Raised by Granny and Sam My name is Ozivell Ecford. I am a Black man with albinism, a first-generation college student, a teaching artist, and a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. I grew up on the west side of Chicago, the oldest of four children in a single-parent household. But some of the most important years of my life were not spent at home. They were spent at my grandparents' house, with Granny and Sam. From sixth grade through ninth grade, four years that most people would agree are among the most formative of anyone's life, I lived with my grandparents, Lillie and Lorenzo. I called her Granny. I called him Sam, his middle name, because that is what he told me to call him. My mother was working multiple jobs at the time, and living with my grandparents made everything more manageable. School pickups, drop-offs, meals, stability. What I did not fully understand then, but understand completely now, is that they were not just solving a logistical problem. They were shaping a person. Sam taught me to play drums. He sat with me patiently, showed me how to listen to music the way musicians listen, not just for the melody but for the structure underneath, the heartbeat that holds everything together. That education never left me. I became a teaching artist who uses music, theater, and spoken word to reach young people in juvenile detention facilities and marginalized communities. Every time I walk into a room and use rhythm and creative expression to open a door that nothing else could open, I am drawing on what Sam put in me from age four and on, sitting behind a drum kit in the basement of his house. Granny taught me something different and equally essential. She taught me respect and discipline, and the importance of boundaries. Not just through lectures but through the way she carried herself and the standard she held my younger siblings and me to. She showed me what it looked like to move through the world with dignity regardless of your circumstances. That lesson has followed me into every room I have ever entered, from special education classrooms to university lecture halls to youth prisons, where I work with young people who need to see someone model exactly what Granny modeled for me. Sam also taught me to cook and to take care of myself as a man. He understood that independence is not something that happens to you. It is something you practice. That practical wisdom has sustained me through years of navigating higher education without a family roadmap, carrying significant student loan debt, and building a research career from the ground up as a first-generation student. My grandparents did not just house me for four years. They furnished me. Everything I have built since, my pedagogy, my research, my commitment to communities that the world overlooks, is built on a foundation they laid when I was young enough for it to matter most. I carry Granny and Sam with me everywhere I go. I always will.

What I Am Building I am building a bridge. Not a physical one, though the metaphor is more literal than it might seem. I am building a structure that connects two worlds that rarely talk to each other: the world of academic research and the world of people who never show up in academic research except as subjects. Justice-involved youth. Children with special needs. People from low-income communities on the west side of Chicago who have been studied, labeled, and categorized by institutions that never asked them what they needed or believed they had anything to offer. I am a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, a first-generation college student, a teaching artist, and a person with albinism who grew up in the community I now serve. For more than twenty years I have worked with incarcerated youth, students with severe emotional and behavioral disorders, and children with autism. I have watched extraordinary human beings get written off by systems designed to contain them rather than cultivate them. I have also watched what happens when someone decides to look more carefully. What is underneath is almost always extraordinary. What I am building is the scholarly record of what works. My dissertation codifies the MAD MAGIC pedagogy, Making a Difference, Making Art, Growing Inspiration and Consciousness, an instructional framework I have developed across two decades of direct practice. I am also developing the Cross-Dimensional Future Orientation Framework, a model that explains how justice-involved youth develop the capacity to imagine and plan for futures worth living. These are not abstract contributions. They are tools. Teaching artists working in prisons, special education classrooms, and community centers will be able to pick them up and use them without spending twenty years figuring it out the way I did. The personal impact of this work is just as real. I carry over one hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt from a predatory institution that targeted me when I was a first-generation student with no family guidance. Building this career, this body of research, and this reputation is also my most realistic path toward financial stability and freedom. Every credential I earn, every paper I publish, every fellowship I receive is another step toward a life that reflects the effort I have put in. But the impact that matters most to me is simpler than any of that. I want the young people I work with to see someone who looks like them, who comes from where they come from, who has carried what they carry, and who made it to the other side with something worth handing back. That is what I am building. A life that becomes evidence. Evidence that the future is real, that it is reachable, and that it belongs to them too.

The Narrator and the Inventor Once upon a time, in a big city full of tall buildings and busy streets, there lived a boy named Zivi. Zivi was different from most of the kids in his neighborhood, and he knew it. His skin was the color of fresh snow, and his eyes caught the light in ways that made people stare. When he walked into a new classroom for the first time, children would whisper. When he played outside, strangers would look twice. Zivi had learned to keep his chin up when this happened, because his mother had told him something he never forgot. "Baby," she said one morning, braiding his hair at the kitchen table, "the world is going to look at what makes you different and think it knows your whole story. Your job is to show them the rest of it." Zivi was not sure what the rest of his story was yet. But he was determined to find out. One afternoon, Zivi's teacher, Ms. Renata, announced something that made the whole class buzz with excitement. "We are going to put on a show," she said. "A real show, with characters and costumes and everything. And every single one of you has a part to play." The class erupted. Everyone wanted to be the hero. Everyone wanted the biggest part. Everyone except Marcus. Marcus sat in the back corner of the room with his arms crossed and his eyes on the floor. He was the newest kid in school, and he had not said more than three words since he arrived. Some kids said Marcus was mean. Some kids said he was weird. Most kids said nothing to him at all. Zivi watched Marcus from across the room and thought about what his mother had told him. He wondered what the rest of Marcus's story was. Ms. Renata began handing out roles. Zivi was given the part of the Narrator, the person who tells the whole story to the audience, who holds all the pieces together. At first, Zivi felt a little disappointed. The Narrator did not have a costume. The Narrator did not get to be a dragon or a princess or a brave explorer. But Ms. Renata knelt beside his desk and said quietly, "Zivi, do you know what a Narrator does?" He shook his head. "A Narrator makes sure nobody gets lost," she said. "A Narrator makes sure every voice in the story is heard." Zivi looked down at the pages in his hands. He read the first line silently to himself. Once upon a time, there were many different kinds of people, and every single one of them had something to say. He read it again. Then he looked up at Marcus in the back corner, arms still crossed, eyes still on the floor. Zivi picked up his script and walked to the back of the room. "Hey," he said. Marcus looked up slowly, like he was waiting for something bad to happen. "What part did you get?" Zivi asked. Marcus unfolded a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. "The Inventor," he said. "But I don't want to be in the show." "How come?" Marcus shrugged. "I'm not good at talking in front of people." Zivi sat down in the empty chair beside him. "I'm not either," he said. "But Ms. Renata says the Narrator makes sure nobody gets lost. I figure that means I have to practice a lot. Maybe we could practice together." Marcus looked at him for a long moment. "Why do you want to help me?" Zivi thought about it honestly. "Because nobody helped me when I was the new kid," he said. "And I remember what that felt like." Something in Marcus's face shifted, the way a window looks when someone finally opens it after a long time. "Okay," Marcus said quietly. "We can practice." And so they did. Every day after school, Zivi and Marcus sat on the front steps of the school building and practiced their lines. Zivi read his narration out loud, slowly and clearly, learning to let each word have its own space. Marcus practiced being the Inventor, a character who built extraordinary things out of broken pieces, things that nobody believed could work until they did. As the days passed, Zivi noticed something. When Marcus talked about the Inventor, his eyes came alive. He stopped mumbling and started projecting. He started adding little things to his performance, a gesture here, a pause there, moments that were not in the script at all but felt exactly right. "You're really good," Zivi told him one afternoon. Marcus looked surprised, as if no one had said that to him before about anything. "You think so?" "I think you've been an Inventor this whole time," Zivi said. "You just needed a place to show it." On the night of the show, the gymnasium was packed with families. Folding chairs filled every inch of space. Little brothers and sisters sat on laps. Grandmothers held programs they would keep forever. Zivi stood at the edge of the stage and looked out at all those faces, all those people who had come to listen, and he felt something he had not expected to feel. He felt powerful. Not because he was the hero. Not because he had the biggest part. But because he was the one who was about to make sure every voice in this story got heard. He stepped to the microphone. He took a breath. "Once upon a time," he began, "there were many different kinds of people, and every single one of them had something to say." The room went quiet. The kind of quiet that means everyone is listening. The show unfolded like a song. Each student took their turn, and each student shone. But the moment that made the gymnasium hold its breath came when Marcus walked to the center of the stage as the Inventor, stood tall in a way nobody had seen before, and said his most important line. "They told me the broken pieces were useless. But I looked at the broken pieces and saw everything I needed." There was a moment of pure silence. Then the room erupted in applause. Zivi watched from the wings, smiling so wide his face hurt. He had not done what he did for the applause. He had done it because his mother had told him to show the world the rest of his story, and somewhere along the way he had figured out that showing the world the rest of your story sometimes means helping someone else find theirs. After the show, Marcus found Zivi by the water fountain. "Thank you," Marcus said. He did not say it the way people say it when they are being polite. He said it the way people say it when they really mean it and have been waiting for the right moment. Zivi nodded. "You did that yourself," he said. "I just sat with you while you figured it out." Marcus laughed a little. It was the first time Zivi had heard him laugh. It was a good laugh, the kind that sounds like it had been waiting a long time to come out. They walked out of the gymnasium together into the cool night air, two kids from the same city who had started as strangers and ended as something better. Behind them, the lights of the gymnasium glowed warm and gold, and somewhere inside, Ms. Renata was folding up the programs and thinking about next year's show, already wondering which voices she had not yet heard. The end. Why I Chose This Story and How Storytelling Impacts Young Audiences I chose to write about Zivi because I am Zivi. I grew up on the west side of Chicago with albinism, a condition that made me visibly different from nearly everyone around me and that required me to spend significant time in special needs resource rooms as a child. I know what it feels like to walk into a room and watch people decide what your story is before you have said a single word. I also know what it feels like when one person decides to sit down beside you anyway and wait for the rest of it. The lesson at the heart of this story is not simply kindness, though kindness is present throughout. It is something closer to witnessing, the act of choosing to see another person fully, including the parts of them they have not yet found the courage to show. I chose that lesson because it is the one I have spent my entire career trying to practice. For more than twenty years, I have worked with justice-involved youth, children with autism, students with severe emotional and behavioral disorders, and young people in marginalized communities across Chicago. In every one of those settings, I have watched what happens when someone decides to look past the surface of a young person and wait, patiently and consistently, for what is underneath. What is underneath is almost always extraordinary. Storytelling reaches young audiences in ways that direct instruction cannot, because story bypasses the defenses that children, like all people, build around themselves when they feel they are being taught at rather than with. When a child reads about Zivi, they are not being told to be kind to the new kid. They are living inside the experience of choosing kindness and feeling what it produces. That is the difference between information and transformation. Information tells a child what to do. Story shows them who they could be. I also wrote this story with Zivi as the Narrator deliberately, because I want young readers to understand that the person who holds the story together, the one who makes sure no voice gets lost, is doing something just as heroic as the person who slays the dragon. We spend a great deal of time in children's literature celebrating the protagonist who stands alone and saves the day. I wanted to write a story that celebrates the protagonist who stands beside someone else and helps them find their own way. That is the kind of heroism I have tried to practice in my own life, and it is the kind I most want to see reflected back at children who are still figuring out what kind of person they want to become. Stories are how we try on other lives before we have to live them. They are how children build the interior architecture of empathy, the capacity to understand that other people have inner worlds as real and as complicated as their own. In my research as a doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, I study how creative and narrative engagement produces developmental shifts in young people, how the act of giving voice to a story, or receiving one, can change the way a person sees themselves and the world around them. The findings are consistent with what every teacher who has ever read aloud to a child already knows intuitively. Story is not decoration. Story is one of the most powerful tools we have. Zivi learned to tell the whole story. I hope young readers will too.

I grew up on the west side of Chicago in a single-parent household, the oldest of four children. My younger siblings did not just see me as a big brother. They looked to me the way children look to a parent, for guidance, for stability, for proof that things could be okay. That role shaped me before I had words for it, and it has never stopped shaping me. The first lesson I learned was that scarce resources do not mean scarce possibilities. My mother could not give us everything, but she gave us what mattered most: her presence and her work ethic. I internalized that and turned it outward. If I was going to be a father figure to my siblings, I had to become someone worth looking up to. That meant making decisions not just for myself, but for the three people watching everything I did. The second lesson was that consistency is its own form of love. Showing up, again and again, even when it is hard, is one of the most powerful things a person can do for another. I have practiced that in every room I have walked into since. For more than twenty years, I have worked with justice-involved youth and marginalized communities across Chicago, showing up for them the same way I learned to show up for my siblings. I am now a fourth-year doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, a first-generation college student actively working toward a PhD and a career dedicated to creating opportunity for people who grew up like me. Where I come from taught me how to lift people up. I intend to keep doing it.

I have spent more than twenty years walking into rooms that most people walk past. Youth detention facilities. Special education classrooms. Community centers on blocks that the rest of the city has decided are not worth the attention. I did not walk into those rooms because I was assigned to them. I walked in because I grew up on the west side of Chicago, and I understood early that the people inside those rooms were not problems to be solved. They were my community. My name is Ozivell Ecford. I am a teaching artist, a researcher, and a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University. But before any of those titles, I was a kid with albinism who spent time in special needs resource rooms and learned what it felt like to be seen by an educator who chose to look. That experience became the foundation of everything I have given back. For over twenty years, I have worked with justice-involved youth through the Storycatchers Theatre organization and the Shakespeare Behind Bars program at Illinois Youth Center-Chicago, a juvenile detention facility. I go in voluntarily, consistently, and with intention. I bring theater, spoken word, hip hop, and personal narrative. I bring the belief that every young person in that room has a story worth telling and a future worth planning for. I have watched teenagers who had never read a poem write sonnets that made the room go quiet. I have sat with young men processing the deaths of cousins, the weight of incarceration, and the terrifying possibility that things could be different. That work is not a program to me. It is a commitment to my community, renewed every single time I walk through those doors. Before my work at IYC, I spent five years as a Teacher's Aide and Crisis Intervention Specialist at Montefiore Special School, working daily with students who had severe emotional and behavioral disorders. I spent two additional years at Agassi School in a program serving children with autism. In both settings, I showed up for young people who had been told, in a hundred ways, that they were too difficult, too complicated, or too far gone. I disagreed, loudly and consistently, with my presence. Beyond institutional settings, I have mentored young artists and emerging teaching artists across Chicago for years, helping them find language for their practice and pathways into their careers. I have connected young people to job opportunities, written letters of recommendation, made phone calls, and showed up to performances, graduations, and difficult conversations alike. I do not do this work for recognition. I do it because I know what a community can do for a person when it decides to show up, and I know what it costs a person when it does not. I have been on both sides of that equation. Everything I give back is my attempt to make sure fewer people end up on the wrong side of it.

Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan I keep a running list too. Mine lives on my phone rather than an index card, but the discipline behind it is the same one Joe Gilroy understood: a goal without a plan is just a wish, and a plan without daily action is just a document. I have spent more than twenty years turning wishes into work, and I am not done yet. I am a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, a first-generation college student, a teaching artist, a researcher, and a person with albinism who grew up on the west side of Chicago. My goals are specific, my timeline is defined, and my plan is already in motion. The Goals I have three interconnected goals. First, complete my PhD at Northwestern by 2028. Second, secure a faculty position at a research university where I can continue my research while training the next generation of scholar-practitioners. Third, begin making sustained payments toward the over $100,000 in student loan debt I carry from attending IADT Chicago, a predatory institution eventually barred from operating in Illinois due to illegal practices that I, as a first-generation student with no family guidance, had no way of identifying at the time. The Plan My dissertation is underway and already producing recognized results. Papers from my first two years of research earned a Best Paper Award at the University of Illinois Graduate Student Conference and nomination as an Outstanding Student Paper at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences, where I presented in Helsinki. I will complete my third research iteration in Fall 2026, conduct longitudinal interviews with adult former participants in Spring 2027, and finish a generalizability study by Fall 2027. Writing and analysis run concurrently throughout, with dissertation completion targeted for Spring 2028. To fund this work, I rely on my Northwestern stipend, income from teaching artistry and consulting, and competitive scholarships and grants. I budget deliberately: fixed expenses first, then debt payments from remaining professional income, then savings. It is not comfortable, but it is intentional. For the faculty search, I am building the record now. Publications, conference presentations, and a growing reputation as a practitioner-researcher give me a competitive profile. I am targeting research universities with strong Learning Sciences or Education programs and active ties to equity work, where my research fits best and where I can do the most good. The Resources The resources I need are time, funding, and access. Time is the scarcest. I am simultaneously teaching, researching, writing, and generating income. Funding gaps slow everything down. Access to research sites and community partnerships I have spent twenty years building are already in place. The infrastructure exists. What I need is financial support to keep moving without stopping. The Impact When I reach the other side of this plan, I will be a published scholar with a codified, evidence-based pedagogy that other educators can use, a faculty member training researchers who come from the communities they study, and a first-generation student from the west side of Chicago who turned predatory debt and twenty years of work in rooms the world forgot about into something that outlasts all of it. Joe Gilroy kept his list close to his heart. I understand that. This plan is not separate from who I am. It is the work of my one life, and I am working it every single day.

Addressing My Student Debt I am a first-generation college student who did not have much guidance when I started my undergraduate education. No one in my family had navigated college before me, which meant no one warned me about predatory schools or predatory lending. I enrolled at IADT Chicago believing I was investing in my future. I did not find out until I graduated that the institution had been operating illegally and would eventually be barred from operating in Illinois due to the laws it broke. By then, I owed over $100,000 in student loan debt with very little to show for it in terms of transferable credentials or institutional support. I was a first-generation student who had been deliberately targeted and systematically misled at one of the most vulnerable moments of my life. That debt has followed me for years. It shapes every financial decision I make. It is the weight underneath every professional achievement. I also live with albinism, a condition affecting pigmentation and vision that has required ongoing medical management throughout my life and that has added an additional layer of complexity to navigating education, employment, and financial planning without a family roadmap to follow. My strategy for addressing my debt is both immediate and long-term. In the short term, I am currently on an educational forbearance while completing my doctoral degree at Northwestern University, where I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Learning Sciences. I use income from my work as a teaching artist, researcher, and consultant to pay down my debt as aggressively as my living expenses allow. I have built a reputation as an award-winning artist and educator whose work has been recognized at national and international levels, including a Best Paper Award at the University of Illinois Graduate Student Conference and nomination as an Outstanding Student Paper at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences. I leverage every professional opportunity I can to generate income toward that balance. In the long term, I am betting on this degree. A PhD from Northwestern, combined with the research contributions I am already making, positions me for a faculty career and consulting work at a level that will give me the financial footing to make real, sustained progress on what predatory lending took from me. I am also actively exploring loan forgiveness programs tied to my work in public institutions and with marginalized communities, work I have been doing for over twenty years and intend to continue for the rest of my career. I did not create this debt. A predatory institution created it by targeting a young Black man with albinism who was the first in his family to go to college and who trusted that the system was designed to help him succeed. But I am the one who has to carry it, and I am carrying it with intention, with a plan, and with the stubborn belief that my education will ultimately give me the tools to overcome what was done to me. This scholarship would not erase what happened. But it would reduce the distance between where I am and where I am trying to go. And for a first-generation student who has been fighting uphill since the beginning, that matters enormously.

The Impact I Want to Make I want to save lives. I know that sounds large, but I mean it plainly. I have lost students to gun violence. I have watched young people walk out of juvenile detention with nowhere to go and no one waiting. I know what is at stake when education fails the people who need it most. I have spent more than twenty years making sure it does not. I am a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, a teaching artist, and a former Crisis Intervention Specialist. I grew up in a low-income community and environment on Chicago's west side. I'm a first-generation college student who was raised by a single parent. I was born with a condition called albinism and spent significant time in special needs resource rooms as a child. Educators made space for me when the world was not sure it had any. That experience is the root of everything I do. My research examines whether arts-based education helps incarcerated youth develop the future-oriented thinking that research links to staying out of prison. I work with Shakespeare Behind Bars at Illinois Youth Center-Chicago, where I have worked with justice-involved youth since 2003. I also spent five years at Montefiore Special School with students with severe emotional and behavioral disorders, and two years at Agassi School in a program for children with autism. The students I have served across these settings share one thing: they were written off before anyone looked carefully enough to see what was there. The people who inspire me most are not famous. They are the student who stayed up all night reading a book because he was finally excited about something. They are Will, who spent four extra weeks in detention after completing his sentence because no housing was waiting, and who used every one of those weeks to prepare for the life ahead of him with a calm and purpose that humbled everyone in the room. They are the students whose stories I carry and protect. The change I am determined to create is immediate and generational. I want to give teaching artists a codified, evidence-based pedagogy they can use without spending twenty years figuring it out the way I did. I want to train the next generation of scholar-practitioners who come from the communities they serve and refuse to treat the people in them as data points. I grew up in a resource room. Educators held up a mirror long enough for me to finally see myself. That is what I will spend the rest of my life doing for others.

Why I Am Passionate About the Special Education Teacher Profession I know what it feels like to sit in a classroom and wonder if the teacher sees you. Not just your hand raised, not just your test score, but you — the whole complicated person who showed up that day carrying everything life had handed you before the bell rang. I know this because I was that student. I have albinism, a condition that affects pigmentation and, in my case, vision. I spent significant time in special needs resource rooms as a child, pulled from the regular classroom to receive support that the general education setting could not provide. Those rooms, and the teachers in them, shaped me. They did not fix me. They saw me. That is a distinction I have spent my entire adult life trying to honor. I am a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, and I have worked with justice-involved, marginalized, and special needs youth for more than twenty years. For five years, I served as a Teacher's Aide and Crisis Intervention Specialist at Montefiore Special School, where I worked daily with students who had severe and profound emotional and behavioral disorders. For two years, I worked at Agassi School in a program serving children with autism. Since 2003, I have worked with incarcerated youth, many of whom carry undiagnosed or underserved special needs into facilities that were never designed to meet them. And since 2023, I have been conducting research on adult literacy and arts-based education in juvenile detention facilities, where literacy deficits are not the exception but the norm, and where the students most in need of specialized instruction are the least likely to have ever received it. Every role I have held, every room I have walked into, has brought me back to the same conviction: the students who are hardest to reach are not hard to reach because something is wrong with them. They are hard to reach because not enough people have tried hard enough, or long enough, or in the right way. That is why I am passionate about special education. Not as a category or a compliance framework, but as a practice of radical attention. Professor Harold Bloom wrote that the purpose of teaching is to bring the student to his or her sense of his or her own presence. This is not a simple idea, and it is not meant to be. Bloom spent sixty-five years in classrooms at Yale. He understood that most of what passes for education is the transmission of content from one vessel to another. But great teaching, he believed, does something different. It does not merely fill a student. It awakens one. To have a sense of one's own presence is to know that you exist in the room, that your experience is real and valid, that your mind is working, and that what you think and feel and notice matters. For many students, this sense is intact. School confirms it every day. But for students with special needs, the experience of school has often been the opposite: a daily accumulation of evidence that they do not belong, that they are behind, that they are a problem to be managed. By the time many of my students reach me, they have spent years being told, in a hundred subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that their presence is a disruption rather than a gift. My mission is to reverse that message. I do this through art. In my work with incarcerated youth through the Shakespeare Behind Bars program, I use theater, spoken word, hip hop, and personal narrative to create conditions in which students discover their own voices, often for the first time. I do not begin by teaching them Shakespeare. I begin by teaching them that the room is safe, that their stories matter, and that the people around them are worth listening to. I use ensemble-building theater games, not because they are fun, though they often are, but because they require each person to be present, to pay attention, and to be witnessed by the group. You cannot play Zip Zap Zop alone. You cannot tell your story to a room that is not listening. The structure of the work itself insists on presence. For students with special needs specifically, I adapt this approach with care and intentionality. I meet students where they are, not where the curriculum says they should be. If a student cannot write, we speak and I transcribe. If a student cannot sit still, we move. If a student enters the room carrying something too heavy to set down, we make space for it rather than pretending it is not there. I have learned, across twenty years and thousands of hours in these rooms, that presence cannot be demanded. It can only be invited, again and again, until the student trusts that the invitation is real. Once upon a time, in a city that had forgotten some of its children, there was a teacher who wore his difference on the outside. His skin was the color of snow, his eyes caught light in unusual ways, and he had spent his own childhood in the rooms that schools set aside for students who did not quite fit. He had not always known what a gift those rooms were. He had not always known that the teachers in them, patient and persistent and wildly imaginative, were heroes in disguise. When he grew up, he walked into rooms of his own. First a school for children whose emotions arrived like storms, fast and total and without much warning. He learned there that a student in crisis is not a student who has failed. He is a student who has not yet been given the tools to succeed, and who needs someone steady enough to stay in the room while he figures it out. So the teacher stayed. Then he walked into a school for children with autism, and he learned that communication takes more forms than words, and that connection is possible across every kind of difference, if you are patient enough and creative enough and humble enough to follow the student's lead. Then he walked into a prison. Then another. Then another. And in every one of them, he found students who had been failed by every system that was supposed to catch them, and who were still, somehow, reaching. He found young men who had never been taught to read and who could recite whole songs from memory. He found students whose diagnoses had never been made because no one had looked carefully enough, or cared enough to look. He found, again and again, the student he had once been: sitting in a room, wondering if anyone would see him. And so he made it his life's work to look. To build rooms, literal and metaphorical, where students with special needs could discover that their presence was not a problem to be solved but a story waiting to be told. He brought Shakespeare to youth prisons and watched teenagers who had never read a poem write sonnets that made the room go quiet. He taught children with autism that a gesture could be a full sentence if the person receiving it was paying attention. He sat with students in the grip of emotional storms and waited, calmly, for the weather to change. He did not save anyone. That was never the point. The point, as Professor Bloom understood, was to bring each student to a sense of his or her own presence, to hold up a mirror steady enough and long enough that the student could finally see what had been there all along. The teacher is still walking into rooms. He always will be. And every time a student looks up, surprised to find that someone is looking back, he remembers why.

I was born a Black man with Albinism. My disability made me visibly different in every room I entered, while the low vision that accompanies it made the standard machinery of school—the board at the front, the fine print, the assumption that everyone learns the same way—a daily negotiation. I learned early what it means to be present in body but rendered absent: labeled before given chances, accommodated before celebrated. Systems that were supposed to educate me instead delivered quiet verdicts about what I could not do. My life's work has been to reverse that verdict—first for myself, and now for every learner I serve. For more than twenty years, I have believed that art is not a luxury for marginalized people; it is a lifeline. That conviction shapes my work as a doctoral candidate in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where I study how interdisciplinary arts empower marginalized communities to heal from trauma and develop self-agency. As lead teaching artist and student researcher for Shakespeare Behind Bars at the Illinois Youth Center in Chicago, I sit with incarcerated young people as they inhabit Shakespeare's characters and begin to imagine futures the world tried to foreclose. That work produced the Cross-Dimensional Future Orientation Framework, identifying four previously unnamed types of future orientation among incarcerated youth—research I presented at the 2025 International Conference of the Learning Sciences in Helsinki, where it was nominated for an Outstanding Student Paper award. I recognize myself in my students. Like me, they have been defined by how the world sees them before anyone asked how they see themselves. I once wrote in my journal: "My faith in my students' success must be greater than their faith in reality." Living with a disability taught me that faith firsthand—someone had to see further for me than the world's verdict allowed, until I could see it for myself. Now I hold that vision for others. It is why I co-created Grow/Share/Belong, an adult literacy program at the Evanston Public Library rooted in dignity rather than correction, presented at AERA 2026. It is why I train undergraduates as mental health facilitators through Northwestern's Cities Mentor Project, co-develop the D65 Coded Beats program with Northwestern's Tidal Lab, and co-authored "Observing Joy," presented at AERA 2025. I am grateful for the Lader Family Scholarship from the Chicago Lighthouse and the Jim Reilly Reformer Scholarship, and honored by my 2026 induction into the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. My goal is to build a body of scholarship establishing the arts as an evidence-based tool for healing trauma and developing self-agency, and to advocate for structural change in how schools, libraries, and correctional facilities serve learners whom institutions have failed—including students with disabilities, who are among the most frequently rendered absent by systems that measure worth through narrow benchmarks. My disability is not a footnote to this mission. It is its origin. I know what it feels like to walk into a room built without me in mind. I intend to spend my life building rooms that say, in every possible register: you are enough. You are capable. You belong here. Your mind is worth knowing.

To many, college is a given. To me, it is a declaration. I am a first-generation college student, born with Albinism, raised by a single mother as the oldest of four children, and now a third-year doctoral candidate in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. My path to higher education was not handed to me. I built it step by step, without a blueprint, and without anyone in my family who had walked this road before me. Growing up with Albinism in a world not designed for me taught me early that I would have to work harder to be seen clearly, in every sense of the phrase. Limited vision. Limited resources. Unlimited determination. My mother gave everything she had to keep our family together, and as the oldest, I felt the weight of that sacrifice and chose to carry it with purpose. My two sisters, my brother, and now six nieces and nephews watch everything I do. Every paper I submit, every podium I stand at, every degree I pursue belongs to them as much as it belongs to me. Being first-generation means navigating systems no one at home can explain. It means figuring out financial aid alone, walking into rooms where everyone else seems to know the unspoken rules, and carrying the dreams of your family while quietly building your own. It can feel isolating. But it also reveals something essential about who you are. I began my doctoral journey in 2023, drawing on more than twenty years as an educator in multimedia design, music, theatre, and curriculum development. My research explores how the arts empower marginalized communities to heal from trauma and develop self-agency. Through my work with Shakespeare Behind Bars at the Illinois Youth Center in Chicago, I developed the Cross-Dimensional Future Orientation Framework, identifying four new types of future orientation among incarcerated youth. I presented this at the 2025 International Conference of Learning Sciences in Helsinki, where it was nominated for an Outstanding Student Paper award. None of that felt inevitable. It felt earned. My dream is to complete my doctorate and produce scholarship that transforms how institutions serve people pushed to the margins, not with pity, but with evidence, dignity, and genuine belief in human potential. I want every child who looks like me, who grew up like me, who was told the odds were against them, to see those doors open wide. This scholarship would lift a financial weight that first-generation students carry in silence and allow me to pour even more of myself into the work and the people depending on me. Marcia Bick Herman believed that students deserve every opportunity to thrive. I intend to honor that belief by becoming living proof that it is true. Being first-generation means being first. But it also means making sure you are never the last.

I was 42 years old when I walked into Northwestern University as a doctoral student. I had spent over two decades building a career as an award-winning educator in multimedia design, music, theatre, and curriculum development, but I knew that the questions burning inside me required more than experience alone could answer. Beginning a PhD at 42 was not a detour. It was the destination I had been moving toward my entire life, even when I could not yet name it. Now, a 45-year-old third-year, I understand, in a way I could not have at 22, what it costs and what it means to choose education later in life. You carry more with you: more responsibility, more self-awareness, and a much clearer sense of urgency. Every course, every paper, every conference presentation carries the weight of all the communities waiting on the other side of your work. That weight does not burden me. It propels me. My journey into doctoral study grew directly from my work as an Artistic Manager, artist, and student researcher for Storycatchers Theatre at the Illinois Youth Centers in Chicago, Saint Charles, and Warrenville. Watching incarcerated young people inhabit Shakespeare's characters and begin imagining futures they had never before allowed themselves to see, I needed to understand why that transformation was happening. Lived experience gave me the observation. A doctoral program gave me the framework to explain it. That inquiry produced the Cross-Dimensional Future Orientation Framework, a discovery I presented at the 2025 International Conference of Learning Sciences in Helsinki, where it was nominated for an Outstanding Student Paper award, and which received Best Paper and Presentation honors at the University of Illinois's 16th Annual Graduate Student Conference. My personal values have always centered on dignity, second chances, and the belief that no one is beyond transformation. Those values did not come from a textbook. They came from years of sitting alongside people whom the world had written off and watching them exceed every expectation placed on them. Returning to school in my forties deepened those values because I became, once again, a learner navigating uncertainty, and that humility made me a better researcher, a better educator, and a better human being. My commitment to community service is inseparable from my scholarship. Together with my co-author Heather Lindahl, I co-designed and facilitate Grow/Share/Belong, a program at the Evanston Public Library that helps adults who struggle with literacy in an environment built on dignity and belonging. I also lead Northwestern's Cities Project, training undergraduates to serve as mental health educational facilitators. And I co-develop curriculum for the D65 Coded Beats program with Northwestern's Tidal Lab, connecting young people to creative technology through joy and self-expression. I plan to use my doctoral degree to build a body of scholarship that positions the arts as an evidence-based tool for healing trauma, expanding futures, and transforming the learning experiences of people whom institutions have historically marginalized. I want to change how schools, libraries, and correctional facilities think about learning, not as remediation, but as restoration. When I read about Debra S. Jackson returning to college at 40, I recognized her story immediately. Not because our paths are identical, but because I understand the particular courage it takes to begin again when the world expects you to have already arrived. Debra's decision changed the course of her life and the lives of everyone she served. I carry that same conviction into my work every day. This scholarship would honor not just my journey, but everyone still waiting for someone to believe in their second chance.

**Tell us about yourself. What experiences, values, or challenges have shaped who you are today? What drives your passion for your chosen field?** I have spent more than twenty years believing that art is not a luxury for marginalized people; it is a lifeline. That conviction has shaped everything about who I am and the work I do as a third-year doctoral candidate in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where I study how interdisciplinary arts empower marginalized communities to heal from trauma and develop self-agency. The work that has most profoundly shaped me is my role as lead teaching artist and student researcher for Shakespeare Behind Bars at the Illinois Youth Center in Chicago. Sitting with incarcerated young people as they inhabit Shakespeare's characters, I watched them begin to imagine futures. That observation became the foundation of my research, which identified four previously unnamed types of future orientation among incarcerated youth, formalized into the Cross-Dimensional Future Orientation Framework. Presenting this at the 2025 International Conference of Learning Sciences in Helsinki, where it was nominated for an Outstanding Student Paper award, confirmed for me that the stories of marginalized young people deserve a place in the highest levels of academic discourse. My values are rooted in dignity. I do not study communities from the outside. I co-design and co-facilitate alongside the people I serve. Together with my co-author Heather Lindahl, I created Grow/Share/Belong, a program at the Evanston Public Library for adults who struggle with literacy, rooted in the belief that literacy is not a skill to be corrected but a human right to be honored. Leadership, for me, means developing other people's capacity to lead. As lead facilitator for Northwestern's Cities Project, I train undergraduates to serve as mental health educational facilitators and researchers. I also co-develop curriculum for the D65 Coded Beats program with Northwestern's Tidal Lab, connecting young people to creative technology in ways that feel joyful and self-determined. That joy is also the subject of my co-authored paper, "Observing Joy: An Observation Protocol to Assess Joyful Learning in STEAM Classrooms," presented at AERA 2025. I am grateful to have received the Lader Family Scholarship and the Jim Reilly Reformer Scholarship, and I am honored to be inducted into the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society in April 2026. **How will your degree help you achieve your personal and professional goals?** My doctoral program is not separate from my community work. It is the lens through which I make that work legible, scalable, and lasting. The degree gives me the theoretical grounding and methodological rigor to answer questions practitioners alone cannot. Why do incarcerated youth who engage with Shakespeare begin to project themselves into futures they previously could not see? What conditions generate genuine joy in a learning environment? What does it mean to teach adult literacy with dignity and humanity? These are not abstract questions. I bring them into every room I enter. My goal is to build a body of scholarship that positions the arts as an evidence-based tool for healing trauma, developing self-agency, and expanding the horizons of people whom institutions have historically failed. The Cross-Dimensional Future Orientation Framework is a beginning. I intend to continue developing it across different populations and learning environments, and to advocate for structural changes in how schools, libraries, and correctional facilities approach learning for marginalized communities. Ultimately, I want my work to create conditions where a formerly incarcerated young person, an adult who struggles to read, or a child in an under-resourced classroom can walk into a learning space and feel, without question, that it was built for them.

Why I Am Passionate About Special Education Teaching Part One: On Presence Professor Harold Bloom's declaration that "the purpose of teaching is to bring the student to his or her sense of his or her own presence" is not a philosophical abstraction to me. It is the living center of everything I do as an educator. To understand what Bloom means, we must first understand what it means to be absent from oneself. Many of the learners I have worked with, adults struggling with literacy at the Evanston Public Library, incarcerated youth navigating institutional walls, students with special needs who have been told in a hundred quiet and not so quiet ways that they do not quite belong in the room of learning, have been made strangers to themselves. Systems that were supposed to educate them instead delivered a verdict: you are less than. The accumulation of that verdict over years, over decades, becomes internalized. They stop expecting to be seen. They stop expecting their voice to matter. They become, in the deepest sense, absent. Present in body, but absent to their own power, their own intelligence, their own story. Bringing a student to a sense of their own presence means reversing that verdict. It means creating conditions where a person can encounter themselves, not the diminished self the world handed them, but the full self that was always there, waiting. Presence is the experience of knowing: I am here. I am real. What I think matters. What I feel matters. My story belongs in this room. My passion for special education teaching is rooted precisely here. Students with special needs are among the most frequently rendered absent by educational systems that measure worth through a narrow set of benchmarks. They are given labels before they are given chances. They are accommodated before they are celebrated. As a Black man born with Albinism, I know this all too well. My mission is to flip that script and to build learning environments where their full humanity is the starting point, not an afterthought. I have learned from my work with incarcerated youth that faith is the engine of this work. I once wrote in my journal: "My faith in my students' success must be greater than their faith in reality. My students only know what they have lived and seen before them. Since I have seen more and further than them, I have to have a greater vision and a greater drive to drag them down the road with me to success until the things that I have already seen and already know become what they know, too. My faith must become their lived experience." This is my teaching philosophy stripped to its bones. When a student with a learning disability, a behavioral diagnosis, or a developmental difference has been told, implicitly and explicitly, that the destination of growth is not for them, my job is to hold the vision of their arrival with a certainty that outlasts their doubt. In practice, this means designing learning environments that are trauma informed, sensory conscious, and culturally sustaining, where a child is not triggered into shutdown before the lesson even begins. It means meeting each student where they are without judgment and identifying the languages of intelligence they already speak, whether kinesthetic, artistic, oral, or communal, and building from that foundation. It means co creating milestones with students rather than imposing them, so that achievement feels like self determination rather than compliance. It means celebrating incremental progress loudly and sincerely, because for a student who has only known correction, celebration is medicine. It means, above all, refusing to mistake a student's struggle with a deficit of worth. Bringing a student to a sense of their own presence is not a single moment. It is a sustained practice of designing spaces, interactions, and relationships that say, over and over, in every possible register: you are enough. You are capable. You belong here. Your mind is worth knowing. That is why I teach. That is why I pursue special education with urgency and love. Part Two: A Fairy Tale Once upon a time, in a world that had long confused busyness for purpose and compliance for learning, I was an educator who had spent years in the hardest rooms. I sat across from young people in rooms with steel doors and fluorescent lights, young people carrying futures the world had already tried to foreclose. I learned in those rooms that imagination was not a luxury. It was survival. I believed in a radical idea: that every person, no matter how many times the world had told them otherwise, carried within them a whole and beautiful mind, and that my sacred task as a teacher was not to fill that mind, but to help the person find it. I carried this belief into a library in Evanston, Illinois, where I helped design a program called Grow/Share/Belong. It was a place where adults who had grown up ashamed of their struggles with reading could come, at last, to a room filled with light and plants and comfy chairs and the quiet promise that no one there would be made to feel small. In that room, they did not just learn to read. They learned to perform. They learned to tell their stories. They learned that the words on the page could become the words in their mouths, and that those words could become something luminous, a play, a narrative, a new account of who they were. The work was not finished. It never is. But something important happened: a paper was born from the soil of that program. I wrote it, refined it, and submitted it to one of the most prestigious educational research conferences in the world. In 2026, I stood before the American Educational Research Association and presented GSB: Reimagining Adult Literacy with Dignity and Humanity. The room was full of people who leaned forward in their seats, because what I was describing was not just a program. It was evidence that when you design for dignity first, everything else follows. After AERA, I turned toward the students who needed me most, students with special needs who had been accommodated but never truly seen. I brought with me everything I had learned: that trauma informed design is not a feature but a foundation; that a student's sense of their own presence is the goal from which all other goals descend; that faith in a student must outlast the student's doubt; and that when you build an elsewhere world, a place where different rules apply and different possibilities breathe, the learner who walks in carrying the weight of every past failure can sometimes set that weight down and discover what they are capable of when they are no longer carrying it. And the students, one by one, began to arrive at themselves. And that was the whole point. And it was enough.

*How do you give back currently and how do you plan to positively impact the world in the future? I give back by meeting people at the margins—where education and justice intersect, where dignity is too often denied, and where traditional systems have failed. At the Illinois Youth Center, I work directly with incarcerated youth through Shakespeare Behind Bars, using theatre not as entertainment but as a tool for developing agency and hope. These young people aren't just research subjects; they're collaborators who've taught me as much about resilience and future-making as any academic text. Each week, I witness young people who society has labeled as disposable discover their capacity for eloquence, empathy, and complex thought through Shakespeare's language. I facilitate their performances, but more importantly, I bear witness to their transformation and carry their stories into academic spaces that desperately need to hear them. At the Evanston Public Library, I co-facilitate the Grow/Share/Belong program for adults struggling with literacy. Too often, adult literacy programs treat learners as deficient, focusing solely on skill remediation while ignoring the shame and isolation that illiteracy creates. We've designed GSB to center dignity and humanity, recognizing that literacy is not just about decoding words—it's about belonging, community, and self-worth. Our participants don't just learn to read; they build relationships, share their wisdom, and reclaim their place in civic life. This work reminds me daily that education should never humiliate—it should liberate. Through Northwestern's Cities Mentors Project, I train undergraduates to become mental health educational facilitators and researchers, equipping the next generation with tools to support youth mental health in under-resourced communities. These students will carry this training into classrooms, community centers, and policy spaces long after they graduate. With the D65 Coded Beats program, I help middle schoolers explore creative technology and music production, ensuring that STEAM education isn't reserved for the privileged. Watching young people from Evanston's most marginalized neighborhoods produce beats, code interactive projects, and perform at our annual showcase reminds me that access plus dignity equals transformation. My future impact will be twofold. First, I plan to establish myself as a scholar-practitioner whose research legitimizes joy, arts, and community voice in academic spaces that have historically dismissed them. The Cross-Dimensional Future Orientation Framework is just the beginning—I intend to build a body of scholarship that fundamentally challenges deficit narratives and proves empirically what marginalized communities have always known: that healing, creativity, and hope are not luxuries but necessities for learning. Second, I will create scalable, replicable models—frameworks like CDFO, protocols like our joy observation tool, and programs like GSB—that educators and community organizations can adapt to serve their own marginalized populations. I'm committed to open-access scholarship and practitioner-friendly resources because knowledge hoarding perpetuates inequality. I don't want to be the only one doing this work; I want to build movements that outlast me. Ultimately, I envision leading a research center or institute dedicated to arts-based healing pedagogy, where formerly incarcerated individuals, community artists, and academic researchers collaborate as equals. I want to train teachers, social workers, and community organizers in methods that recognize marginalized people as knowledge-producers, not problems to be solved. My twenty years as an educator taught me that transformation is possible; my doctoral training is giving me the tools to scale that transformation. The Bouchet Society induction represents not an endpoint but a mandate: to use every privilege academia affords me to tear down the walls between ivory towers and the communities that need rigorous, joyful, liberatory education most.

A Time When Faith Carried Me Through Fear As a Black man born with albinism, I've spent my life defying expectations. Doctors told my mother I'd never drive. Society assumed my vision impairment made independence impossible. For years, I believed them. Every medical professional, every skeptical relative, every doubting employer had reinforced the same message: some dreams weren't meant for people like me. But at twenty-six, after finally obtaining my driver's license against all odds, I faced my greatest test: highway driving. My employer, who had openly doubted my abilities, required me to follow her to our workplace in Warrenville, Illinois—a journey that demanded I navigate the expressway during rush hour for the first time. That morning at 3 a.m., I woke up terrified. I had practiced on empty highways in the pre-dawn hours, but this was different. Real traffic. Real consequences. Real proof of whether I truly belonged behind the wheel or if everyone who doubted me had been right all along. As I merged onto the expressway, my hands gripped the steering wheel and my heart pounded so hard I could hear it over the engine. The posted speed limit was sixty miles per hour—faster than I'd ever driven with other cars around me. I had no confidence in my ability, only faith. So I prayed—continuously, desperately, with all my heart. I repeated Philippians 4:13 like a lifeline: "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." I asked God to guide my hands, sharpen my focus, and protect everyone around me. Prayer became my anchor as cars whizzed past at speeds I'd only practiced alone. When my employer sped ahead, changing lanes aggressively and disappearing from view, I didn't panic. I kept praying, trusting that the same God who had brought me this far, who had given me the courage to pursue my license when everyone said it was impossible, wouldn't abandon me now. Fifteen minutes after she arrived, I pulled into the parking lot safely. She made a joke about my tardiness, but I had done it. Not through my own strength, but through Christ who strengthened me when fear could have paralyzed me. That day proved that when we're called to do something that terrifies us, faith doesn't remove the obstacle—it carries us through it. Like Nabi Nicole, who used her faith to counsel and uplift others in her community, I learned that our relationship with God isn't just for Sundays—it's the foundation that helps us conquer what seems impossible. I now drive confidently, having upgraded to a Lexus. But I'll never forget that every mile I travel is a testament to God's grace and a reminder that "Nothing is impossible if I'm possible."

Why I Am Passionate About the Special Education Teacher Profession My passion for special education stems from a profound understanding that every child, regardless of their challenges or circumstances, possesses inherent worth and untapped potential. My 20 years of experience in special education as a special educator(SpEd) educator have revealed to me that children labeled as "difficult" or "problematic" are often simply waiting for an adult who sees beyond their behaviors to recognize their humanity and capabilities. I also speak to this subject as someone who was born with Albinism and a vision impairment, as someone who has benefited from excellent services for people with special needs, and someone who has had some unfortunate and harmful experiences as well. 1. Understanding "Sense of One's Own Presence" and My Mission Professor Harold Bloom's statement that "the purpose of teaching is to bring the student to his or her sense of his or her own presence" speaks to the fundamental goal of education: helping students recognize their own value, agency, and potential for growth. To experience one's "sense of presence" means to develop self-awareness, confidence in one's abilities, and an understanding that one's thoughts, feelings, and contributions matter in the world. For students with special needs, this concept takes on even greater significance. These children often arrive in our classrooms carrying the weight of repeated failures, negative labels, and diminished expectations from society. They may have internalized messages that they are "less than" or incapable of meaningful achievement. Again, because I can attest firsthand to the effects of a great or harmful service provider, my mission is to systematically dismantle these harmful narratives and replace them with experiences that affirm their worth and potential. When I worked at Montefiore Special School, an all-male school for students with severe and profound emotional and behavioral disorders, I witnessed this transformation firsthand. When I chose to sit beside students at their computer stations, engaging with them as capable learners rather than problems to be managed, I saw them begin to experience their own presence. They moved from seeing themselves as troublemakers to recognizing themselves as students capable of learning and growth. This shift in self-perception was evident in how they carried themselves, approached challenges, and interacted with peers. My mission in accomplishing this task involves several key strategies: Creating Authentic Relationships: I believe that meaningful learning happens within the context of genuine human connection. By demonstrating that I value each student as an individual, I help them recognize their own worth. This means learning their names, understanding their interests, and showing genuine concern for their well-being and success. Maintaining High Expectations: Rather than lowering standards, I maintain high expectations while providing the support necessary for students to meet them. When students at Montefiore realized I believed in their potential, they internalized these expectations and began to see themselves as capable learners. Celebrating Growth and Effort: I focus on progress rather than perfection, acknowledging every step forward, no matter how small. This approach helps students develop confidence in their ability to learn and grow, fostering their sense of agency and self-efficacy. Providing Voice and Choice: Students develop their sense of presence when they feel heard and valued. I create opportunities for them to express their thoughts, make decisions about their learning, and advocate for themselves, just as the students at Montefiore did when they spoke up to the principal about my impact on their education. Through my current doctoral research on how interdisciplinary arts can empower marginalized communities, I continue to explore innovative ways to help students discover their own presence. My work with Shakespeare Behind Bars at the Illinois Youth Center builds on these foundational beliefs, using the power of literature and performance to help incarcerated youth envision positive futures for themselves. 2. A Brief Fairy Tale: The Teacher Who Saw Light Once upon a time, in a school nestled within the heart of a bustling city, there lived a young teacher named Ozivell who possessed a rare gift – the ability to see light where others saw only darkness. The school was home to young princes who had been forgotten by their kingdoms. These princes carried invisible crowns of pain, forged from the harsh realities of their young lives. The other adults in the castle whispered that these princes were cursed, destined to remain trapped in towers of anger and despair. An aging wizard, fearful of the princes' power, had cast a spell of silence throughout the castle. "Do not speak to them," he commanded. "They are dangerous and beyond help." The princes, sensing the wizard's fear, began to believe they were indeed cursed and acted accordingly. But Ozivell possessed ancient wisdom that told him otherwise. He knew that every prince, no matter how forgotten, carried within them a spark of magic that could illuminate the darkest corners of any kingdom. Armed with nothing but patience, compassion, and unwavering belief, he began to break the wizard's spell. One by one, he approached each prince's tower. Instead of shouting instructions from below, he climbed the stairs and sat beside them. He spoke to them not as cursed beings, but as the royalty they truly were. He helped them solve the riddles that had long puzzled them, celebrated their victories, and reminded them of their inherent worth. Slowly, the princes began to remember who they were. Their invisible crowns began to glow with newfound confidence. They started to help one another, sharing their unique gifts and talents. The entire castle was transformed by their light. When the kingdom's council investigated this miraculous change, the aging wizard tried to claim credit for the transformation. But the princes, now confident in their own voices, spoke their truth. They told the council how Ozivell had seen their light when no one else could, how he had believed in their magic when they had forgotten it themselves. The princes ruled their kingdoms with wisdom and compassion, never forgetting the teacher who had helped them remember their own presence. And Ozivell continued his quest, traveling to other forgotten castles, carrying the torch of belief to other lost princes and princesses, knowing that every child deserves to discover the light within themselves. And they all lived not just happily, but purposefully ever after. --- This fairy tale reflects my core belief that special education is not about fixing what's broken, but about helping students recognize the strength and potential that already exists within them. Like the princes in the story, many special needs students have simply been waiting for someone to see their light and help them remember their own magic.

I chose to answer prompt #1: Tell us about a time when you had a positive impact on a child’s life. During my time as a paraprofessional at Montefiore Special School in Chicago, I encountered a situation that would fundamentally shape my understanding of how meaningful human connection can transform a child's educational experience and sense of self-worth. Montefiore served elementary-aged boys diagnosed with severe and profound emotional and behavioral disorders. These children carried heavy burdens – many were affected by gang violence, substance abuse, and family trauma that no child should have to endure. They arrived at school each day having already faced challenges that would test the resilience of adults, yet they were expected to learn and grow despite these overwhelming circumstances. I had recently graduated with a degree in Multimedia Design when I was assigned to work alongside a veteran teacher who was counting down his final months before retirement. His approach to managing the classroom was rooted in fear and distance. He had established a rigid rule that prohibited paraprofessionals from directly interacting with students. When children struggled with their computer-based assignments and asked for help, his standard response was simply to tell them to "read the instructions on the screen." This hands-off approach created a sterile, unwelcoming environment where students felt isolated and unsupported. The students sensed their teacher's fear and discomfort, and they responded accordingly. They acted out, showed little respect for authority, and seemed to fulfill every negative expectation placed upon them. The classroom atmosphere was tense and counterproductive, with students disengaged from their learning and increasingly frustrated with the educational process. I couldn't reconcile this approach with what I believed these children needed. Despite explicit instructions not to engage directly with students, I made a conscious decision to prioritize their educational and emotional needs over institutional protocol. When a student raised their hand asking for help, I would walk over, pull up a chair, and sit beside them at their computer station. Together, we would work through whatever challenge they were facing. The initial response from students was one of genuine surprise. They couldn't believe that an adult was willing to sit in close proximity to them, engage in conversation, and provide patient assistance. These children, who had been labeled as difficult and problematic, were simply hungry for human connection and academic support. As word spread throughout the classroom that I was available to help, more students began reaching out. The transformation was remarkable. Students who had previously given up on assignments began taking pride in their work. They celebrated getting correct answers and started to see themselves as capable learners rather than troublemakers. I developed a system of incentives and recognition that acknowledged their efforts and achievements, no matter how small. The classroom environment shifted from one of tension and defeat to engagement and possibility. Academic performance improved dramatically. Students who had been failing began earning passing grades, and those who were already passing pushed themselves to achieve even higher levels of success. The change was so significant that it caught the attention of the school principal, who launched an investigation to understand what had caused this remarkable turnaround. When questioned about the improvements, the classroom teacher attempted to take credit for the students' success. However, the students themselves spoke up with a clarity and honesty that was both powerful and moving. They told the principal that I had made the difference by helping them with their work and treating them with respect and patience. More importantly, they articulated how my approach made them feel: supported, encouraged, seen, and heard. What struck me most profoundly was their explanation of motivation. These children, who had been written off by many adults in their lives, expressed that they wanted to succeed because they didn't want to let me down. They had internalized my high expectations not as pressure, but as evidence that someone believed in their potential. They felt proud of their accomplishments and began to see themselves as students capable of learning and growth. This experience taught me that behind every "difficult" child is often someone who has been failed by the systems and adults meant to support them. These students didn't need more rules, more distance, or more fear-based management. They needed what all children need: adults who see their humanity, believe in their potential, and are willing to invest time and energy in their success. The impact extended beyond academic achievement. Students began to carry themselves differently, to interact more positively with peers, and to approach challenges with increased confidence. They had experienced what it felt like to be valued, and that experience began to reshape their understanding of their own worth and capabilities. This experience at Montefiore planted the seeds for my current doctoral research in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where I study how interdisciplinary arts can empower marginalized communities. My recent work with Shakespeare Behind Bars at the Illinois Youth Center builds on these early lessons about the transformative power of believing in young people who have been written off by society. The children at Montefiore taught me that positive impact often comes not from grand gestures or complex interventions, but from the simple act of showing up authentically, treating young people with dignity, and refusing to accept that any child is beyond hope. Their courage in advocating for themselves and their willingness to trust an adult who chose to see their potential rather than their problems continues to inspire my work with marginalized youth today.