This chapter will identify main themes from the data analysis process. Each theme will be discussed with quotes, crocheted squares, and critical reflections. 

This chapter contains ableism and racism. It critically analyzes primary quotes containing the erasure of colonial and state violence, the justification of forced assimilation, deficit-based depictions of marginalized communities, and inaccurate histories of Black and Indigenous Peoples. Please be mindful during and after reading, and engage at a pace that honors your own capacity and well-being. Step away or pause whenever you need to.

I situate these words in the broader colonial, neoliberal educational system that reinforces narrow, whitewashed, racist, ableist narratives. I situate them within a classroom of misinformation. I situate these words within myself, as I uncritically internalized and perpetuated their messaging. So, I let the quotes stain the page, a confrontation.

Disability Justice Commitments: Collective Access and Intersectionality: I commit to perceiving myself as more than myself, but as one facet of a much bigger picture. I commit to flexibility and creative nuance. I commit to opening up access needs and embracing them as a group responsibility. I commit to interrogating data through an intersectional lens, paying attention to how privilege and marginalization show up and interact. 

Crocheting Process. This was the first square I completed. It was so glaringly obvious early on that the citations I was using in my undergrad work were almost all white, nondisabled authors. Initially, due to my initial shock, I was inclined to crochet an entirely white square to acknowledge this complicity head-on. My plan was to crochet a square with holes in it to represent the holes in the narratives, the context that is missing. The more I planned and considered, I thought that it wasn’t just that the narratives were white and nondisabled, but that it engaged with Black, Brown, and disabled histories yet actively omitted perspectives from these communities. It wasn’t that they weren’t there, it was that they were being shut out of the academic institution. When I crocheted this square, I decided to crochet it all over Black and Brown yarn. I worked with the black and brown yarn all the way through the square, noticing it and stitching all around and over it. This process made me reflect on the harm that is caused, and the resistance and resilience of counterstories.

Erasure of colonial and state violence. Disability history was largely excluded from my undergraduate teacher education, despite specializing in special education. Disability history, disabled perspectives and experiences, ableism, medical and social models of disability, and disability rights, are all basic, foundational concepts in disability education that were systematically absent from my coursework. Throughout my early teacher education, my writing consistently functioned as a means protecting white, settler-colonial, and non-disabled comfort. I justified the isolation of marginalized identities and framed systemic barriers and violence as neutral. I actively centered and protected dominant narratives. This was, in many ways, by design. The vast majority of the sources cited, content I engaged with, and professors who taught me were white, nondisabled people. I was encouraged to remain a neutral third-party. Histories were taught as isolated events from the past, without connections to present-day injustices and ongoing coloniality.

The most glaring complicity in my early coursework was my active participation in the erasure and justification of systemic, state-sanctioned violence against Black and Indigenous Peoples. In an essay about the history of education in the United States, I attempted to address racial segregation of American schooling. However, the reflection reduces centuries of genocide to a series of contextual and unfortunate events. I used a passive voice throughout the text, and wrote that Black Americans “were taken from Africa unwantedly and forced to America”. I structured the sentence around what “was done” to Black communities rather than naming the white European colonizers and state violence. This displacement of accountability led to sweeping, deficit-based claims about Black communities:

“They [Black Americans] have no idea where they came from. It would be important to implement some sort of African history into schooling as well-- maybe one day”

Here, I characterized Black Americans as lacking-- lacking culture, history, resistance, agency and disregard the existence of Black culture. In the same paper, I chose to center and legitimize the perspectives of white supremacists. I wrote that “many politicians believed that schools should have stayed segregated”, presenting the denial of basic human rights and state-sanctioned racial violence as a valid political opinion. This choice positions racial segregation as a historical debate, as if both sides are balanced, when they are not. I overall reflect a severe lack of nuance and deficit-based view of Black communities by viewing them through a lens of trauma, with an empty promise of “maybe one day”. 

The pattern of white-washing and passive phrasing is also evident in an essay titled “The Assimilation of Native Americans in White Boarding Schools”. The title alone is an egregious misrepresentation of residential schools. “White Boarding Schools” alludes that these schools were run for white students that Indigenous schools were integrated into. In my coursework, my textbooks and professors taught me that these so-called schools were integrated and the most significant form of discrimination was forcing students to speak English. They omitted the horrific realities of systemic neglect, starvation, physical and sexual abuse, murder, and state-sanctioned genocide. I went on to evaluate the boarding schools by weighing the “positives” of genocide, 

“It’s okay to learn English and assimilate them into our culture, but it’s also important to preserve their culture as well”

I made moral judgments that normalized colonialism, and argued that genocide was “okay” as long as the state made an effort to preserve a tokenized version of their culture.

Meritocracy as Neutral. Meritocracy is positioned as a so-called “fair” or “neutral” way to go about schooling, where academic success is a function of individual effort and achievement. This myth of meritocracy reflects accountability onto individual student deficits. I exemplify this thought process in an early essay titled Pedagogic Creed:

"Academic achievement has a lot more to do with someone as an individual. Students with certain backgrounds and family lives tend to have different beliefs and outlooks on life. This should be handled by trying to influence them through programs to teach them that even though we all come from different places we all should have the same goal in mind and that's to better ourselves." 

I framed the barrier as the student’s background. I treated the education system as politically neutral, and proposed an assimilative and singular solution to conform to. I assume deficits within the student can be ironed out through an educator’s influence. In this case, the only ones bearing responsibility are the student to conform and the teacher to “influence” the student into conforming. There is no mention of oppressive structures, I leave no room for nuance. 

Superficial diversity. This subtheme refers to the practice of reducing complex identities to tokenistic add-ons. Diversity is treated as an afterthought, a noble favor, an inconvenience, or as novelty. A common through-line of this superficiality is the representation argument, where the issue of lack of diversity is merely a lack of diverse ethnic and racial representation. In an Interactive Read Aloud Assignment, I note that, “when all you see in literature is white children, that paints a dangerous narrative”, but do not go on to name what that dangerous narrative is or how it came to be. The simple fix for that was to add a book to the bookshelf. 

This rhetoric is reinforced by a teacher who tells me in an Interview Assignment that a student’s diverse cultural background doesn’t “come into play” because they “create a strong classroom culture”. I note that her comment “seem[ed] ignorant” because “religious and ethnic differences still exist”, but go on to protect this narrative by saying the teacher does their “best to respect other cultures and traditions as much as possible”. I prioritized my comfort by uncritically accepting good intentions made up for claims of race-neutrality. In these cases, diversity could only be welcomed when it was convenient, celebratory, and temporary.

Crochet Process. In this square, which I designed myself, I wanted to capture an image in my head of the reduction process. I wanted something to capture the image of complexity of the subject matter, and then straining out to something simple. I looked around at my materials. In my head, I imagined a newspaper that is reduced to “abc”. I didn’t have newspaper yarn, but I had a newsprint shirt. I cut up the shirt to make yarn, stripping the shirt of its context as a garment, and repurposing it. I made the red strainer, the red symbolizing the violent act of stripping away context. I crocheted my newsprint yarn in with a variety of colors to add on more complexity. In the end, the red strainer took away all the colors but two, the black for the lettering, and the yellow to make it shiny and marketable. 

Recipe for Reduction. The systemic process of taking the messy complexity of human learning, language, behavior, and brains, and boiling it down into easily measurable absolute truths is identified in this theme as the recipe for reduction. This theme takes many forms. At first, to solve the problem of creativity in the classroom, Montessori presents itself as the solution. In a paper titled Critical Reaction Assignment, I describe Montessori schooling through a lens littered with absolutist framings of human learning and development.

“Because there are three different types of learners—kinesthetic, auditory, and visual—this system [Montessori] makes sure to incorporate all three… If a student lacks a certain ability, this system assures that the child will reach their learning potential.”

The level of certainty in the Montessori system resists critique. Assuring every child will reach their learning potential through Montessori practices is an empty promise. And, perhaps the most blatant case of reduction, is the essentialist view of learning styles. This is a through-line throughout the four-year undergraduate degree. I use learning styles as a way of pigeon-holing and categorizing students. In later essays, I write things like:

“Most children are visual learners and the content that is taught in most classrooms is for auditory learners… Often, students with disabilities are visual learners”. 

In a lesson plan, I separate learning needs based on learning styles, “This lesson supports the three learning styles of auditory, visual, and kinesthetic”, but fundamentally misunderstand kinesthetic learning as a learning style, confusing kinesthetic learning for taking breaks instead of learning through movement, “for kinesthetic learners, several transition periods will be included throughout the lesson in order to meet the movement needs of these learners”. 

Additionally, the binary of behavior is essentialized into anti-social and pro-social behavior, “Behavior can be dissected into two branches—anti-social and pro-social”. This binary is then put in the context of stages of development, with concrete, age-dependent categories:

“The first stage, sensori-motor, is when the agent is an extension of the environment. At this stage, the child is not yet an agent. The next stage is preoperational, which is when the child is not capable of seeing things from other points of view, however, this is where agency starts to develop because they are no longer simply an extension of the environment around them.”

Students are not the only people who are reduced to checkboxes-- teaching methods are, too. In particular, the binary of authoritarian teaching versus authoritative teaching emerges in my writing as a distinct separation of traditional, dominating teaching versus assertive, collaborative teaching. 

“The educational approach to behavior is often anti-social and authoritarian. In the future, teachers should encourage pro-social behaviors and run their classrooms authoritatively. They should set limits and boundaries, leaving their students feeling empowered rather than controlled.”

I insinuate that students with disabilities should be individualized to their developmental stage. 

Upon witnessing a student struggling to finish a worksheet in time, who was “extremely self-conscious because all the other children had finished already” and called themself “‘stupid’ for taking so long”, I responded with reductionist, well-intentioned solutions. I argued: 

“If they are behind, then adjust your expectations of them. Motivate them by setting smaller goals (and remember to congratulate them when they accomplish these goals) and then work up to the largest goals”. 

I did not question the worksheet itself, the standardized expectations that all students must complete the same task in the same time frame, why speed is being conflated with intelligence, the emotional experiences of the student, the broader environment or peer pressure, or the definition of “success” in this learning context. Instead, I accepted that the child was “behind” and I needed to lower my expectations so that they could eventually catch up to the same normative, fast-paced speed of the student’s peers. 

This theme of reductionist, simplified solutions is so prevalent that it follows my work throughout graduate school as well. When I learned about Universal Design for Learning, I, again, framed it as a one-size-fits-all solution. In an analysis of medical education, I argued that traditional lecture-based courses are inaccessible and can be “solved” by UDL, concluding “With Universal Design for learning, we can make this a reality”. In a later journal, I recommended mandating UDL across all curriculum design and instructional practices. A common rhetoric I bought into was that UDL will meet the needs of every student. I even acknowledge how misguided UDL as a universal solution is, but double down by saying, “Despite my previous critiques of assuming universality, UDL recognizes learner variability as the norm—not the exception". When I essentialize UDL as the solution, it leaves the underlying white, neurotypical, capitalist, colonial measures of success unexamined and puts all the responsibility on the teacher for their individual teaching practices.

Crochet process. I wanted to represent something that articulated the image of changing something slightly, but keeping a sense of continuity to represent how I would change my teaching practices but still keep the end-goal of compliance. A recurring color is red, symbolizing violence, and a reccuring symbol is a square to represent “thinking inside the box” or the norms in normative society. I chose a diamond pattern to shift the box on its side, to show that I did change something, but everything else is the same-- same colors, same shapes, just a different angle. 

Compliance as Baseline. I consistently bash “conformity” and “authoritarianism” in undergraduate teacher education. Across multiple assignments, my critiques about compliance in education were loud. I would position myself as a progressive fighting against rigid school norms. 

In Pedagogic Creed, I declared:

“Conformity is so often practiced in society—and especially in school... Strictness in the curriculum limits the student’s creativity. If they cannot express themselves, school will be boring for them.”

In Critical Reaction Assignment, I argued:

In Teaching Practices in the Classroom: Behavior Support, I asserted:

“Managing behavior is inherently authoritarian... This objectifies students and does nothing to advance their agency... Approval is a state of judgement—everything is a binary of wrong versus right, or good versus bad.”

However, I routinely accepted and reinforced the same behavioral compliance in other ways. For example, I frequently mentioned the importance of making school “fun” and “exciting”. Even when a teacher described herself as the “alpha” of her classroom and centered obedience and authority, because she did so in “exciting” games, I reflected, 

“I would love to take a page from her book and turn everything into a game… The kids are tricked into obeying her which is a really difficult but amazing thing.”

I defined obedience as “amazing” simply because it was turned into a game. Additionally, a recurring topic was positive reinforcement and extrinsic reward systems. When a teacher uses funny money for “behaviors and achievements” that teacher wants to encourage, I respond by arguing this system is excellent because it “keeps students motivated”. While receiving tangible prizes for behavior could be “fun”, it relies on behaviorist conditioning and reinforces capitalism. It publicly rewards compliant students and, in turn, punishes students with non-normative or non-compliant behaviors. It also undermines authentic relationship building. 

In a later classroom placement, I praised a teacher because she never yelled, and instead asked students questions about why they behaved a certain way, which created an environment where “the children did not want to disappoint her”. I consistently praised this dynamic and idea of students not wanting to disappoint their teacher. I advocated for a classroom management model where the students behave out of a fear of losing the teacher’s approval. 

 In my undergraduate work that focused on special education, I often conflate disability with non-compliance and disruption. I localize the failure within the student. I do this when I accept a zero-tolerance logic, when a teacher asserts that “there is no negotiation when you are being unsafe”, and I accept that students can be sent home or isolated spaces. I did not question the framing of emotional meltdowns as noncompliance instead of as an underpinning of distress and why this student might get to that point of meltdown.  

With this mindset, tools designed to provide sensory access, such as standing tables, noise-cancelling headphones, fidgets, and low-sensory spaces become classroom management strategies. In Rationale: 

“The ‘Zen Zone’ is a place for students to go if they feel overstimulated or upset. This zone gives them the space and comfort they need to recollect themselves, and rejoin the class when ready. There are stress balls and calming tools in a basket as well.. it has worked very effectively.​​”

In the same essay, I go on to suggest lesson plans should include “short dances to get their energy out so they are able to sit still afterwards.” While sensory access and movement breaks are supportive classroom practices, the reasoning reveals that effectiveness takes precedence over student well-being and access to learning. 

Throughout undergraduate field journals, creative and connective modalities were celebrated. However, the reasoning was for their capacity to produce quiet and manageable students.

In an essay about classroom management, I wrote about the importance of building relationships with students:

“Probably the most obvious way to communicate appropriate levels of cooperation is to take a personal interest in each student... If your students know you care for them, they are more likely to cooperate in class."

The transactional logic in this essay is disturbing. I did not advocate for taking a personal interest in students to honor their wholeness or create a relational learning space. Instead, I advocated for care as a bribe to secure behavior compliance. Care becomes a management technique. In this essay, I also cite a scholar who rationalizes emotional connection as a tool for “classroom discipline”.

In a lesson plan where I use American Sign Language (ASL) for nonverbal cues, I write:

"One of these cues is 'a' in sign language—a fist. This is a signal for everyone to be quiet… This way, the chaos that usually spurs when you ask children questions disappears. It is a very useful and powerful tool when establishing and maintaining classroom discipline in a positive and motivational manner... saves class and instruction time." 

I justify the use of ASL through the lens of compliance. I decontextualize ASL by stripping the significance of Deaf culture. I valued sign language for its function and how it could benefit me, rather than its inherent value as a language and mode of communication. 

I used a similar framing of creativity, specifically needed in lower-income communities to “regulate behavior” and instill a strong “work ethic”. It is used as a tool to help students adapt to systemic distress on individual levels, and whilst emphasizing the perceived deficits.In Music Reflection, I argue that music education supports “executive function, self-control, and sustained focused attention” that translates to “better results in other subjects, and eventually in high scores of general IQ”. I do not state the inherent value of music or cultural resonance. I, instead, resort to appeasing the need to justify usage of the arts as tools of colonial capitalistic notions of intelligence and achievement. Moreover, I go on to state:

“I have been playing the guitar since elementary school, and I sincerely believe it has had a significant impact on my specifically my social skills, creativity, and memory... I had no idea how this multisensory experience would stimulate my brain in ways that would affect me for the rest of my life—it makes me very grateful that I had the opportunity to pursue music. The process of creating music is a skill that I developed that I then transferred to my academia.”

This is a lie. I do not know how to play the guitar. I manufactured this narrative as an act of performativity. Perhaps it was because I felt unsafe to tell the truth, or I wanted to justify music as a valid form of intelligence, or I wanted to mask myself as a “good”, “culturally enriched” student, or to appease my professor, or a combination of all of these things. I felt the need to lie about something as simple as playing the guitar to justify the investment in the arts, to frame it as an investment in academic productivity and intelligence. 

Crocheting Process. I assumed, at some point, the apple imagery would be used. Apples are often symbols of teachers. The sun acts as a bright light that a teacher who has a savior complex might see themselves in, or see the profession of teaching in. The surrounding red, again, the violence. The teacher at the center might have every good intention, but ultimately, is self-serving and allows the systemic harm to continue. Originally, I planned on having the yellow circle in the middle to separate it from the red background. However, I wanted to emphasize how the savior-mindset can be so glaring and overwhelming that it can be difficult to see outside of it when you’ve been in it for so long. This is the reason for the rays, 

The Cure to School. Throughout my undergraduate coursework, my writing was saturated with romanticised, heroic descriptions of teachers. I positioned teachers as saints who rescue children from difficult backgrounds:

“Teachers are discouraged by the general public’s perception of schooling, but the children deserve the best education possible and passionate teachers will never give up.”

Claiming that “passionate teachers will never give up” insinuates that non-passionate teachers give up, resuming the logic of meritocracy where it all comes down to individual effort. If teachers staying in the profession all depend on passion, then low pay, exploitation, and systemic neglect can go by unexamined.

Saving Myself. A painful realization in this study was that I projected my own unresolved trauma into my teaching practice through a desire to “save” students. I unconsciously only critiqued the school systems in terms of my own struggles. Because school was boring for me, I overcorrected by putting the expectation on myself that everything must be exciting and fun. Because I lived in constant shame, I wanted to protect all kids from embarrassment. My school experience was defined by a loneliness and understimulation. In later graduate work, when reflecting on my elementary school experiences, I express:

“I engaged in self stimulating behaviors like pulling out my hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows, biting holes in all my long sleeves, biting my nails and cuticles to bloody stubs, licking/chewing on my lips until they got so chapped they turned black, fake-typing words that got stuck in my head with my fingers. I cried a lot. I was very sensitive… I was sensitive to authority, to criticism. I saw how kids who misbehaved were treated. I did not want to be treated like that. So, I slipped by unnoticed because…I was quiet, I got good grades. I did not think I was good at anything. I did my bare minimum in school. I didn’t care about learning, just the grades… I craved excitement… For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt like I’m cheating my way through life.”

These experiences set the context for my undergraduate work. I experienced school as a tedious, sensory-depriving prison. I operated under the assumption that all students were suffering from unbearable boredom, too. So, I insisted that every lesson needed to be high-energy and gamified. 

In Oregon Unplugged:

“As a future educator, I am obsessed with finding ways to cultivate a love for education. Education should be fun and allow room to be expressive and creative! School doesn’t have to be a boring, mundane chore... it is important to address the most important tool to utilize—excitement!”

In EBD [Emotional Behavioral Disorders] Essay:

“Students often view learning as a chore, but if you present learning as a fun activity, the students will enjoy it and begin to view learning in a new light.”

In Pedagogic Creed:

“Strictness in the curriculum limits the student’s creativity…If they cannot express themselves, school will be boring for them”

In Interview:

“She makes everything relevant by making it engaging and exciting for all her students. I love classrooms where students are actively learning and learning through play… I absolutely want to adopt this in my teachings”

In Creativity in the Classroom:

“Many students become disinterested in school if they are not fully engaged. In a classroom where there are multisensory experiences that are highly visual and prosocial, students absorb the information, create pictures in their heads, and form their own ideas”

This theme is so recurring that I made a field journal note: 

“are seeds of my radicalization literally because i was bored in school?”

In undergraduate assignments, I rarely mention my own identity as a student or my relationship with school. I did not reflect on this idea of saving my younger self until graduate studies. In a journal reflection, I state:

“When I started this inclusive education program, I felt like I was healing my younger self. I’m telling her that it was okay to want to make songs and smash rocks. It’s okay to be sensitive. It’s okay to daydream. It’s okay to be quiet, and it’s also okay to be loud. And grades don’t matter. Your brain matters. Your heart matters.”

The savior impulse to give students what I did not receive as a child is ultimately serving myself. In many ways, this reflects the same institution that I despised. When neurotypicals replicate how they learn best, we are left with more neuronormative standards. Part of the inclusive education work is making space for diverse experiences, getting curious about how others show up.

Crochet Process. This is a simple square, because it seems so simple now. I was practically yelling at my data, at my previous self. “THAT’S BECAUSE OF RACISM!” I wanted to say. The act of naming was taboo to me at the time. This square reminds myself of the power of naming oppression, of naming the thing that took me so long to name. For me, blue can represent healing. We cannot heal what we refuse to notice. It represents naming oppression as a vital first step to deconstructing normativity. 

Naming Oppression Directly. In my undergraduate writing, I often used soft, euphemistic language to protect my discomfort. I would avoid direct confrontations with racism, ableism, and colonialism. I characterized genocide as an “unhealthy classroom environment”. I ignored how the university courses, textbooks, and professors I was engaging with were socializing me into ignorance. 

My graduate studies drew directly on Disability Justice and Global South disability scholarship. In a paper titled “Disability Justice: Rejecting Colonial Structures in Inclusive Practices”, I name the realities of colonial capitalism in education systems:

“Nguyen (2018) discusses examples of Western imperialism inflicting violence resulting in disability in the Global South—such as the intergenerational impacts of Agent Orange in Vietnam, where U.S. military intervention caused lasting impairments; the institutionalization of people with disabilities under South African apartheid; and the disabling conditions in countries... where colonial exploitation devastated mental health infrastructures... These states were 'disabled' by colonial violence on bodies and minds, yet the blame is often put on the individual country for government inaction.”

Furthermore, I contextualized my immediate context in Canada by naming environmental racism and structural ableism:

“Disability justice also connects with environmental justice. In so-called Canada, over 90% of the Grassy Narrows First Nation show symptoms of mercury poisoning, including neurological and cognitive impairments... This is due to the dumping of toxins mercury by a settler-owned paper mill into the English-Wabigoon River... These are not separate struggles.”

In a poem about Jordan’s Principle, I refused governmental excuses for lack of access, and directly name the state’s denial of basic human rights to Indigenous children:

“The children whose voices are silenced,
whose needs are ignored,
and whose humanity is questioned.
Rooted in colonial histories,
in the ongoing trauma of displacement,
in the erasure of culture,
in the denial of basic rights”

Naming ableism indicated a profound shift in how I discussed disability. For example, in my early undergraduate placement, I designed behavior plans to manage and remediate neurodivergence. I praised the classroom setup where a student with “severe ADHD” sat at a segregated desk coloring to “prevent [the student] from acting out”. In a graduate reflection, I reflected on how I viewed ADHD through an internalized lens of deficit and shame, and confronted it in nature-based reflections in an Indigenous Social Emotional Learning course:

“As I sit here in the snow, I’m thinking about the binaries in my present circumstance... In a colonial context, there is a pressure to label and keep a fixed mindset... In nature, in my surroundings, fluidity is more natural than binaries... After years of being called lazy, distracted, 'too much', I felt isolated in school and ashamed of my habits... When I started to reframe my ADHD in a strength-based mindset, I started to feel more like the snow in the sun... the same snow, with the right light, sparkles… My ability to think divergently, hyperfocus on passion, and move through the world in a nonlinear way is valuable… But when I struggled in school, it wasn’t just because I hadn’t found the right mindset. It was because the system wasn’t built for me. If we only look through the sun ray closest to us, we limit ourselves. We can’t see the full picture. We must zoom out, perceive the context, environment, and history in which we exist.”

I acknowledge the nuances of strength-based approaches to neurodiversity through an ecological context. I bring acceptance to the simultaneous transformative possibilities for strength-based approaches where mindset shift falls short in lieu of systemic barriers. By reframing ADHD through the lens of nature’s fluidity, I rejected colonial capitalistic systems with narrow standards of human worth. These critiques continue into a story I wrote about a fictionalized student named Ali:

“Her teacher tried to help, giving her tools to fidget with and letting her take breaks, but Ali’s struggles ran deeper. She often felt unmotivated, working only to avoid disappointment rather than out of genuine interest”

I intended on illuminating an example of the complexities that may be going on for a student when the only accommodations are breaks and fidgets. While breaks and fidgets are vital access points, they can also function as surface-level “fixes”. They may still operate as means of performance control, especially if the underlying curriculum remains rigid and compliance-driven. 

In many ways, this theme is in direct conflict with previous themes. This theme is a counterstory, trails of engaging with perspectives of marginalized communities in intimate ways, of exploring my own experiences in critical ways, of perspective-shifting and narrative-creating to make room for a variety of experiences.

Crochet Process. At first, I wanted a square that represented interconnectivity. When I realized that every crochet pattern has interconnectivity, I challenged myself to think about patterns that hold each other, while leaving space for growth. This pattern spoke to me because they cannot be separated from each other, and they do not overpower one another. The two colors are existing simultaneously, with space in between. 

Bigger than me. Contrasting the savior complex in Teacher as Savior, this theme describes the process of de-centering myself. Part of this is acknowledging that my version of “help” and “support” might not align with others. In a graduate assignment, I state: 

“Professional practices can reinforce colonial power imbalances by positioning Indigenous communities as 'lacking' something, and settlers as 'helping' or 'saving' them. Consequently, this does far more harm than good… In an Indigenous context, preference to 'look after their own' and suspicion of 'help' highlight a disconnect between external professionals' resources and how they're perceived in the community”

I tied together two of the reflective themes-- the power of naming oppression, and the need for de-centering individual perspectives in service of communities. Another example of this was in Disability Justice: Rejecting Colonial Structures in Inclusive Practices,  I write: 

“Colonialism centers individualism, while many Indigenous and Global South communities center collectivism. Individualized approaches like IEPs often clash with collectivist values and relational understandings of care”

When analyzing a movie titled Butterflies are Free, I deconstructed how a non-disabled character (Jill) projects her own fears onto a Blind character (Don):

“even strength-based comments can perpetuate harmful assumptions, too. This film shows Don’s frustration and insecurity with being reduced to his blindness. This insecurity runs deep in Don, which is evident when he begs Jill not to patronize him or feel sorry for him. He has an intense desire to feel seen and loved for who he is.”

I critique well-intentioned strength-based comments by recognizing the harm this is causing Don. Whether I relate to his story is irrelevant. Perhaps the biggest break-through moment occurred when reflecting on a course research paper, “We don't need to relate to someone on a personal level in order to validate and support their needs”. I had previously thought about my own experiences as a student and trying to act out a savior complex to ‘save’ my younger self. It might sound simple, but the sentiment behind this statement encompasses the privileged need to view sociopolitical issues through one’s own experiences. In Crochet Journal, where I crocheted and verbalized my reflections, I share:

"In crochet, the stitches are interconnected. If one becomes undone, the whole piece can unravel. Everyone exists within the context of their communities. When we don't give a student proper support, it's not only unfair to that student, it affects the whole community."

Nature as community. 

Another dimension of deconstructing normativity was stepping outside of the classroom and engaging with the Land as a teacher and community partner. In my Terrastory Journal series, I drew on Indigenous ecological perspectives to understand human variability as a natural and essential aspect of life. Nature taught me that fluidity and transformation are ‘normal’. In Terrastory 4, I sat with the rain as it came down around the trees in the forest. I reflected on the underground root networks as a physical representation of community strength:

“The trees, with their intertwined roots, symbolize a resilience that has been built over generations, weathering storms and thriving... Just as the trees rely on their roots to sustain them, Indigenous communities draw on the strength of their ancestors, the resilience cultivated through generations.. this place is not a backdrop for a nice walk... it’s an active amalgamation of life.”

Through learning with the Land, I realized that education needs to zoom out beyond the individual student to encompass their full, interdependent context. I began to relate my teacher identity to natural elements to understand my role more:

“How can I nurture my fire? There is so much to be angry about. Ableism... It makes me want to blame them. To blame teacher education for not addressing it. Blame, blame, blame. Fire, frustration, fury. Discrimination. Human rights violations, unchecked biases, loud opinions and louder defenses…”

I contend with water, noting its fluidity. I replace an earlier theme, Recipe for Reduction, with embracing ambiguity and thinking outside of binaries:

In Water:

“I will refine my language as I grow, noticing the terms we adopt, and the ones we let go. This fluidity goes beyond labels. People with disabilities are constantly adapting and negotiating… water trickles down into streams into rivers into oceans. Every drop is valuable and ever-changing. Language flows, too. It reflects the barriers, the shifts, the ways we try to understand"

In Terrastory 5:

“In nature, there is an expectation that things will change, shift, grow, and adapt. Fluidity is the expectation. The changing weather across my four visits illustrates the dynamic and active context of the environment. In a colonial context, there is a pressure to label and keep a fixed mindset (Bruun, 2024).”

The reflections involving nature added a depth and nuance to my work. I couldn’t imagine what a “normal” teacher or “normal” student was, but I can recognize that every part of nature is connected and belongs. Nature makes the myth of “normal” irrelevant. Instead of forcing myself or my students to fit into narrow, reductive boxes, or my own preconceived notions of their struggles, or doing whatever I can to get them to sit still and listen, I can lean into the expansive, interconnected rhythm of the natural world. I can recognize diversity as necessary, nuanced, undeniable, and growing. I don’t need to essentialize and produce one kind of outcome.