What matters here is important so I want to conclude by taking up implications of these cases and to return to the questions of privilege and generalization that I noted in the methodological video and that I could gloss as “no surprise that a child of two professors succeeds in the academy but what does that mean for the majority of students, their families, and their schools?”

So four quick points to consider in terms of the general implications of this research and the question of privilege.

First, yes, networks matter and when we pretend that successful individuals achieve success all on their own, we mystify success and support a climate where individuals who do not succeed can be “held fully accountable” for their failures. We should be focused on supporting and building networks for collaborative inquiry and becoming, but a lot of educational energy is spent on isolating students to test their skills and knowledge.

Second, Nora has what is probably diagnosable as dyslexia (though we avoided ever inviting that label). In practice, this has meant that she has always needed to talk intensely through her writing process and to put extra attention into copy-editing. Nora is also a woman in a world and profession where sexism continues to be powerful. See, for example, the links in the footnote at the end of the conclusion. Nora’s relative success to date has been far from easy and predetermined: it has emerged in the intersection of rich supports from family, friends, and colleagues and particular blends of socially situated challenges.

Third, this brief narrative of becoming has pointed repeatedly to public resources for science and learning (children’s literature, public television programs, the many sociohistoric resources developed over decades that support bird watching as Spencer Schaffner and I discussed in our 2011 Ethos article, science toys and coloring books, the public schools Nora attended from k-12 and that she has identified as especially important for learning math and for engagements in music, the museums and zoos that excited her imagination). The corporate-driven Common Core Standards in the US have coincided with a historic withdrawal of funding from public life and a growing political hostility to science. Nora’s story of becoming is inseparable from decades, even centuries, of building deep public resources for science and learning.

Fourth, it is critical to see Nora’s entangled agency in this narrative of becoming. The world has rich resources for many pathways of becoming. It was her emerging pattern of interests, what she chose to read, watch, talk about and do, what she selectively oriented to in her cultural worlds and what she rejected, that built her pathways to becoming a biologist.

In short, I would argue that the general implications of this case are that all students need public resources, need adults who are willing to co-inquire with them on what they are interested in, need respect as they trace their neurodiverse ways of being in and knowing the world, need collaborative support in the long process of becoming, need, in short, adults who recognize that Baradian potential for change in that pause before the next breath of everything becoming. Our theories (implicit and explicit) matter because of how they address (or don’t) these needs.