against it is measuring distance from power.
- —The Week 6 history supports this: exclusion and institutionalization came first, the clinical concept came later, and the advocates' vocabulary came last.
- —Testable in a building: catalogue the norms a school enforces, then ask which are instructional necessities and which are cultural preferences with a compliance mechanism attached.
- —Risk to watch — this can slide into arguing that support needs are not real. Sinclair, Wing, and Fung all hold difference and need together without collapsing either.
exploring
The unowned four minutes
A possible dissertation site: passing periods as the least-designed, most-revealing part of the school day.
- —Attractive because it is bounded, observable, and nobody has claimed it.
- —Risky because it may be too small to carry a dissertation on its own.
emerging
An equity inventory for an independent school: what would we have to count?
A proposal to build something like ESSA's disaggregated reporting for a school that is not required to produce any — starting with the four levers Barth names (funding, curriculum, teachers, discipline) and adding the discretionary ones my own study is about: extensions, retakes, referrals, and who is offered a scaffold.
- —Barth's brief is written for public school boards and assumes data a public system is legally required to keep. The first task is to work out which of those levers an independent school can even see, and which are kept only as impressions.
- —Candidate categories: enrollment and tuition assistance, advanced and honors course enrollment, discipline records, staffing, and access to support (tutoring, counseling, study skills) — plus the discretionary decisions that never appear in any report.
- —Staffing has to be counted at every level, not just in classrooms: counseling, the front office, athletics, divisional and upper leadership, the board, and the committees that hire. A school whose student body is changing while every level above the classroom stays uniform is telling students something — and that is the part of the table nobody is required to publish.
- —Guardrail: privacy and consent come before numbers. Small populations mean a disaggregated table can identify a child, so leadership and review conversations happen before any data is pulled.
- —Guardrail: a count is not a finding. The same table that shows who is in an advanced class does not show what it cost them to get there, or what it costs them to stay.
- —The honest framing: this is not an audit designed to produce a verdict on colleagues. It is the instrument that lets a school stop arguing from impressions.
- —Connection to racialized rigor: if equity means each student gets what they need, then the study's real question is whether need — or my assumption about need — currently decides who is given what.
emerging
The first-image audit: what my Civil Rights Movement unit teaches before I speak
A structured review of the first names, images, questions, and verbs in my Civil Rights Movement unit — testing whether the curriculum presents people as organizers with agency or as icons and suffering bodies.
- —Inventory the first ten names and images students encounter, who is named, who is pictured without a name, and whose role is reduced to a brief mention.
- —Code the verbs attached to people: planned, funded, argued, taught, cared, adapted, endured, suffered, followed. Agency should be visible in the grammar, not only asserted in a concluding lesson.
- —Compare my intended message with what the sequence actually communicates. Intention is part of the record, but not evidence of impact.
- —Use Jeffries, Anderson, Morris, and McCarthy and Zald to rebuild the unit around internal resources, strategy, disagreement, intersectional leadership, and continuity across generations.
- —Opening question to test: When did the Civil Rights Movement end?
- —Guardrail: this is not a search for a perfect list of overlooked heroes. The aim is to change the frame from isolated heroism and spontaneous unrest to collective, sustained, human work.
emerging
How my school's demographics have changed since 2018
A descriptive study of my own school's changing demographics since 2018 — enrollment, rosters, courses, clubs, discipline — sparked by watching the girls basketball team go from predominantly white in 2018 to mainly Black and state champions for the first time in school history.
- —The observation that started it: in 2018 the girls basketball team was predominantly white — no Black players that I can recall. For the past three to five years the team has been mainly Black and more highly skilled, and last year won the school's first-ever state championship.
- —The research move is description before interpretation: what does the school's own data show about who has been here, in which programs, since 2018?
- —Candidate data sources: team rosters, enrollment figures, advanced-course enrollment, arts and club participation, discipline records — whatever the school already collects and I can access ethically.
- —Why it matters for racialized rigor: if the student body diversified faster than the institution's habits changed, then differential demands and micro-assumptions are being applied to a population the school's defaults were not built around.
- —Why it matters for belonging: Black students can be the face of the school's greatest athletic success and still report thin belonging elsewhere in the building. Both can be true at once — that tension is the study.
- —Guardrail: this is my own school's data. Privacy, IRB, and head-of-school conversations come before any numbers get pulled.
emerging
Micro-assumptions — a second phrase I am trying to coin
Micro-assumption: the small, silent, usually unexamined inference a well-meaning adult makes about a student's ability, background, intent, or belonging before the student has supplied any evidence. The microaggression is what the student hears; the micro-assumption is what the adult believed a half-second earlier.
- —Why a second term is worth the trouble: microaggression describes the utterance and its impact. Micro-assumption isolates the input — the part a teacher can examine in private, before harm leaves their mouth, without needing to be accused first.
- —The population I mean is specific: white adults who are confident they are not racist, and who are largely right about their intentions and largely unexamined about their inferences.
- —The arithmetic is the argument. Any one assumption is deniable. Eight before lunch is not eight small things to the student on the receiving end — it is one continuous condition: isolation, othering, being read before being met.
- —Relationship to racialized rigor: the assumption is the input, the differential demand is the output. No extension, no retake, a referral instead of a conversation — each one began as a guess about who this student is.
- —Candidate taxonomy to test against Sue's categories: assumptions of capacity (can they handle this course), of resources (can the family pay, is there help at home), of intent (was that tone tired or defiant), of representativeness (can you speak for your community), and of belonging (is this student here on scholarship, is this student a fit).
- —Method: a decision log paired with student accounts of the same task. The log captures what I assumed and decided; the student account captures what landed. The gap between them is the finding.
- —Novelty check still owed: a full database pass on microaggression taxonomies to confirm the pre-verbal inference is not already named. If it is, I cite it and drop the coinage without regret.
- —Guardrail: this cannot become a tool for accusing colleagues. It only works as a private instrument that keeps the dialogue open.
emerging
Racialized rigor — a phrase I am trying to coin
Racialized rigor: when white teachers and administrators place heavier demands on students of the global majority, believing they are preparing them for college and career, while white students in the same building are held to a lighter standard.
- —The move is framed as benevolence — we are getting you ready for the real world — which is exactly what makes it hard to name and harder to contest.
- —It is not the same as high expectations. High expectations are offered to everyone. Racialized rigor is a differential: more demand, less flexibility, faster escalation to consequence.
- —Where I see it in my own career: missed assignments treated as defiance rather than as a missing support, tighter deadlines, fewer retakes, more referrals for the same behavior.
- —Adjacent literature I need to read against it — the discipline gap, benevolent racism, opportunity hoarding, and the critique of the soft bigotry of low expectations, which this concept sits opposite to rather than inside.
- —Data I would need: assignment-completion consequences, retake and late-work policies as actually applied, and referral rates disaggregated by race within the same course and teacher.
- —How it shows up in public school: universal policies applied unevenly, and subjective behavior categories — disrespectful, defiant, disruptive — that require an adult to interpret tone, posture, and eye contact before a consequence is written.
- —How it shows up in private school: scholarship and recruited students carrying an unspoken bill to be excellent and grateful, where struggle becomes a question of fit rather than a need for support.
- —The hidden standard: college-ready and professional usually describe a cultural register, not a skill — so the student is graded on the work and, invisibly, on fluency in whiteness.
- —Distinct from the soft bigotry of low expectations: that names adults asking too little; racialized rigor names adults asking more while extending less time, less doubt, and less grace.
- —Sharpest test I can imagine: hold teacher and course constant, then disaggregate retake approvals, late-work decisions, and subjective-category referrals by race. If it is real, it is visible inside one classroom.
- —Open invitation — if you have language for this already, or research that names it, or a counterexample that breaks it, I want to hear it.
emerging
What a strengths-based, neuroinclusive school would actually have to change
Lawrence Fung's strengths-based model and the LEANS curriculum both exist. The gap is institutional: what a building would have to stop doing to adopt them.
- —Fung's Stanford Neurodiversity Project reframes neurodivergence as advantage — dyslexic students who find alternative routes to words developing creative problem-solving and a strong work ethic.
- —Sue Fletcher-Watson's LEANS curriculum at the Salvesen Mindroom Research Centre teaches neurodiversity to students rather than about them.
- —Markers of a neuroinclusive school from the presentation: inclusion understood as an advantage for everyone; every student read as having unique strengths regardless of neurological profile; neurodivergent leaders invited to speak; staff professional development on neuroinclusive practice.
- —The four-column frame I want to keep using: inclusion, belonging, equity, diversity. Diversity is representation. Equity is constantly redistributing power. Belonging is when views, beliefs, and values are integrated rather than tolerated.
emerging
Critical disability theory as the frame for my dissertation
A convergence rather than a single theory: disability activism, disability studies, the social model of disability, critical theory, poststructuralism, and intersectional feminism.
- —Reading list forming: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Michael Oliver, Alison Kafer, Nirmala Erevelles, Dan Goodley.
- —Attraction of the frame is that it treats the environment as the object of study. That matches what I already believe about school culture.
- —Open problem — combining critical disability theory with Crenshaw's intersectionality without letting one become a subheading of the other.
emerging
Rigor as a euphemism for distance
An intellectual rabbit hole: how the language of rigor gets used to justify withholding support.
- —Started as an offhand line in a presentation and has refused to go away.
- —Probably a paper rather than a dissertation, but I want to keep pulling it.
