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My Leadership Philosophy: We Not Me
Above all, I value truth—in particular, the truth of our collective interdependence, of the delicacy of this socioecoLOGic web into which literally each of us is woven (UNEP, 2025). I find it salient in virtually every conversation. This is why my leadership begins with one refrain: I am not here for me, myself, and I,…
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Discipled by Cons-training
I don’t just survive constraints. I need them. They empower me to do not just hard things but big things. Example: for a graduate course challenging me to work within a constraint of my own choosing, I decided to rebuild a teacher training I had originally authored in D2L two years earlier — at the…
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My Alive Horizon
When communication fails, people get hurt. When a future newborn’s parents don’t understand how vaccines work, they swallow propaganda selling disinformation at a handsome profit and conclude they should engineer controlled exposure to build immunity — the irony flying overhead, unnoted. When law enforcement officers don’t recognize autism, disability can become culpability at the speed…
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Sure I can be awkward—but have you seen my pattern recognition?
I was just a stereotypical college kid with a part-time job — and no idea that the pattern my brain was about to inaugurate would go on to reappear like cross-sector whack-a-mole across a span of diverse experiences. In truth, before I was designing multi-year change management systems, innovating workflows that cut operational steps in…
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Outta the Mouth of JAWS
What I’ve learned about accessibility lately is inextricable from what I’ve learned about both web design and AI. I came into the Spring ‘26 semester laser-focused on a distinct objective: to cobble together a not-too-embarrassing digital shed in which to house artifacts I had previously designated to live at my web address, www.smllmttrs.com. Imagining myself…
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If the Target were Equity
What if, in some post-apocalyptic society, the remaining clans of humanity had an annual coming-of-age archery tournament and it is your year to participate? What if afterwards, no one rejoins their childhood clan and the results of the tournament determine how welcome you will be in any of the others because only those who can…
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Regard the Definition of Learning
Introduction Perhaps much of what produces conflicting perspectives on learning stems from conflating training with teaching and reacting with understanding. Furthermore, perhaps this conflation reflects an unreasonable dismissal of the phenomenon we refer to as consciousness simply because it is such a difficult, abstract concept to describe, and harder still to quantify. Such a response…
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Wait, I Know This One
My central takeaway from the MSU MALXD program is not what I expected it to be. I came in believing I was going to learn how to become a leader in instructional design. I am leaving with the understanding that I have been actively inhabiting this work for a long, long time — and inhibiting…
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To Err is Human, To Learn is Divine
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…
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The Stone is Inclusivity
Yes, actually–a magic bullet does exist; no, sorry–it isn’t what they’re trying to sell you. I built this microlearning module that teaches healthcare staff to document what patients do — not what staff think it means. One Small Bird The research problem I started with was quite a small bird: autistic patients being mislabeled as…
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Online Learning Manifesto
Old Hierarchy–in the micro, the macro, and the everywhere in between-o A centuries-old capitalist agenda has long made itself manifest in every single hierarchy of human relating. From the unparalleled intimacy of household relationships, patriarchy crouched in dimly lit corners whispering of roles, whose literacy was eligible to earn coin or sign land contracts, of…
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Oppression
I took a class at USF once titled Feminist Digital Humanities. Seeing it on my schedule when I’d registered for Feminist Critical Theory, I was initially a big disappointment. I imagined someone had decided we literature students needed a hefty dose of analyzing literature specifically written for or on the most modern delivery systems and,…
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Silent Steps: what ADHD learners don’t get to hear
When I set about trying to zero in with absolute precision on what I, as a learner with ADHD, have been unable to access–and have witnessed my own children with ADHD being likewise unable to access–my discovery amused me. Because as I zoomed in and in and in–bringing into crisp focus the–as I said, precise–deficit,…
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It was the worst of times; it is the worst of times. Can we get a best, please?
Despite widely-harbored resistance to the idea, anyone authoring content that fails to evidence, at minimum, an attempt at universal accessibility cannot hope that said content be useful as more than, at maximum, a non-example object of study for students of instructional design. Such content is now an absurd relic from the Pedagogical Dark Ages, serving…
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Wishes: The Science and Poetry of Dandelions
At age five, my daughter was told that when you find a stem topped with one of those white puff balls–what we adults recognize with widespread enmity as dandelion seed heads–and blow it into the air, whatever wish you make on that dispersing cloud will come true. Consequently, she began calling these seed heads “wishes”. …
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Video games: a portal to the world of learning
Until October 2024, it had been a few decades since something in formal school learning was so searingly relevant to and influential on my personal life. The last time, I lived with two Black women and learned from the education-related research of author Jonathan Kozol (1992) that these, two of my closest and most important…
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Small matters.
So, a couple years ago I sprinkled about a single seed pod from the most needed species of milkweed in our region into what I now refer to as my butterfly garden. It looks so trashy at the moment that the name would seem a delusional misnomer. There’s a pot laying in it that I…
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Behaviorists Vs. Everybody (but in this case, I’m with Everybody)
“Two Sides” For as long as I can remember, I’ve witnessed–on a local and national level–a political war. The two waging sides, aptly represented in terms of learning theories by exclusive behaviorists versus everyone else, are now as they have always been, fighting on the battlegrounds of public school classrooms. As we witnessed in 1954’s…
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Create a To-Do List for Kids with Google Sheets
Turn a Google Sheet into an interactive tracker to help kids accomplish everything from daily chores to long-term school projects independently.