Overview

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour with your host, Lori Boll. We know you’re busy so we bring you 1 hours worth of content in under thirty minutes, leaving you with time for a true happy hour. 

Lori: Hello everyone. I’m Lori Boll, your host, and today I speak with Angeline Aow and Dr.Sadie Hollins, the authors of Becoming a Totally Inclusive School – a Guide for Teachers and School Leaders published by Routledge in November, 2022. 

Many of you know Angeline Aow as she was a keynote speaker at our SENIA Europe conference and a presenter at our virtual conference happening right now! And just a little plug, it’s not too late to register for that as you are able to watch the videos for 4 months- so hey, why not register today! Anyway, both Sadie and Angeline have extensive experience and knowledge in supporting inclusion and today they share about their book, and give suggestions for how everyone in a school setting can and should be empowered to be an inclusion advocate. They share about their inclusion continuum and how school leaders can use it to make necessary change. So you know, enough of me. Let’s dive right in and learn about becoming a totally inclusive school. And now, onto the show. 

Hello Sadie and Angeline, and welcome to the podcast! 

Angeline: Thank you so much, Lori. 

Sadie: Thank you Lori.

Lori: Well, it’s great to have you here. You have written a book! So first off, congratulations. It’s a monumental task and you’ve done it! So, well done. 

Angeline & Sadie: Thank you.

Lori: And your book is called “Becoming a Totally Inclusive School, a Guide for Teachers and School Leaders”. What is it about and how did you start your project? 

Sadie: Yeah, thank you so much for having us Lori. So, I mean, the book overall is, there is a resource for teachers and leaders to help their school and their school communities become more inclusive. It basically does what it says on the text. But I think it’s an interesting story how we’ve come together. Me and Angelline have never met in person and actually the first time we made contact with each other was as a part of this project. So we were introduced by a third party and we had the idea to try to create a book that would be useful for schools and I never told Angeline this, but I think I thought, coming into the meeting, I’d like to create a resource that might help PSATs and international schools in different contexts and make it more inclusive. So I was coming in very much with that angle, but I think for what we’ve created and I think Angelie will share more about how the idea came about and the structure of the book and the material in it. But yeah, we used to meet every Sunday, or nearly every Sunday, for nearly a year. And nearly two years later, the book is here. 

Angeline: Yeah, it’s been an absolute joy to meet Sadie and I sometimes wake up on a Sunday now and think “oh I’m missing something!” because the book is, the process of writing is over and… But the book really came off a series of presentations that I’ve been doing with schools, for what’s called an DEIJ advocacy course, and I have like a 6 course series that I developed and was working with institutions and international schools and so in thinking about when you want to move forward in this area, even if it’s in your domain of teaching, you really need a whole school approach and so thinking about that and thinking about all the different elements that you need in order for you to have the infrastructure support that you need, the mindsets and behaviours that you would love for your colleagues and your families to have to move this forward, and so the book really started with thinking about the broad picture and supporting everyone in your school to be able to move forward together. 

4:30

Thank you for joining us for today’s show. For more information including how to subscribe and show notes, please head to our website. That’s SENIAinternational.org/podcast. Until next time, cheers.