The Miseducation of Taylor Cummings: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Belonging in The United States Education System and A Vision Towards Healing and Consciousness

This autoethnographic study examines my lived experiences navigating the U.S. education system as a Black girl becoming a Black woman. From an African-centered perspective (Asante, 1990) this study critiques how belonging and motivation are conceptualized through Eurocentric frameworks that lead to conceptual incarceration, epistemicide, and the miseducation of Black students. Using Blackgirl Autoethnography (Boylorn, 2016) and Intuitive Inquiry (Anderson, 2004; Romanyshyn, 2007), I constructed a Life Timeline (Bau, 2024) from archival artifacts, academic and medical records, personal journals, and conversations with family and educational mentors. This allowed for a deeper understanding of how institutional exclusion, religious indoctrination, and psychological misorientation shaped my understanding of identity, motivation, and belonging. Data were analyzed using The Soundtrack of My Life (Payton, 2023), functioning as a hermeneutic and analytical tool. Through lyrical interpretation, I examined how music gave voice to emotional truths, ancestral memory, and unspoken resistance. Findings reveal that institutional belonging often required fragmentation of self, while a true sense belonging emerged through (re) connection with self, my cultural heritage, and deep, soul work—most notably through an episode of psychosis reinterpreted as a spiritual awakening. This study calls for a (re)conceptualization of motivation and belonging as intuitive, communal, and rooted in African-centered onto-epistemologies. In doing so, it urges Educational Psychology to expand its frameworks to affirm the spiritual, emotional, and cultural dimensions of Black life.