In 2008, I was a recent college graduate with bachelor’s degree in sociology. I had moved back to Arizona and taken a job as a substitute teacher. Each day in the classroom was a practical encounter of the social and cultural theories I learned as an undergraduate. I witnessed processes of enculturation and stratification, ritual making and identity development. Social conflict was always present—amongst groups of students, teachers, institutions, the larger society. I became increasingly interested in these social functions and enrolled in a master’s degree program titled Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education at Arizona State University.

As a graduate student, I learned about critical and cultural theory, curriculum studies and the pedagogy of Paulo Freire. I had amazing teachers who taught me how to connect education (especially my own) to the realms of culture and ideology. About a year into the program I began teaching for the first time outside my role as a substitute. I taught adult English language classes from a “know your rights” and popular education framework. It was an opportunity to practice the ideas and theories I encountered as a graduate student. I learned more about teaching, politics and respect than in any other training I had received.

In 2010, I landed my first job in public education in a dual language high school as a special education teacher. My critical and cultural theory lens were always present, but I thought mostly about them in relation to curriculum. As a special education teacher, I could help but to notice how narrowly defined curriculums left so many behind. Even worse, those left behind were stigmatized with disability labels and remedial classes. I was determined to do schooling differently.

In the last year of the master’s program I spent my time reading the historical and theoretical work of Michel Foucault. His writings put words to undercurrents of violence in school curriculum—the ways that certain knowledges, bodies, and experiences are included while others excluded. Working in special education made these distinctions all too present.

In 2012, I took a position working as an elementary special education teacher. It was exhausting and some of the most intellectually challenging work I have ever done. The children I worked with had an amazing ability to stretch the boundaries and expose what we have taken for granted and thought of as normal and natural. On a daily basis, they challenged what it means to be educated and who is worthy of this education. For me, they exposed the limits of curriculum and the violence that often ensues when you “act out” from the norm. I loved this work and still do but I was still determined to learn how to do schooling differently and found myself back in school.

In 2016, I enrolled in the Learning, Literacy, and Technology PhD program at Arizona State University. My goal was and is to learn how to do schooling differently. I came into the program with the notion of “acting out,” but I was no longer simply interested in acting out from the perspective schooling. I also wanted to explore the place of acting out in social theory, philosophy, and research methodology. It is this interest in doing things differently, beyond the strictures of normativity, that brought me to post qualitative inquiry, poststructural thought, and affect theory. And, ultimately, it is what I hope to bring back to the study and practice of education.