Phase 1 — Foundations & thesis discovery

Goal: align personal interest with the thesis and establish the research problem.

Week 1 — The gap between policy and practice

Encounter. Locate the precise place where official accessibility policy and the lived learner experience pull apart — and treat it as something you can investigate, not just endure.

Build. A Statement of Intent naming the phenomenon, your point of view, and the context that makes it urgent.

Take back. Name a real, high-stakes problem in your own setting with a defensible point of view — the first move from practitioner to practitioner-researcher.

Week 2 — Deconstructing the hypothesis

Encounter. See the three pillars — accessibility, disability justice, emergent learning — as they actually operate in your environment, integrated or quietly siloed.

Build. A three-pillar analysis of your setting, with a group audit of where each one shows up.

Take back. Diagnose whether your environment connects the pillars or isolates them, and name whose exclusion is built into the legal floor.

Week 3 — Systems that carry — and drop — knowledge

Encounter. Map the real delivery systems your organization uses to carry knowledge, and notice where participation is assumed rather than designed.

Build. An environmental scan mapping those systems and their structural gaps.

Take back. Surface where support is consistently dropped for certain learners — before you design anything new.

Week 4 — Developing the research question

Encounter. Narrow a broad, honest curiosity into a single question precise enough to answer and brave enough to name who is excluded.

Build. A refined research question, pressure-tested with peers.

Take back. Frame a question answerable within real constraints that keeps the most excluded learner at its centre.

Week 5 — Ethical constraints as design constraints

Encounter. Treat time, resources, access, and consent not as obstacles to the work but as part of its design — and consent as a relationship, not a form.

Build. A feasibility and resource map, with a plan for ongoing informed consent.

Take back. Scope an investigation you can honestly carry, and engage participants from historically, persistently, or systemically marginalized (HPSM) groups ethically from the very start.

Week 6 — The proposal as a living blueprint

Encounter. Gather everything so far into a blueprint clear enough to guide you and flexible enough to change as the work teaches you.

Build. A one-page research proposal with explicit success criteria.

Take back. State your objectives, method, and significance so any reader could judge whether the inquiry succeeded — and keep it adaptive.

Phase 2 — Literature review & theoretical scaffolding

Goal: situate the inquiry within existing legal, social, and pedagogical frameworks.

Week 7 — Legal frameworks — the floor

Encounter. Meet the law (ACA, AODA, ADA) for what it is: a floor that holds you up, never a ceiling that tells you you've arrived.

Build. A legal-frameworks audit of your environment, naming what the law leaves out.

Take back. Use legal literacy as a design tool — and ask, of any standard, who it still fails.

Week 8 — Technical standards — the grammar

Encounter. Gain real command of WCAG 2.1 while holding the harder truth: a page can pass every check and still reach no one.

Build. A WCAG scan of one piece of your own digital content.

Take back. Tell the difference between content that passes a checklist and content that actually teaches.

Week 9 — Disability justice — the compass

Encounter. Move past single-issue thinking into intersectionality and the leadership of those most impacted — the ethics that decide who design is really for.

Build. A power-and-voice map of your context, with an intersectional reading of your question.

Take back. See clearly who leads, who benefits, and who is most affected — and design accordingly.

Week 10 — Emergent learning — the method

Encounter. Trade the old model that treats the learner as an account to deposit into for one where learning is alive, relational, and shared.

Build. An observation of where learning is already emerging, plus one condition you design to invite more of it.

Take back. Create the conditions that let learning emerge, rather than steering it toward a fixed outcome.

Week 11 — Neuroeducation & brain health

Encounter. Learn what the brain actually needs in order to learn — active engagement, spacing, emotion — and where "neurotypical by default" quietly excludes.

Build. One session redesigned with active learning and spaced repetition, audited for neurotypical defaults.

Take back. Design with how brains really work, and catch the assumptions that would have forced others to retrofit.

Week 12 — Identifying research gaps

Encounter. Bring the literature to its real purpose: not mastering each field, but finding the place where their absence, together, is hurting someone.

Build. A gap statement, stress-tested with peers.

Take back. Name the specific synthesis gap your inquiry is positioned to close — the most generative place to stand.

Phase 3 — Investigation & methodology

Goal: conduct field research to gather qualitative and quantitative data.

Week 13 — Choosing methodology

Encounter. Choose how you'll come to know what you know — mixed methods that honour both measurable scale and lived depth.

Build. A methodology choice with a written defence.

Take back. Defend an approach that balances numbers and narrative, and say plainly what you'll count as evidence.

Week 14 — Stakeholder engagement & co-design

Encounter. Move from asking permission to sharing the pen — designing with the people most affected, before the decisions are made.

Build. A stakeholder map showing who is missing, with a co-design plan.

Take back. Bring excluded learners into the work early, as co-designers rather than late-stage approvers.

Week 15 — Listening as a research practice

Encounter. Learn to listen as a discipline — close, patient, non-extractive — to the people the system has been quietest about.

Build. One participatory interview or focus group, with notes on what you heard.

Take back. Understand lived barriers from the inside, and hear the outlier data your questions didn't anticipate.

Week 16 — Quantitative data as provocation

Encounter. Let numbers do what they do well — reveal patterns — while refusing to let them have the last word.

Build. A short, piloted survey of your context.

Take back. Surface broader patterns and use them to ask better questions, not to close the conversation.

Week 17 — Ongoing ethical oversight

Encounter. Hold ethics as a living relationship that travels with the research as it changes, not a box ticked once at the start.

Build. A reviewed consent and confidentiality protocol, with an accountability mechanism.

Take back. Keep participants safe and informed as the inquiry shifts beneath you.

Week 18 — Collaborative inquiry

Encounter. Discover what becomes visible only in company — the findings that hold up when more than one practitioner looks.

Build. A hosted preliminary-findings session and the robust patterns it surfaces.

Take back. Test which of your findings survive other perspectives, and which were only ever local.

Phase 4 — Analysis, design & synthesis

Goal: translate findings into inclusive learning content and finalize the thesis.

Week 19 — Meaning-making

Encounter. Turn what you gathered into meaning without flattening the specificity that made it worth gathering.

Build. Coded qualitative data and thematic analysis, done with a peer.

Take back. Produce findings that are both deep and broad — and that keep lived experience intact.

Week 20 — Cross-case analysis

Encounter. Learn to tell a local problem from a structural one — the pattern of exclusion that outlasts any single context.

Build. A cross-case analysis naming shared systemic patterns.

Take back. Generate insights that hold across environments, not just in yours.

Week 21 — Backward design for social change

Encounter. Begin at the end — with what transformation looks like for the learner the system has served least — and design back toward it.

Build. An end-goal statement to design backward from.

Take back. Align every later choice to a destination defined by the most marginalized learner, not the average one.

Week 22 — Prototype development

Encounter. Make something real and testable, born accessible from its first rough draft rather than corrected into accessibility later.

Build. An accessible prototype or sample lesson, tested with a real person.

Take back. Surface the assumptions you couldn't see — by building, and testing with someone usually left out.

Week 23 — Iteration & public feedback

Encounter. Treat feedback as part of the design itself — reflection in the moment and after it — and let the community's insight reshape the work.

Build. A documented feedback session with recorded refinements.

Take back. Refine in public, honouring the people whose insight you're building on.

Week 24 — Culmination & dissemination

Encounter. Return what you learned to the community that made it possible, in a form they can actually use — and let it keep living past you.

Build. A finalized body of work, shared as an accessible, living resource.

Take back. Hand back a usable resource that goes on adapting in contexts you'll never control — the full arc from reader to practitioner-researcher.