What does it mean to build the capacity to meet others where they are? I trace my search for language around containment, from a dream about a vessel to my daughter drawing sad faces in the dark, and ask what teacher preparation assumes but does not teach.

What does it take to build practitioners who can see past their initial perceptions? This post traces two experiences across thirteen years of faculty work to examine what AI, designed well and rooted in evidence-based practice, can build in EI/ECSE/ECE preparation.

This blog proposes AI as a contemplative tool for early childhood educators' professional learning. It proposes a four-pass structure for organizing observations and documents the research gap in AI use for early intervention and early childhood special education.

Universal Design for Learning principles guide curriculum design for children - but what about applying those same principles to how teachers learn? Three assignments from early childhood teacher preparation courses show what it looks like to use technology to create processing space for contemplative practice.

Every life has ruptures. This blog maps four of mine — and what opened, each time, when I stayed with what had shifted rather than moved past it.

When New York City launches 2-Care this fall, the question is whether we will build the ecological conditions — the people, positionalities, processes, and practices, and the educator well-being that mediates all of them — that make genuine partnership between families and teachers possible. This post makes the case for why that has to happen now.

An inquiry into practice architectures shaping teacher knowing across traditional and nontraditional early childhood learning environments. Universal design teaches us to design from the margins—what might emerging models reveal about conditions that enable responsive practice everywhere?

When verbal fluency functions as the primary gate to professional participation, whose knowledge stays invisible? This post examines how Universal Design for Learning principles can be intentionally designed into practice architectures across higher education, professional development, and school-based collaboration

NYC's billion-dollar investment in 2-Care can solve affordability or it can provide early childhood education that supports children's development and parents' ability to work—the difference is partnership infrastructure. This post draws on decades of research to show what partnership infrastructure requires and why it must be budgeted from the start.

NYC's 2-Care expansion is a historic investment in young children and their families. This brief explores what becomes possible when we build infrastructure that develops educator capacity through reflective supervision, learning communities, and partnership structures that position practitioners as knowledge-holders.

Traditional professional development focuses on practice and competencies while skipping over the person. This post explores what happened when I applied contemplative mapping to understand my own pattern of reactive accommodation—using neuroscience, Buddhist practice, and a playground moment with my daughter to find ground.

NYC's new administration has named what matters: sustaining educators, seeing students as whole people, authentic partnership. But naming commitments and building the infrastructure to sustain them are different challenges. What does it take to build practice architectures that make policy sustainable?

My first practice mapping is live: returning to running after a long break.

It's about how containment (not willpower) cultivates ease, and why the mundane barriers matter more than technique ever did.

My first application of contemplative mapping didn't go as planned. Family loss reshaped what practice could look like, revealing a gap in the framework and raising questions about how practitioners' embodied practices shape the relational climate children need

Can data science help us understand contemplation at scale? Before answering, I need groundwork - systematically mapping my own practices through a framework that honors both embodied knowing and methodological rigor. This post establishes that framework.

Last week I gave a presentation in my data science class asking whether computational methods could capture contemplative transformation in teachers. But as I prepared it, something else surfaced: I can't study contemplative observation without doing it myself.

Last week I shared a blog piece about life mapping my educational journey—drawing the tenure track as a jail. Today, I'm sharing an article about reclaiming my voice and journey by learning to say my own name.

"The Myna Bird Knows Her Name" (original title: In the Liminal Space: Self-Compassion When Systems Fail) has been published in Lion's Roar Magazine's Bodhi Leaves section—exploring how mispronunciation and marginalization became invitations to reclaim voice, and how liminal spaces became training grounds for practice.

In January 2022, while building reliability for our PreK inclusion study, I drew my first life map. I drew the tenure track as a jail—black and white, with vertical pillars.

The discomfort was so immediate that I drew a second, safer version to share with teachers. I was asking participants to be vulnerable about their educational journeys while hiding my own.

Three years later, I'm sitting with what that first map revealed about researcher positionality and the ecology of institutions of higher education.

What 272 teachers taught me about invisible infrastructure

Liminal spaces—those thresholds where you never quite belong—aren't just places of struggle. They're sites of insight that reveal what institutions miss when they only measure what's familiar.

What becomes possible when we design with people from liminal spaces rather than for them?