S3 Ep10: Interview with Martin Scanlan

[Music] Hello and welcome to series three of inclusion dialogue. My name is Joanne Banks and I'm a lecturer and researcher in the School of Education in Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. We are in our third series of this podcast, so for any new listeners I would suggest you go right back to series one and take it from there. In the last few weeks we have passed the 30,000 listens for this podcast, so I'm really delighted to release this new series of interviews with top experts in the area of special education, inclusive education, student diversity and educational inequality. For this series we move the conversation along further, delving into issues, broadening the geography of the podcast and the diversity of voices heard and represented. As with all my guests I would like to thank the interviewees who kindly gave up their time and energy to chat with me, describe their work and talk through some of the challenging theme significant education systems around the world. As you know series one of the podcasts has been published as a book with Right-led Education and series two is due to be published in early 2025. I hope you enjoy this series and I look forward to your feedback, comments and critiques on this fundamental aspect of education around the world that is inclusion. You're very welcome to this week's episode of Inclusion Dialogue. It is my great pleasure to welcome Martin Scanlon onto the podcast. Martin, very welcome to Inclusion Dialogue. Lovely to chat with you this morning. Thank you. Thank you. It's a privilege and pleasure to be here with you, Joanne. As you know from possibly listening to other episodes of this I love to ask my academic colleagues and friends how you ended up working in this space and I think it's one of the things that the listeners of the podcast seem to enjoy quite a lot. It's just your early career and what kind of motivated you to get into this space. So would you mind just describing that for us? Yeah, no I'd love to. I fell into education in a really backward manner. When I went to the university I didn't know what I wanted to do. I actually started as a theater major and then I was a medicine and pre-medicine and was bouncing around and ended up creating my own major. I took sociology and religion and anthropology and wove those three together and created a peace studies major and made up this major and called it peace studies. When I graduated from the university of course they weren't out hiring. No one was hiring peace studies majors for anything. And so I had to find a job and I found a job teaching in our nation's capital Washington DC. There was a little program. They were quite desperate to get people into Catholic schools to teach and so they would take people who had no training but some interest and aptitude and had worked with children and so I had had all those things and they would put us into schools and also we'd work on a master's in education at the same time. So simultaneously. So I went into teaching kind of by accident and ended up really loving it. And so it was a teacher in elementary and middle schools. So with adolescence in Washington DC which is on the eastern coast of the United States and then I was over in Oakland, California. I got married and my wife was in graduate school there so I was on the west coast of the United States and then came back and was in the middle of the United States. So I was teaching in three different regions for about a decade and was also moving into administration and so teaching and administration and really loved teaching and was fascinated by it. And throughout that time I eventually started to work on my doctorate degree and was really interested in starting my own school. And throughout that time and throughout my doctoral studies I noticed how I was in the Catholic school systems and how Catholic schools had this philosophy of education. They call it Catholic social teachings and they claim to have a preferential option for the poor or the marginalized. That was the teaching and yet these schools they always marginalized certain students and didn't include certain students. So they had this philosophy of education that was saying one thing but then the policies of who are we actually serving in our schools was somewhat contradictory to that and I was wrestling with that. How do we reconcile that? And that led the foundation for my doctoral studies which was to study what were some schools that really do include and so I conducted this study and I asked for recommendations. What were some schools that are really living Catholic social teachings? Where are they? And I got these recommendations of different schools to study and I found out that wow this is a school that really serves the poor who economically or here's a school that really serves students with disabilities or here's a school that really serves students who speak a different language as a home language. And I found these different schools and what I noticed was and this was the conclusion of my dissertation that the schools all have some dimensions of inclusion so they include the poor that they didn't really do anything for kids with disabilities or they would include students with disabilities but really didn't have anything that was anti-racist or they would be anti-racist but they wouldn't. So these different dimensions of inclusion they had but not a full spectrum that laid the ground for what I've gone on to continue to work at. How do we develop what I was initially calling these epistemologies of inclusivity the ways of thinking about inclusivity that are holistic and intersectional and that's been the life of my research ever since in my scholarship. I'm really interested in you know I'm a sociology degree as well at Martin and I'm really interested because it sounds like you know it sounds like your three your three subject areas that you did for your degree really fed into your doctoral work because essentially what you were looking at was demographics and I don't know we describe it a lot inclusive education about the changing demographics bringing challenges to our education systems but I don't know from listening to you there I'm just wondering whether it's just a greater awareness of diversity and the demographics that are in our classrooms rather than the change in them over time but it sounds like you encountered perhaps different cohorts to students therefore whatever characteristic or reason we're being treated differently in different educational contexts without be fair. Yes and noticing it also in myself so when I was initially a teacher in Washington DC reflecting you know when I was writing it of course then I was just too nervous to to really reflect on it but but in the hindsight then you know it's like okay what is this school doing well the very first school I was in did a very good job of serving in this case it was mostly African-American students in Washington DC and it was a very inclusive of those students I was learning a lot from my colleagues in that school many of whom were black teachers and educators about race and racism and the role of schools in really combating that and that was very very strong but we weren't doing anything for students with disabilities so we weren't really as a school community kind of recognizing that and then the next school I was in was primarily immigrant students from Mexico and El Salvador and so there are a lot of Spanish-speaking families and Spanish-speaking colleagues and I was learning about that we had very few African-American very few white students and learning about engaging the families in those ways and welcoming them but weren't really anti-racist we weren't really talking about race per se and that school we didn't really do much for students with disabilities and then the third school I was in we actually it was a more affluent school much more racially diverse so there was black students some immigrants from Latin America and some Latinx students and some white students and some Asian students so it was more racially diverse we weren't really anti-racist I would say but it was more racially inclusive but it was much more financially privileged school but they did have some programs for students with disabilities and and really some intentionality around that and so being in these different environments myself was helping me develop my awareness about different awareness of the structures of the school and who is this how are those structures really set up to embrace the diversity of the students or not and where are the blinders and for me this was my coming to awareness that the blinders that we have that limit what dimensions of diversity we see often those are built into the structures in the school and how can then the structures of the school take those away and broaden out how we envision the diversity that each individual can bring to the school yeah and I think we're veering into your more recent scholarship here but you know my my my burning question is they're like well what did you find what are the key factors that remove those kind of, those blinkers or those barriers that prevent people from kind of seeing the more holistic picture. So can you bring us along to what you did explore in terms of your research when you left teaching? Yeah. So for the last 20 years now, I've been at the university level and working with teacher educators and then working more in the last 15 years primarily with leadership. So administrators more recently even with people who are in leadership worlds outside of formal education settings. And throughout that time, I've tried to do a lot of case study research around schools and how school leaders in particular confront these barriers or blinkers as you call it. What I've found is that the awareness of the diversity of the people who are there in the school, the awareness there is often times broadened when there's a clear mission of the school, an understanding of the purpose of the school that's expansive. And when the leaders and the teachers in the school have the dialogue that talk about that, what is our purpose as a community? So increasing in my most recent work, I talk about this about how the grounding of an inclusive school community has to be in what is our purpose as a community? How do we understand that purpose? Just yesterday actually I came upon this article and when I was remembering that we were going to be talking today, I wanted to bring it up. And it's by Kenneth Stryk written back in 1999 and the article is titled, "Can schools be communities?" The tension between shared values and inclusion. So I came upon this article. This is an interesting flowers yesterday. I was reading it and taking all these notes because I wanted to draw upon this in my thinking. It was really resonating with me. And so in this article, Kenneth talks about this tension. I wrote a quote down to it. He says, "This is the dilemma. There are a number of characteristics that are associated with the community. One, particularly important one, is that communities are united by shared values. However, values that forged school communities can be divided into two types, those that are too thin to constitute an educational community and those that are too thick to be inclusive." So when it's too thin, then the community is like a bank, he says, "You know, and I go to the bank and I want them to manage my money well and you go to the same bank and you want them to manage the money well." But I don't care what you're doing with your money and you don't care what I'm doing with my money. We're both at the bank to the Serbian and that's one type of community. And then a different type of community at the other end of the spectrum, a very thick community, via kind of a faith-based community, a congregation or synagogue. And well there, you all have to share your going there because you're ascribed to that. So some schools of course can be a faith-based school and that can be a very thick. But that's not a public school that is serving all. So how can schools be thick communities, not like banks, but also inclusive of the diversity and I think this biscuits app, you ask kind of what's it I thought? I think that there's the tension and what's the purpose of our community and where are the barriers? Because there are barriers in every single community. Every school has barriers and some of those barriers aren't a problem. They've said, "Well, we're an early childhood center. We're not taking you because you're too old. That's a barrier." That's not inclusive of you. So where are the barriers, exclusionary barriers? And that's what I found. Schools need to continually, critically reflect. What is our purpose and where are their exclusionary barriers? Our purpose isn't to serve everyone all the time. So what is our purpose? If we're supposed to be serving you and we're not, that's an exclusionary barrier. And how do we then recognize that exclusionary barrier and confront it? I love that. Thanks so much for explaining it so nicely. I love your thick and your thin, the author that you cited there as well. And I think it really resonates in Ireland as well because we have faith-based schools, majority of our schools are Catholic schools still. We have new schools, educate together, multidimination schools. And yeah, I think there's a transactional nature to some school context of the consumer and the client versus, yeah, the more communities. I like the way you described that. My brain went further though, Martin, just when you were talking, they're going like, what enables a school leader to develop, nurture, maintain that kind of vision and ethos compared to the guy or girl down the road who simply cannot or doesn't have the capacity to do so. And I presume your work has delved into that. We're getting to the good stuff here. Yeah, I've come to, in my most recent work, dig into, I think this question, one of the directions I see my work going. We talk in the states often about social justice in our schools and that's become almost a tagline or a line that people just kind of throw out in their ed leadership programs. And it's become very diffuse in what it means. So it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And we've developed these kind of tools. So we've talked about culturally responsive leadership as a tool, a way of thinking about how am I being culturally responsive or how am I being anti-racist or how am I being linguistically inclusive. And so we think about these different, again, dimensions of diversity. How can I address these dimensions of diversity? And to develop, I think, a more comprehensive approach to social justice, I believe requires a schema, a way of thinking. So the metaphor that I've come to use is, I like to sail, sailboats. And when you're sailing a sailboat, there are different techniques and tools that you have. So there's a tiller that controls the rudder of the boat. And you can push the tiller and you can go one way and you pull the tiller and you go a different way. There are lines that are attached to the sails and you can pull the line in or you can sheet it out. And so there are these different tools that you have on the sailboat. Just having those tools doesn't mean you understand how to sail because you have to navigate the particular situation. And if the wind shifts, you need to know what to do with the line or with the tiller. But there can be things that happen that are unexpected. There might be something under the water that you didn't see. And so just knowing how to use the tools isn't enough. You need to have an understanding of how is this all working? That would be a schema. And I think it's the same way with our social justice that if you just have these tools in your tool chest, I know the way to talk about being culturally responsive or to be anti-racist or I know what the techniques are to accommodate a student with this disability, this exceptionally, et cetera. Just those tools themselves is like a tool sheet. You need to also have a schema, a way of organizing the tools to know, what do I do in this context? Even if I'm pulling the tiller and I think the boat's going to go this way, but it's not, do I understand why it might not be? Why is that tool not working the way I think it should? And so developing a schema for inclusivity or schema for social justice is I think what we need our leaders and our teachers to be doing. I offer some ideas for a schema, but my point isn't that I know the right schema. My point is that I think that's how we need to be thinking and talking about approaching inclusivity with a broader schema. Yeah, I love your analogy there and I think that's really helpful and I think you've pointed to something that there's a lot of noise or traffic in school leaders and teachers as well around what they should or need to know in order to become more inclusive or those kind of toolkit or champion idea of what's required and I actually think, well I'm exciting the great Lani Florian on this one, but it's about the kind of disempowerment or the empowerment of teachers to feel that they have the capacity to operate the sale of both themselves without the necessary or to draw on expertise of somebody who does, yeah? Yeah, I love that you bring up, Ladi, she wouldn't remember this, but I hunted her down like a fan would years ago and just like out of the blue call there and she was very gracious and went to lunch with me. But yes, I think that you're right, that capacity to do it yourself. Sometimes it's without the tools I was mentioning how I grew as a teacher and it was out in Oakland teaching during this second part of my early career. That's where I actually learned to sale. And one thing that they would do in San Francisco Bay there, the little club that I was learning to teach in, after you learn how to sale a bit, they would take the tiller and the rudder off the boat and you would have to sale rudderless because they would say, they'd say, well what would happen if your rudder broke? How would you sell the boat? And so, sailing rudderless is a phenomenal kind of thing to do, but you can sail a boat rudderless if you understand how the boat can work. If we get to there that sometimes we do, we're leading rudderless or sometimes the rudder breaks and sometimes things break down in our classrooms and our school commutes. But if we have the right understanding of what are we trying to do here, that's And even in those horrific situations, we can navigate forward. And unlike, I mean, I was telling you, when you were over in Ireland a couple of months ago, you know, Ireland, Ireland's going through quite a bit of change in terms of policy and legislation regarding inclusive education at present. But I sometimes wonder, for school leaders, I think the communication between the government and the schools is really, really important and that they're on this journey together. And I feel like, you know, that relationship really needs to be managed. So that teachers, school leaders have the assurance and have the kind of the backing of government regardless of what's going to be brought in in terms of policy changes or toolkits or whatnot. And I feel like when that relationship, things a little bit or breaks down a little bit that school principals themselves then feel aggrieved that, you know, this is another thing that's been planted or being put on top of me. And there goes the empowerment piece as well. I often say, like, you know, in dealings with policymakers and people who make the decisions, you know, some of the most inclusive settings in schools I've ever visited have been ones that, you know, have had segregated settings on the premises. But I kind of think that the way in which the practices were done was more important than, you know, than what was being done. It was kind of how it was being done seemed to play out a whole lot more. And I think that kind of culture eat us and the buy-in from the school as a whole was what I witnessed anyway and those particular school settings. But anyway, enough about Arlen Martin. Yeah. But one of the points that makes me think about also is the role of the family and the parents, the caregivers in helping the educators shape because we think about schools in partnership with the families. And I'm very critical of many aspects of Catholic education where I got my roots in the school. But one thing that I think Catholic education does write is they recognize that parents are the primary educators and the family is the primary educators. And how can the schools work with the families to say, how could I include this child who's obviously a sacred individual and loved first and foremost in the family? They love and appreciate and nurture that child much more than we can ever hope to replicate in the school. And we want to partner with them. And so I think part of what you were saying also just made me think about the lead and how we listen to how we can listen to the families in trying to, how do we love this child? Literally. Like that's to nurture and educate, to love and cherish this child. What does that mean? What does that look like? Yeah. And I think, you know, I think, because I work in initial teacher education and I often think the communication between the school and the parent is often an overlooked part of initial teacher education. It's often quite the most daunting part for newly recruited teachers as well. But my goodness is it important, right? Oh, my goodness. I often think about this too, because, you know, as a young teacher, I wasn't a father and many teachers can be excellent teachers and not have children themselves. But certainly becoming a parent changes you as a teacher. All of us of course are children, even if all of us aren't parents. So as a child, you know what that relationship is like? How important it is to work with families, as you say, as an overlooked for the young teachers. And also for the administrators, you know, one of the most important aspects there is both their direct dealings with families. And also, how do they set up a school community in which that is the expectation? In my doctoral work, one of the great leaders, I was privileged to go into these different school phenomenal leaders in these different schools. But one principal, I'll never forget her, she would have all of her teachers. She had lots of new teachers. This is her school serving financially, very impoverished students and families financially in poverty. Very difficult setting. There was somebody shot outside the school while I was there one day. It was just an awful kind of place, but this community was a vibrant community. And she had a lot of turnover of our teachers. So she had new young teachers all the time. She would require those teachers to have a contact, a positive contact with all of their families. And she would require that they would know, like, your list of your students. And I want to know, when have you contacted these in a proactive, positive way? You're going to have problems. There's going to be some problems that you're going to, but I want to know every week who are you contacting. And I want to see that list of who you contacted this week. So there's structures that she set up. It wasn't going to take it for granted or we're going to have this kind of general announcement. Please be in touch with your family. No, no, no, no. I want to see. Did you see them at the dismissal or the drop off? Did you make a phone call? Did you send a note home? I want to see. I don't want three weeks to go by and everyone hasn't been contacted over those three weeks. I want to make sure that every old 25 year students have had a contact with you at least once from a positive standpoint. Not because you called home because there was this discipline issue or blah, someone didn't have their homework. No, I want a positive contact with every family. So there's structures you can put in place. It's not just this kind of imploring. It's really like what are some structures you can put in place? Yeah, and it's human connection and it knows no bounds then at that point, right? Martin, we've raised through our interview. If I asked you a formal question, I'm not quite sure. But is there anything you'd like to share with listeners before we sign off? Or is there any research you'd like to point them to or anything else you'd like to say? I can't believe we've gone so quickly. So one of the exciting things I'm thinking about right now, I'll leave you with, and it's exciting to me. It's this notion that I haven't used at all in my research yet, and I'm excited to think about it. And it's this notion of embodiment and that we live in bodies. I don't know why this is so striking and novel to me, but it is. I think about how much our schools, we think about the mind and the educating the intellect. And we talk sometimes about social emotional learning and wellness and things. But I think that in my work, I've been, there's a philosopher, a Macinture who talks about being forgetful of the body. And I think about how you live in bodies. And what does that mean? Well, to live in a body means that you have dependence upon others at certain times. And others are dependent on you at certain times. To be in a body means that by definition. And how do we educate people without this awareness of you living a body? And your body is going to have periods of dependence on others. And your body is, other people are going to be dependent on you. So that's to be in community. And so that for me just brings home why we want to include the diversity of humanity within our schools and why it's essential to include because we're all in bodies. And so you're doing a disservice to exclude. And so, well, we can't serve you here. You have this particular learning disability. You have this mobility. We can't include you here. We're actually doing a disservice to the education. And so that's kind of where my mind is going in terms of inclusion. How schools can really recognize to educate is to educate people. People live in bodies. And by definition, therefore, we need to be more inclusive. That's fascinating. I'm thinking there of the Victorian education system, which Ireland system certainly, we still kind of occupy. The physicality of the classroom is not very conducive to what you've just described, right? I mean, it's quite the opposite. I'm just thinking of like younger, particularly boys who perhaps want to laugh about a bit more than the next child or even students with physical disabilities or different types of physical kind of impairments that require a different kind of, for one to the better words, set up. There's a beautiful book. I'll leave you with this. Sarah Hendren is her name, I believe. The book is, what can a body do? She talks in that book about the designed world and how design really design features. She writes about just exploring design. And she gets into this as a mother of a child with some physical impairments, looking at how the world is designed, how different things are designed, and what that design includes or excludes by its nature. And then therefore to think about how can we rethink our schools and how do we invite the students themselves and the families to help us rethink the design. We have to do this in our lives. One of my family members recently had an operation and they need to sit differently now. They need to have different accommodations because of that. We have to do that in our lives as people. We have to readjust. I have a new hip and I needed to rethink how do I move? How do I get into a vehicle? So we experience this need to design and redesign our spaces. And so for our schools, it needs to be the same. We need to not be locked into one rigid way of design. But we need to be nimble in redesign to include the bodies that are here. And I think it reminds me of somebody who was on the podcast last season, Shrikalanarian, and she described like what can disability studies discourse teach just the inclusion piece more generally. I'm really not doing it just by describing it like that. But from a practical point of view, I see these kind of we have a lot of special classes or units offer autism in our schools, but in many ways the design of them to say it could benefit the mainstream classes is an understatement in terms of the facilities that they have, the practices that they undertake throughout the day, but again they're considered just for that particular cohort of students. So there's a lot of learnings I think can go the other way. Exactly. Oh, that's a brilliant part. Martin, it's been an absolute pleasure. I could talk to you for the rest of the afternoon. So I really want to say thank you so much for your insights and just for having such a lovely casual and honest conversation about your scholarship and your work and it's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for all the good work that you've done with this podcast. Thanks Martin. Well that's another great interview with lots to think about on inclusion dialogue. Feel free to share, like and subscribe the podcast and I will see you next time.