When I applied to the MALXD program, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted: to bring new skills to a nearby school district where I’d spent years as a deeply involved parent and volunteer, better equipped to join the work already underway — the work of educators and community members fighting for kids with resources that have never been adequate, not because of local failure but because of centuries of structurally designed marginalization. I framed my contribution through the only lens I had language for at the time: educational equity. It was the best tool I understood well enough to perceive as effective. I didn’t yet realize it was only one tool.

Learning Is Not About Being a Minor

My first semester, EAD 861 assigned a documentary following facility custodians for large organizations who pursued ambitious, self-directed learning projects outside of work — creation, problem-solving, design. The film-maker had also taken time to trace the various childhood obstacles each of these people had once faced, the obstacles that had foreclosed those too few, too narrow paths deemed by our society as legitimate and rewarded by our economy as viable. We also studied adults learning on their own terms from other margins, including Native American tribes whose learning is rooted in collective well-being through Ancestral Intelligence preservation rather than individuals self-actualizing with AI. That semester forced a fundamental recalibration: learning is not fundamental to being a minor. It is fundamental to being human. Which means that poorly designed learning experiences aren’t just ineffective — they are dehumanizing, regardless of the learner’s age.

Crossing Elevators

Shortly before entering the program, I had read a series of detailed accounts from some of the oldest cultures in the world — those most insulated from colonization and globalization — detailing how parenting and raising humans is done. Then, in CEP 800, I studied a survey of the theories underpinning western psychology’s conceptualizations of learning. When we reached the Bandura, Vygotsky, Papert, Lave and Wenger eras, the patterns became undeniable. Humans learn what their social context demands that they learn with little to no friction, and young people are neurologically predisposed to learn from their families, their communities, the more knowledgeable others in their authentic contexts — people who are themselves best situated to be authorities regarding what needs learning. This simultaneously lowered the position of formal education systems and raised the position of culturally situated learning in my mind — like elevators, crossing paths. My goal hadn’t changed. My understanding of who it served had been too small.

When the Homework Became Personal

The shift deepened when coursework on instructional design project management emphasized rigorous perspective-taking during the discovery phase and then asked me to apply it to a real problem in my own context. At that same moment, autistic relatives were navigating ongoing mistreatment in publicly funded institutions and the incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services was publicly suggesting that vaccines, originally vilified for being falsely linked to autism, were unnecessarily dangerous and that this neurotype was an undesirable side effect of Tylenol. I did not want to design an e-learning module explaining to seventh graders why bullying autistic classmates is bad. I wanted to design a structure wherein entire communities — always led by adults — could honestly listen to and learn from each other as a means to unearth and render powerless the various biases inevitably lurking beneath such social out-grouping. By consciously designing to invert every conceivable power structure, I wanted to empower communities to tend to culture, itself — that which, by its very nature, determines how people treat one another. That project became We See Us, an integrated organizational change methodology built on community co-design, and it became my unofficial capstone and accidental proposal for a dissertation no one had assigned.

Where I Am Now

My commitment to community well-being that doesn’t leave anybody out has not wavered. What the MALXD program changed is how many tools I can now see for pursuing it. Educational equity is one lever — and , for me, remains a compelling one — but so are organizational change methodology and instructional design that recognizes the people most affected by a problem as its primary solvers. I entered this program believing I needed one credential to unlock one door in one district. I am leaving it with a framework for community co-design — built to require a facilitator at launch but engineered to make that facilitator unnecessary, so that each community becomes its own author, arbiter, and sustainer. That toolkit can travel into any organization, any sector, any room where people are being failed by systems that were never designed to include them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​