Show #82 Extraordinary Experiences

Show #82 Extraordinary Experiences

Host Lori Boll speaks with Kathi Silva, author of ‘Extraordinary Experiences: Tales of Special Needs Abroad,’ a book about living with special needs as expats. Kathi wrote this book as a way to share stories and help others prepare for adventures overseas while parenting their neurodiverse children.

Kathi shares about her experiences raising her autistic twins overseas in multiple countries and her wishes for international schools from the lens of a parent.

Bio

Kathi and her husband joined the Foreign Service when their autistic twins (now 22) were two years old. They have lived and coordinated education and support services for their twins in the U.S., France, South Africa, Venezuela, Serbia, Uruguay, Uganda, and Switzerland, with each country providing a different perspective of how neurodiversity is perceived and handled. In 2019, Kathi produced and edited ‘Extraordinary Experiences: Tales of Special Needs Abroad,’ a book about living with special needs as expats, as a way to share stories and help others prepare for adventures overseas. She has also written for the Foreign Service Magazine to advocate for more support for families with special needs children.

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Resources from Today’s Show

Transcript

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 hour of content in under thirty minutes, leaving you with time for a true happy hour. 

Lori: Hello everyone. At SENIA, we are all about amplifying voices of inclusion. And one of those voices are the voices of our parents. Today, I get to speak to a parent, her name is Kathi Silva, and Kathi and her husband joined the Foreign Service when their autistic twins, who are now 22, were two years old. They’ve lived in coordinated education and support services for their twins in the U .S., France, South Africa, Venezuela, Serbia, Uruguay, Uganda, and Switzerland, with each country providing a different perspective of how neurodiversity is perceived and handled. 

In 2019, Kathi produced and edited Extraordinary Experiences: Tales of Special Needs Abroad. It’s a book about living with special needs as expats as a way to share stories and help others prepare for adventures overseas. She has also written for the Foreign Service magazine to advocate for more support for families with special needs children. 

Now, Kathi and I today, we have a great conversation about her twins, how she found out they were autistic and just her different experiences in countries all over the world. My own son is 23 and it was really interesting hearing Kathi’s experiences as so many of them mirrored our own journey. So I’ll stop talking now and let’s just get right to it soon now on to the show Well, hello Kathi and welcome to the podcast. 

Kathi: Thanks for having me.

Lori: You bet. So you and your husband joined the Foreign Service when your autistic twins who are now 22 were just two years old. You’ve lived and coordinated education and support services for your twins in the US, France, South Africa, Venezuela, Serbia, Uruguay, Uganda and Switzerland. Wow so as a fellow mom of a son with autism, I know just how hard this must have been for you… But to start can you just tell us a little bit about your twins? 

Kathi: Sure. So my twins, they’re David and Carlo, and they are identical twins, and they have identical profiles, identical special interests, identical medical interests, because they do have some medical needs as well. They were preemies, so we’ve got some medical issues along with autism. They are, they’re wonderful souls, I have to say. They’re very curious. They love the outdoors and nature. There’s, you know, there’s, there’s this idea that autistic kids are really good on computers or on math, that is not my sons at all. They have no interest in computers and they actually have a math disability. So they find joy in being outdoors and I think one of the ways that they calm themselves is by movement. So they have learned to take up sports like skiing and skateboarding and jumping off high because they love roller coasters, anything that involves movement. So they’re very adventurous in that way. Yeah, what else? They both love music too. So they both have found hobbies. One plays guitar and the other plays piano and both of them are pretty much self -taught. 

Lori: Wow. 

Kathi: And yeah. 

Lori: Well, they do sound really cool and I hope to get to meet them someday. Yeah. That’s awesome. So how did you discover they were autistic? 

Kathi: Well, we, so they were born, like I said, very premature. And from the very beginning, they had to have OT and PT to learn how to swallow and to learn how to sit by themselves. And so somebody had always been keeping an eye on them. And when they were very young, one of our physical therapists noticed that they would like turn the toy cars upside down and spin the wheels. And they would say, um. don’t get nervous yet, but this might be a sign or something. So we had our eyes open to it. But then we had to go through a whole medical clearance process with the State Department before we could go overseas. And then we were clear to go overseas. They just said they had some delays, but they thought it was due to the prematurity. So when they were two, they just turned two, we were clear to go to Paris, which they thought had top notch medical facilities in Western Europe. It’s… certainly they could handle anything. And while we were in Paris, the twins actually started to regress quite a bit. Their behavior got more and more uncontrollable. Everyone says, oh, the terrible twos. So we kind of expected some bad behavior. But it wasn’t actually until my parents came to visit us and said, yeah, raising two -year -olds and raising twins is supposed to be hard, but not this hard, that we see something not right. You know, for us, we were first -time parents and we were kind of isolated, right? We’d just gone overseas to our first posting, so nobody, we didn’t know it, we didn’t have a community yet. 

And Paris is not a posting where you make a tight community very quickly. Most of the Western European countries aren’t. So I’m actually really grateful that my parents came out and said, something’s not right. Because I just thought it was, it was just parenting two -year -olds. So we had them tested, evaluated back in Washington, D .C., and that’s when they were diagnosed. 

Lori: Oh, wow. Yeah, and so it’s a very interesting you say that I’ve read several articles about grandparents being one of the first people to recognize that there are some delays or some challenges for Autistic children. 

Kathi: So Yeah, yeah. Well, definitely. Yeah, that was my case. 

Lori: Yeah Wow So you Obviously as we mentioned before I’ve moved to many many many countries and You’ve definitely had different differing experiences in all of them. Can you share how some of your experiences differed from? country to country continent to continent.

Kathi: Sure. Well, I mean, first of all, there’s a huge factor of age that comes into play as well because, you know, where you are at a certain age could be, you could have a very different experience depending on the age of the kids. So when our kids were, when our twins were very young, so Paris actually was, was not a good place to be at all. And I probably it’s not that great of a place to be at any age for kids with neurodiverse issues. But we, we spent like, what was it, first through third grade in South Africa. And that was an amazing experience. In our case, we had exceptional support services and exceptional school. It was English speaking. They were, the medicine was far enough advanced. but yet they were still curious. So they were still open -minded to trying all sorts of things. And I think the access to nature was wonderful for my twins and animals. You know, South Africa had a lot of parks where you could pet a baby lion or, you know, touch an elephant. And these kinds of experiences, I think, were really informative for my son. So that was beautiful. 

So Caracas, for example, was interesting. We got fairly good services. But I would say for Caracas and Uganda, which were our two most difficult postings, I didn’t quite take into account the effects of chaos that would have on the systems of my twins. And that’s, yeah, that was kind of an afterthought and of course, you know, that when you’ve got traffic everywhere and, you know, especially in Uganda, at this point, my twins were 17 and 18, they were in their last years of high school. So there was a lot going on in their heads and their hormones and everything. And that was probably a really bad move to put them in a place where there was just too much traffic and too much noise and too much pollution and smells. And so their sensory system just got overloaded. 

Lori: Yes, sensory overload. I hadn’t really, really taken into account. 

Kathi: Yeah, so I will say we did tons of research before we went anywhere and had to get all of our pre -approvals and made sure we had everything in place. My sons had always had an aid in the classroom, either a one -on -one aid or sometimes they would share one between the two of them. And so that was also different in each international school we were at. Some international schools supplied the aid to us and wanted to train them and have them under their own umbrella of their payment. Others said, we want nothing to do with it. You have to interview your own aid. You have to set up training somewhere in between. So it was every school we went to, we really didn’t know we were going to get. So we have experience drawing up contracts for aids and we have experience training aids. And we also have experience with us not being able to do anything and not being happy with an aid, but not really being able to do a whole lot about it. I will just throw in, our favorite school of all was the school that was least prepared for our twins in the sense that they had never, it was a very small school. They were not used to accepting kids with special needs. They were not used to being asked the question. And they were so, they were open -minded but also very cautious. So they were the school that communicated with me the most about, we really want your help, we really want your information about your kids and your feedback. And I found, and that was the best experience for my, for my sons, you know, we’ve been at some of the other schools where, you know, they said we got this, we got this, don’t worry about it. No way, go away, and yeah, not always, not always great results. So highlighting the importance of that communication between schools and families and recognizing that when you are working with a family of children with special needs, that they truly are the experts on their child. And as professionals, we need to listen. 

Lori: Yes. Absolutely. And learn. 

Kathi: Yep. Yes. Yep. But then again, you know, I do know that there still are parents, unfortunately, I think a lot of parents who don’t want to give information because they don’t want to preempt the school with this is, you know, these are my child’s issues. They want to see if maybe they’ll go away if they’re not, you know, in a new start in a new school. 

Lori: Yeah, yeah, we hear a lot of those stories as well. 

Kathi: And so I’m always straight. I’ve always been straight up front. If I don’t tell you something, ask me because I believe the more information I can give the school, the better they are to to help my sons. Yeah, exactly. I have that same mindset. And when anyone asks me if they think they should give the school the information, I say yes, say it. Because so many are worried that their kids won’t be accepted at the school and they may not be, but if they’re not accepted, there’s a reason they’re not accepted and you probably wouldn’t want your child to go there anyway. Yep, yeah, absolutely. So we can’t force it. 

Lori: Yeah. I’d like to. 

Kathi: Yeah, and you know, now that my sons are 22, a lot has changed since they started going to school. So who knows, maybe the experiences that I had in their elementary schools would be completely different for somebody going there now because I do think a lot has. change for the better, I believe, for the most part. 

Lori: For sure. For sure. And we see that through SENIA. More and more schools are opening up their minds, their hearts, and programs to support more and more students, so we’re getting there. Yeah. Well, in 2019, you produced and edited Extraordinary Experiences, Tales of Special Needs Abroad. It’s a book about living with special needs as expats. So what inspired you to write this book? And what did you learn writing it? 

Kathi: Well, what inspired me was actually this experience we had in the small school and So it was it was in Uruguay, which is a tiny country. It’s you know, three million people and nine million cows. So tiny tiny country they we they were at the it was a small American school and It was actually the The combination of of culture and how it plays into How people with special needs are supported because I realized that in Uruguay. The culture was just so warm and low stress and community oriented and I realized that’s actually the the best way to help my twins is to let them feel part of some, let them feel that they fit in somehow or that there’s a place for them in the community. Because most of the other places they’ve, they’ve, they’ve known they’ve been outsiders. 

But in Uruguay they felt, they didn’t feel like outsiders, nearly as much as anywhere else. And so I got really interested in the idea of, you know, what, who else is having these kind of experiences of, of being in cultures where they have a situation that’s, you know, it’s either a medical special need or psychological special need or, you know, learning disability. I was just curious about other people’s stories and I was looking for happy endings, to be honest, I was looking for, for good news because I was also… I felt that our experience taking our twins around the world was overall a very positive thing to do. I felt that it really helped to develop their adaptability and their ability to pivot and see all types of people in the world and maybe find their place in the world. And I wanted other people to not be afraid to be overseas and have these experiences. So yeah, I was basically looking for feel -good stories. But not all the stories in the book were perfectly happy endings, but they all show that we all grow as people when we’re overseas with special needs in some way. And most people found it to be a positive growth. 

Lori: Well, that’s great. And I have read through the book and it is, it is really good. I highly recommend it for all our educators out there, all the families. 

Kathi: Yeah, thank you. I am I, I loved, I loved compiling the essays but one of the things that I really enjoyed was diving into the cultural studies of how culture affects more than just how our kids are treated treated. It’s how we how we communicate with the doctors or how the doctors communicate with us or, you know, how somebody on the bus sitting sitting next to you is going to, are they going to help you when your child is having you know an allergy attack, or are they going to make things harder for you so I just thought that the cultural aspect was really interesting. Yeah, for sure. It’s something we don’t we don’t always think about when we’re looking at, where do we, you know, where do we go live. 

Lori: Yeah, yeah So true. 

Kathi: Yeah, I Do recommend families do so much research before they had overseas So many are surprised when they get to a country and the school won’t accept their child or they find out there’s no occupational therapists or speech pathologists in the area and so Researching that research in the culture around it all of that is it’s important Yeah, well I I had always done all my research on the therapists in the schools Mm -hmm, but not really so much about the culture per se. You know, we just have this assumption that westernized cultures are going to be more like us. And so the medical systems are going to be like ours or the, you know, the people’s attitudes are going to be more like ours, but it’s not always the case, you know, especially like you look at Paris is a really, a really tough place to be for somebody with special needs, because there’s no place for you if you don’t fit in the box in schools. You know, very much the education is very square. And if you’re if you’re around, there’s a place for you, you know, and that’s just their culture. 

Lori: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now that your sons are adults and you know what you know about being an expat, what’s one thing you hope all teachers or school administrators could know about working with families of children with special needs? 

Kathi: Oh, that that’s a really tough question if you’re asking me to narrow it down to one thing or two or 10, but Okay, um Okay, I would say That if you want to do it right if you want to have true inclusion and Not just you know Bring bring kids in because it looks good for your school or because you have to because it’s not posed on you If it’s done, right and the the children really feel like they belong there It it has to be it has to be part of the school culture. And it has to be, it cannot be the principal that’s saying, this is what we’re gonna do because it’s good for the school. It cannot be just one or two teachers saying, I love working with special needs kids. Bring them on, bring them all to me. And yeah, and it has to also include the other students because if the teachers and staff are on board, but the students are bullying the kids behind their backs, that doesn’t work either. So it’s got to be a whole culture of the school. That would be my advice, I mean, yeah. 

Lori: I agree with you. I mean, that’s a great, great one. 

Kathi: I don’t think that’s yeah, it’s I haven’t come up with anything brand new that nobody’s ever thought of before, but I just that’s just so important because we’ve, we’ve had all of those experiences we’ve had schools where we had the most amazing learning support person who was our child, our twins But the other teachers weren’t on board and the learning support teacher actually resigned in protest because the school was not doing enough for our twins. And she knew that if they if the school just gave a little bit more than my twins would be would skyrocket. But so yeah, we’ve seen it all. Yeah, we’ve been we’ve been at schools where everyone’s great for the students were not in the students were bullying my sons behind everyone’s back. So 

Lori: Well, your sons are now 22 years old. What what’s what does life look like for them now? 

Kathi: yeah, so so they they just finished their second year of University and we chose, they chose to go to a university not in the United States. So my home country is the US, my husband’s home country is Ecuador. But the twins don’t really feel like either of those countries are home because they haven’t lived in either place for a long time And we don’t really have networks there anymore they chose to go to a university in the Netherlands because they… We did cultural research. We felt that the Dutch were very open -minded, very liberal. The level of English is extremely high, so we didn’t worry about their communication as much. And we found programs in the Netherlands that we hadn’t found anywhere in the States that are a combination of kind of your typical four -year university combined with like a trade school. So they have a lot of real -life work experiences. They don’t have to take tests. My sons did not like school because they didn’t understand why they had to learn something that was not at all useful for them in the real world, you know algebra or… You know biology if you know your your plants sell life. They’re like we don’t we’re never gonna use again and And test taking was is extremely difficult for my twins so we thought let’s put them in a in a in a program where they have to learn how to do projects with other people and Put together proposals and then actually do internships by the third year. They’re doing internships And and few and fewer and fewer courses and more and more work. 

So they’re there It’s been very challenging both for them and for me for them is challenging because… There are some people with, on the spectrum at this university, but not, it’s not a few, you know, it’s just because they have some technology programs and these are kids that are Asperger’s, as they would say with a quirky, you know, computer programming stuff. That being said, the school’s been amazing. They’ve done everything they can to support the twins. What’s been the hardest was the life skills, getting used to living with others in a dorm the first year. They, you know, having to cook their own food, buy their own groceries, do their own laundry, that kind of stuff. Combining that with academics was overwhelming. And I’ll say the one thing actually that was the, that is still the hardest are the social skills. Because I didn’t realize up until then, I was always kind of there to jump in when things started to get shaky. And it’s amazing how quickly things can spiral out of control, going from shaky to total meltdown and one of my sons getting thrown out of a place because he’s screaming and then him having a panic attack. So that’s hard for them. It’s also very hard for me because I’m not that close to them. I’m an hour and a half plane ride away. So I was getting a lot of phone calls, panic attacks and I don’t know what to do. or I’ve locked myself out of the apartment and banging their heads on the door, like really bad situation. That’s really difficult. 

And my sons, they wanted to be a part of everything. So they would do stupid things. Like they would go to bars and they would drink too much and then get everything stolen from them. And so all of these situations where these kinds of kids are super, super vulnerable, that’s what we’re dealing with now. And for me as a parent, it’s really, really hard to know when it’s a learning experience and when it’s… more than that. And that’s, it’s something that’s going to traumatize them forever. Oh, yeah. And we’re still walking that tightrope. So I actually spend half of my time here in Geneva with my husband and my other daughter and half of my time living in the Netherlands with the twins. So that I can make sure that if things get a little bit shaky, then I can fix it before it gets out of control. 

Lori: It’s hard. 

Kathi: It’s really hard, you know, and the whole stuff dealing with dating, dealing with their realization. They realized just in the past couple of years that. They’re very angry that the neuro -typical world does not accept them. They’ve been listening to a lot of autistic adults that are also very angry, and my sons are also feeling this frustration and need to change the world, and it’s not good. It’s not necessarily healthy, because now they’re like, why can’t they adapt to us? Why do we have to adapt to them? And unfortunately, the world is not going to change fast enough to adapt to them the way they want, so they do still need to learn how to adapt in the world. So it’s finding that little kids, little problems, big kids, big problems. 

Lori: Wow. Well, thank you for sharing all of that with… I think it’s so important for everyone to know that our kids they they don’t grow out of.. grow out of it and you know once they hit 18 and you know graduate high school, it’s it’s it’s still a struggle, it’s so many positives so many wonderful things, of course, but there are absolutely Yeah, I didn’t mean to end this on a on a negative note. 

Kathi: No, no, but I do I I do hope that Yeah, that I guess when when you are raising kids with special needs it is really good to think of the long -term picture and I don’t know just be prepared for for whatever, you know, because my sons want to be super independent and that’s really hard for me because that comes with a lot of, a lot more heartbreak on my side. You know, it would be a lot easier if they still wanted to live at home in a lot of ways. And I could be there to help them more and protect them more. But yeah, yeah. Well, you didn’t end it on a sad note. Don’t you worry. I mean, I, you know, I think, I think they will, I, yeah, I think that, that things will work out in the end, but it’s just, these are really hard years. They are really hard years. Well, I mean, even for our neurotypical children, college years, they come with so, that adulting piece, that life skills piece, doing the laundry, things like that, but it’s just amplified so much. for kiddos like your kids and hard. I could go on and on and tell you less. I really think you might wanna interview kids like my son to get their perspective on what schools can do better or what advice they would give to schools. Cause one of the beautiful things about them getting older is that they’re able to articulate a lot of things now that they couldn’t tell me when they were growing up. And so now I’m hearing stories about things that I never knew, the bullying I never knew about or this feeling of utter despair with the IB program and this complete entrapment that they had to get through it that was the only option at the international school. And it was just so wrong for them and they knew it. And there was, So, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it’s important to get all the voices, right? So, and just a plug for our conference coming up in November, we are talking about amplifying voices in special education and amplifying the inclusive voice. So those are voices of parents of individuals with disabilities of teams at schools, working with individuals, administrators. 

So, yeah, we’re really trying to get all voices included. I would encourage more more voices from from the students themselves. Yeah, for sure. If they’re if they’re we do have a we actually have a student student panel. 

Lori: Okay, that’s going to be there. So yeah, we hope many of you can join us there. So at that, I think we are out of time. So Kathi, I want to really thank you for taking the time today for sharing your story and for sharing your, you know, being vulnerable and sharing about your your twins. We really appreciate just your time and… So, thank you. 

Kathi: It’s been a pleasure. If anything I say is going to help someone else and make their path easier, then it’s absolutely worth it. 

[outro music plays]

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/podcasts. Until next time, cheers. 

Show #81 Changing Perspectives Through Promoting Awareness & Inspiring Empathy

Show #81 Changing Perspectives Through Promoting Awareness & Inspiring Empathy

Today host Lori Boll speaks with Sam Drazin, Founder and Executive Director of Changing Perspectives, one of SENIA’s sponsor organizations and partners. Lori and Sam discuss Sam’s background and inspiration behind starting Changing Perspectives, Sam’s definition of inclusion, the needs of schools in terms of how they can become more inclusive, and his vision for the future of schools. So dive right in and enjoy.

Bio

A nationally recognized educator and changemaker, Founder and Executive Director Sam Drazin applies his personal and professional background to lead Changing Perspectives’s mission to strengthen school communities through social-emotional learning, disability awareness, empathy development, and inclusion. Sam was born with Treacher Collins Syndrome, a rare congenital disorder resulting in both facial anomaly and hearing loss. His experiences, both as a student with a disability and as a teacher working in an inclusive classroom, helped him recognize the importance of supporting students in developing the essential life and relationship skills that underpin equity, inclusion, and social change. The students and educators we work with around the nation are a constant inspiration for Sam.

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Resources from Today’s Show

Transcript

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 hour of content in under thirty minutes, leaving you with time for a true happy hour. 

Lori: Hello, all. I hope you’re doing well. I had a great time on my podcast today. I speak with Sam Drazen, and he’s the founder and executive director of Changing Perspectives. Changing Perspectives is one of SENIA’s sponsor organizations, and also one of our partners. And to be a partner of SENIA, one must be a nonprofit organization. So just to, you know, clarify that for everyone. Today, we discuss Sam’s background and inspiration behind Starting Perspectives, his definition of inclusion, and the needs of schools in terms of how they can become more inclusive. We talk about Sam’s vision for the future of schools and gosh, we just talk about all sorts of things. It’s a really fun podcast and I really hope you enjoy it. So now on to the show. Well, hello Sam and welcome to the podcast.

Sam: Hey Lori, happy to be here.

Lori: Well, you’re the founder and executive director of changing perspectives whose goal is to educate, empower, and inspire students from pre K through high school to become the change makers for tomorrow and to build a more inclusive, just, and equitable society. So your mission is similar to SENIA’s in that we champion inclusion by empowering our global community to connect, learn, and advocate for one another. and you’re also a nonprofit. And so it’s our shared goals that are the reason that we are partner organizations as well. So can you tell us a little bit about changing perspectives and how you fulfill your mission and your vision of promoting awareness and inspiring empathy? 

Sam: Sure, yeah, happy to share. Always happy to share a little bit about what we’ve created over here changing perspectives. So the majority of our work is around partnering with mostly pre -K to 12 schools, although like SENIA, we partner with other organizations as well. And we really offer schools a, what I think of as a pretty unique and holistic sort of all a cart menu of programs and services. We don’t really want to come in top down and say to a school that we’re working with, here’s exactly what you must do, but rather come in side by side holding hands and go, okay, where are you in your inclusion journey? What are the barriers that you’re faced with? And what are the goals that you’re trying to achieve? And how can we help you with that? So we really fulfill our mission by building these partnerships with schools and offering them five different programs and services. So we at Changing Perspectives curate a pre -K through high school, disability awareness and social -emotional learning curriculum. We provide schools the ability to engage with us through coaching hours, professional development trainings, family engagement workshops, and on -site visits as well. So it’s really that menu of five things of curriculum, trainings for teachers, coachings for teachers, family workshops, and site visits that allow us to do our work in a really holistic and customizable way. 

Lori: That’s great. I love how you also include the family. So important. 

Sam: I think it’s really important when we’re trying to change school culture community that we take a moment to educate, engage, and inspire all of the stakeholders in that community. And so families are a really important stakeholder group, and we want to make sure that we provide an opportunity to engage them, educate them in the conversation. 

Lori: Great. And you’re the founder, correct, of your organization? 

Sam: Yes. Yeah, I started it about 10 years ago now. 

Lori: Wow. Well, congratulations. So what inspired you to do the work that you do? 

Sam: Yeah, what inspired me is I was an elementary school general education teacher and realized pretty quickly in my career that there was this expectation on me to educate academically and educate socially and emotionally students in my classroom that were both general education students as well as students that were receiving special education services. 

And it seemed that those two sort of buckets were pretty siloed and that how could I as a teacher help empower all students in my classroom to gain better awareness and empathy towards each other, so that they’re really the inclusion leaders I felt like I was having to kind of force inclusion by saying, you know, you’re going to sit with this student and you’re going to play with this student and realize there was really no support in my school or my district to provide me with the resources and or training that I needed as a teacher to facilitate both academic and social inclusive opportunities with my students in a more authentic, holistic and intentional way. 

Lori: And why is inclusion so important to you? 

Sam: Well, I think, you know, the world is inclusive. You know, it’s kind of interesting. We, in schools, we kind of segregate, right? We track based on ability or disability. And then you go out into the world and we don’t do that anymore. So, you know, if we’re really trying to raise the next generation of inclusive change makers, it’s really important that we provide opportunities to help them to learn those skills in schools rather than waiting till after school. 

I think it’s really, I go to a lot of schools and it seems like we bookend a child’s career with inclusion. So preschools are oftentimes inclusive of students with and without disabilities. And then they get to kindergarten or first grade and we start to segregate based on ability, right? And then the rest of the K -12 experience is segregated. And then if a child chooses to go into the workforce they could be working with people with disabilities. 

If they go to college, we don’t segregate in college. Students with and without disabilities are living in dorms together and going to classes together. So I think it’s really kind of vital for us in our relatively kind of complex world and highly competitive world that we provide these opportunities to build essential skills around empathy and collaborating with others, even if they have a different lived experience than yourself, hoping students recognize the various ways in which we communicate with each other, and all of that in order to position them to be those change makers for tomorrow. 

Lori: You know, I think I’ve mentioned this on my podcast before, but I was doing a presentation to a class of seniors in high school about autism, my experience as a mom who has a son with autism and his experiences in non inclusive environments and things like that. But at the end of the presentation, one of the students was outraged, like literally outraged. And I could just see her seething and I was like, hey, what’s going on? And she said, I am angry that I am a senior in high school and this is the first time I’m learning about this. This is the first time I’m going to be heading out into the world, into college, into the workforce. And I’ve never known about this. We’ve been like cut off from part of society. These students aren’t in our schools, why? They’re not in our classes, why? And so I like what you said, Sam, about it being bookended because, you know, it’s, they’re just. It’s so inclusive in that preschool time, right? And then they’re just phased, phased dried out, they disappear. It’s really disappointing. 

Sam: I find it especially interesting, disability is really the largest minority group in the world. Only minority group that any one of us could join at any moment of any time. But yet it’s the minority group that we talk the least about, right? Schools, they talk a lot about racial diversity. They talk about ethnic diversity. They talk about religious diversity. They talk about gender diversity. They talk about family structure diversity, right? All of that is very often conversation and celebrated in a, or hopefully celebrated in most schools in a positive sort of loud and proud sort of way. but yet disability continues to be this marginalized group that we feel uncomfortable talking about, it’s taboo to talk about, and the saying ignorance is bliss, ignorance isn’t always bliss, ignorance is scary, right? And when we are afraid of something, what does that trigger in human beings? Well, that triggers that flight, fight, or freeze sort of response. And so we have been kind of frozen in time of not talking about disability. And the other piece that people forget is like considering intersectionality, right? A student with a disability or a person with a disability is not just a person with a disability, right? They could be a part of any other sort of identity group at the same time. 

Lori: Yes. Thank you. One of our keynote speakers at our upcoming conferences, Emily Liddell, and she speaks a lot about that as well. Going back to your point of the ignorance part, which causes fear and stress among our students. As a mom, I went in and presented to my son’s first grade class because they were afraid of him. I just showed them pictures of him snow skiing or swimming and asked them, do any of you like to do these things? Just showed some things that they had in common with Braden. You know by the end they they understood that he was a human a kiddo just like them and I did explain his autism and and what his autism looks like for him and also mentioned one of the boys asked if it was catching if they could catch it and I think you know of course, I said no and and I think that I Visibly see a sigh of relief from the kids because then they were like, oh I’m not gonna get this This what Brayden has not that what Brayden has is is a bad thing, you know It’s just they were so concerned In and afraid of him and they were no longer afraid of him just from that simple and I think I spent 30 minutes with them So I love the idea of your curriculum where you’re sharing about different disabilities and the building that empathy piece and understanding. 

Sam: Then awareness really is the foundation for empathy. And empathy is kind of the precipice for the actionable change. In schools, they often describe empathy and maybe this was the way you were taught empathy when you were a student, Laurie, is, you know, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Yeah, and I personally am not a big fan of that sort of way of explaining empathy because a lot of times it is kind of articulated without building any awareness, right? I can’t I can’t have empathy for your son. I can’t put myself in his shoes if I don’t know anything about him. If I don’t know about how he experiences the world. 

And so it’s really important that if we’re really trying to truly teach empathy to our students, whether that’s about disability or something else, that we invest the time, we push ourselves as adults, maybe outside a little bit of our comfort zone to have the tough conversations and build the empathy, build the awareness. And to your point earlier, I think a lot of times when we start conversations with young people about how we’re different, we end the conversation by talking about all the ways that we’re the same. 

Lori: Yeah, so important. So. We’ve talked about why inclusion is important. Let’s go back a little bit. Can you just tell me, what is your definition of inclusion? It can mean different things to different people. 

Sam: That’s a really tough question, to be honest, Lori. I don’t know if I really have a definition of inclusion and with changing perspectives when we support schools, even if we’re supporting multiple schools in the same district, we work with each school individually to come up with their own individualized definition of inclusion. I think there’s lots of verbs that can go into these definitions. And some of the verbs that I hear are things like equity, belonging, participation, access, diversity, and I don’t know if there’s really one definition of inclusion because I think inclusion is relative to the community for which you are a part of. I think having access is something very different than participating. Participating is something very different than belonging. And so I think it’s really about identifying the needs of the community and what does inclusion really look like, sound like, and feel like in that community. One way that I do sort of compartmentalize it, however, with schools is thinking about inclusion in three different components – academic inclusion, physical inclusion, and social inclusion. So if I had to come up with a definition, I would say that inclusion is creating places and spaces where all people are authentically included in the academic experience, the physical experience, and the social experience to cultivate a sense of belonging. 

Lori: Wow. For not having a definition. 

Sam: Oh, that was totally on the plan. This was not scripted, folks. 

Lori: I am very impressed. I’ve been asked that question a lot myself, and it really is hard to put into words. And I just appreciate your thoughts on how it is so dependent on the community that is defining it. So, thank you, appreciate that. Through your work, what are you seeing as the needs of schools when it comes to inclusive practices… You most, you mostly work in schools in the US. Am I correct in that? 

Sam: Yes, that’s the majority of our work. Okay Yeah, so the need you know schools always want the tools and the strategies teachers always say Just give me the tools. Give me the tools. Give me the tools I don’t think the tools or the teaching strategies are the biggest need to be honest Because in order to change actions behavior, we need to change mindsets value systems perceptions and attitudes 

So, I would say the biggest need in schools is shifting mindsets from a medical model of disability to a social model of disability, it is cultivating an inclusive mindset, it is understanding what inclusion actually means, it is working on common language in schools, unpacking ableism and ableistic thinking, so that to me is the biggest need, is how do we, it is easy, once someone has an inclusive mindset, it is easy to change behavior, the hard thing is changing that inclusive mindset, and I think what is really hard is that, at least our public schools in America, we are not designed for neurodiverse students, we are not designed for students with disabilities. So our system, at its core, is ableistic. Our system, at its core, is built for segregation. Our system, at its core, is built to assimilate students rather than celebrate the differences. So we’re kind of trying to shift the mindsets while educators and administrators are stuck in a system that isn’t changing. And so we’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. But I think it’s first changing mindsets, building common language, and then from that it’s the strategies, and then I think organically the system will have to change. 

Lori: So do you think it’s the system that’s causing the mindset like what causes the non -inclusive mindset? Do you have any thoughts on that? 

Sam: I it’s something I don’t know you wake at night … eah, it’s kind of like the what’s the saying… Carp before the horse sort of situation and I’m not sure I mean part of it is the system. But I also think it’s part of how we as a society Starting to change now, but anyone who was pregnant born before 1990 You know, it’s the way that society has kind of made us think about disability as disability is a deficit. That, you know, disability representation is not always there in the media. So I also think it’s a societal sort of influence that’s happened for decades and decades and decades. 

Lori: Thanks. I know that one was a good one. 

Sam: There are no simple answers when it comes to this work. 

Lori: Certainly not. So how do you see the landscape of inclusive education changing? Like what are your predictions or vision for schools maybe 10 years from now? 

Sam: I think one of the things that’s changing is people are not just talking the talk now, but they’re starting to walk the walk. We’re not running the marathon yet, but we’re walking the walk. And I think that is huge progress. You know, I would say 10 years ago when I started changing perspectives, schools were maybe talking the talk. 10 years later, they’re not just talking, but they’re looking to do some things. We haven’t done everything. We’re not fully embracing it, but we’re walking. We’re starting. And so I expect that that kind of is going to continue over time. 

I think there is going to need to be some big system changes that will need to happen in order for us to move the walkathon to a marathon. But I think it is starting to grow. I think people are realizing the importance of inclusive education. I think people are starting to be willing to talk about what isn’t working in a judgment -free way. I think sometimes there is in this bureaucratic society, it’s like, oh gosh, we can’t talk about it. I can’t speak up because then it’s going to reflect poorly on my evaluation as a teacher or something like that. But I think people are willing to speak up. And I think, you know, the work that you’re doing is sending out podcasts like this the work I’m doing it changing perspectives, you know, my friend who’s going to be speaking at your conference Emily who we referenced earlier her book. You know there’s a lot happening in this space. And, you know, it is a grassroots movement, and that’s how grassroots movement make long term sustainable change. 

Lori: Certainly. How do you work with teachers or administrators who say, you know, Sam, I’d love to do all this, but we already have so much on our plate. We’re already so busy. What is your thought behind that? 

Sam: So that’s a mindset issue again, Lori, it’s helping schools recognize that inclusion and inclusive practices. Although we might be going in to support students with disabilities who or who receive special education services that this work is universal design for learning. This work is going to support all students, anything that you might tweak, modify, accommodate for, for students with disabilities is ultimately going to have a ripple effect and help all of your students. So it’s again, it’s a mindset thing and helping schools realize that this is not one more thing. This is what you’re doing all the time. And also helping schools realize for putting a business term in here, the ROI, the return on your investment, right? This is this is a huge exponential positive impact academically and socially for all students. 

Lori: Well, Sam, I am truly inspired by you. I’m inspired by your work at changing perspectives. I’ve learned so much from you just in this really short amount of time today. So before we sign off, is there anything else that I may not have asked you that you would like to share with our community? 

Sam: Oh, gosh. Well, there’s so much we could have asked for hours. 

Lori: I know. 

Sam: Day, week. You know, I think I really, you know, when I give training, sometimes I like to talk about what I call the 10 % rule. And I feel like, you know, our listeners might be listening and getting, you know, really motivated and engaged. Like, oh, I’m going to make change. I’m going to make change. I’m going to make change. And it can feel incredibly overwhelming. And so what I really encourage people to do is think about what can you do in your daily practice to make your community, whatever you define community as 10 % more inclusive. Because if each of us, every day, every week, every month, every year, strives to tweak things by 10%, those 10 % changes really are going to have monumental impact long -term. 

Lori: Brilliant. And I think that’s a great way to end this podcast today. So Sam, thank you for your time and thank you for all you do. 

Sam: Well, thank you for SENIA’s partnership with Changing Perspectives and inviting me to join you in on this really important conversation today. 

[ Outro music plays ]

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

Show #80 Making the World More Inclusive One Playground at a Time

Show #80 Making the World More Inclusive One Playground at a Time

Today host Lori Boll speaks with G. Cody QJ Goldberg, co-founder and Chief Play Officer of Harper’s Playground which inspires and empowers global communities to build radically inclusive playgrounds. Through storytelling, consulting, and unique design principles, they create playful nature-scapes where people of all ages and abilities find belonging and social connection through play. Lori and Cody discuss the inspiration behind Harper’s Playground, Cody’s belief  that a well designed and realized inclusive play space can truly transform a community for the better, and of how schools and communities can design physically inviting, socially inviting, and emotionally inviting spaces.

Bio

Father of two, Cody proudly serves as the Chief Play Officer of Harper’s Playground. A graduate of New York University with a BFA in film and television studies, he co-founded the organization in 2010 along with his wife, April. Together they spearheaded the design, funding and construction of the first Harper’s Playground in Portland, Oregon. A big fan of inclusion of all kinds, Cody is committed to creating opportunities for both of his daughters to build friendships and community for themselves. He believes that the power of a well designed and realized inclusive play space can truly transform a community for the better.

Connect

Resources from Today’s Show

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[ Introduction music plays ]

Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour podcast with your host, Lori Boll. We know you’re busy, so we bring you one hour’s worth of content in under 30 minutes, leaving you time for a true happy hour. 

Lori: Hi everyone. So I was driving down the road a few weeks ago and I was listening to our public radio and came across a story of a family who started an organization called Harper’s Playground. And as soon as I heard the story, I thought, I need to get this group on our podcast and reached out to them and they responded. So I’m quite excited and happy to introduce you to G Cody QJ Goldberg. 

Cody is the father of two and he and his wife, April, co -founded Harper’s Playground. And their mission is to inspire and empower global communities to build radically inclusive playgrounds. Through storytelling, consulting, and unique design principles, they create playful naturescapes where people of all ages and abilities find belonging and social connection through play. So an incredible mission and an incredible organization. Let me tell you a little bit more about Cody. He’s the father of two. He graduated from New York University with a BFA in film and television studies. 

He and his wife, April, spearheaded the design for the very first Harper’s Playground in Portland, Oregon. Cody is a huge fan of inclusion of all kinds and is committed to creating opportunities for both of his daughters to build friendships and community for themselves. He believes that the power of a well -designed and realized inclusive play space can truly transform a community for the better. And I know he’s right. So I won’t go on any longer. I’m just excited for you to hear this episode. 

So now on to the show. Well, hello, Cody, and welcome to the podcast. 

Cody: Hi, Lori, how are you doing today? 

Lori: I’m doing great, and I’m really, really excited you’re here with us today. I was listening to our public radio station and heard your interview, and I thought he must be on the SENIA Happy Hour podcast. Our listeners need to hear from you, so. 

Well, pleasure to be here. So you are the Chief Play Officer and founder of Harper’s Playground, which creates inclusive and accessible playgrounds. Can you share your story behind Harper’s Playground and what inspired you to be part of this really incredible project? 

Cody: Well, for a couple of small corrections, allow me if you will, first and foremost, I’m the co-founder. Yes, co co founder, my wife is the other co-founder, my wife, April. And really, it was actually her idea even in the beginning. So she’s like the first co-founder, I am the sub co-founder. And now, and now chief also chief play officer. And one other tiny correction that we’ll maybe get into. We call our place our playgrounds radically inclusive. You mentioned inclusive and accessible, accessible is something that we consider as one key component of inclusive but not an end, I think, maybe. But I love talking about our design philosophy. We can get into that more. And what it is that makes it radically inclusive. Accessible is the first layer. But by itself, accessible is almost nothing. 

Lori: Yes. That is a great point. And thank you for sharing that. And we will get into it. In fact, can you share your, well, your vision statement, which is similar to SENIA. Our vision statement is to live in an inclusive world. Your vision statement is a more inclusive world, one playground at a time, naturally. So, do you want to share a little bit about that? 

Cody: I do like yours. I think yours is good. Noodling around with mission statements and vision statements is such an interesting thing to do, right? Our vision statement has been the same since the very first playground, which was opened 11 years ago now. The journey began, and you asked about the Genesis too, the journey began for us really 18 years ago, plus when Harper was born, when we entered what people refer to sometimes as disability land. I don’t know if you’ve heard that phrase. 

Lori: Yes, of course. 

Cody: So we entered disability land when Harper was born because it was a very traumatic birth story, like so many people in our community have experienced. We were in the Harper was Harper was in the NICU and we were with her most of the time for a full month. And it was during our time in the intensive care unit with her that somebody suggested taking a blood sample because she had some anomalies that were of interest. And the long story short, we found out that we were on this journey of disability shortly after we got out of the intensive care unit. And they told us that she had a diagnosis of something called Immanuel Syndrome. It’s part of a family of differences called partial trisomy. 

So it’s in the chromosome with numbers 11 and 22. And the geneticists at the hospital where Harper received her diagnosis had never heard of it. They had to Google it. And all they could figure out was to suggest to us that she would never walk nor talk in her lifetime. That was what they told us. 

Lori: That must have been quite the news to get as parents. 

Cody: It was pretty surreal. I mean, I can remember the moment and I felt like, so I studied film and television in college and there’s this thing that you do in movies where the camera comes at you but you’re pulling back and they use it a lot when time stands still and that’s definitely how it felt. I mean, it was a pretty impactful moment. How do you unpack that? So I think I’ve been unpacking it for 18 years to a certain degree, but what I’m really, I think, excited to share about is that while there were initial moments of like fear and dread and concern, you know, those really passed pretty quickly once I started to just recognize that one of the many, one of the many beautiful gifts that Harper has brought into our life is that if we’re just present with her in the present moment, there’s nothing wrong. And what a gift that is to have somebody in your life who is constantly reminding you not to worry about the future, but to be present. So, anyhow, the story that I guess is the Harper’s playground genesis story is that four years later, she had learned how to walk with this little yellow walker. 

And we took her on her maiden voyage, we took a walk in our neighborhood park. And that park had a playground within it that was like typical playgrounds surrounded by wood chips. And that little walker that she was using got stuck in those wood chips and my wife, who gets the full credit for co-founding the organization and even thinking of this. She got really mad like immediately that that design injustice had like caused harm to our daughter on the day she started walking and she said we should do something about this. So that became the start of Harper’s Playground back in the summer of 2009 is when this all started. 

Lori: Wow. So Harper is quite your inspiration and April. Throw out all the props to her for her idea. Credit where credit is due, but you two have worked on this together along with family and investors and such, I’m sure to make this happen. 

Cody: So, yeah, it’s been an amazing journey. And that first journey, you know, it’s, I guess, in chapters, or I’d say there, let’s call it a book, this book has several chapters. The first chapter was Harper’s birth story and learning about disability world and another props I’d love to give I don’t, I would imagine you all know in your network about Kathy snow. She wrote a book called disability is natural. She’s a speaker that April and I listened to a passionate speaker about inclusion. And we listened to her around the time I’m imagining Harper was about a year old, it was in the first year of her life. And that had set us up to now lifetime of being inclusion advocates. That speech, the talk that we heard from Kathy Snow and then the experience we had at the playground, those melded together. And the first three years of Harper’s Playground, what you’re talking about, we started with a bake sale in front of our house. 

And in three years, we had raised $1 .2 million and come up with a very innovative design. And most impressively, if I’m going to throw my shoulder out patting myself on the back, most impressively, we got it built. That is no easy task to navigate a city bureaucracy. And basically, we showed up at the city’s door and said, you’re doing it all wrong. We’ll show you how to do it. And they don’t necessarily say, oh, great. Thank you for telling us we’re doing everything. Here’s the keys to a public park. You do it. That’s not how it was. 

Lori: And your first playground was built in Portland, Oregon. 

Cody: Yep, Portland, Oregon. Our family has since moved to Vancouver, Washington, just across the river. But many of our projects are here still in the Pacific Northwest. But we have one as far away as Tokyo, Japan. 

Lori: Yeah, I saw that on the website. And that is a incredible looking playground. So I’ll encourage people to check that out. So tell me about the word “naturally” that you’ve added to the end of your vision. 

Cody: Well, I am big on double meaning, if you can get it. And that’s what it’s meaning here. We use nature in our design quite a bit. And so nature, everyone deserves play. Everyone deserves community and everyone deserves access to nature. And natural features make for a better playground as well. So that’s what that word means in a more literal sense. 

We also believe that inclusion is the natural order of things. That children are born to be inclusive and they learn to exclude, especially through experiencing built environments that encourage exclusion. So that’s something, that’s part of why the word is there. I work with community groups all the time and it just blows my mind that adults in the room, and I think I said this in that OPB interview that you heard, but adults in the room that we work with all the time are trying to convince us that what we’ve already done is impossible, that you can’t build an environment that works for people like Harper and also works for people who are typically developing, right? It’s impossible that there has to be a trade -off, right? It’s gonna not be as cool for those other people. And the children in the room, we work with kids all the time, the children in the room are always quick to say, of course we can do it. And not only of course can we, but we must, like there’s no, we can’t compromise. 

Lori: Of course, yeah. 

Cody: So that’s why I say it’s a natural order of things. Kids are inclusive. Yeah, and just thinking about that whole idea of universal design for inclusion. It’s not hard to imagine if… you just imagine it, if you’re willing and open. And I think as adults, you know, people just get stuck in their ways. 

Lori: Yeah. 

Cody: So, yeah. Luckily for me, I never grew up. That was something I was adamant that I would never do. So I found the perfect work for myself as a forever child, which is designing playgrounds. 

Lori: I love it. I love it. Well, you mentioned that you believe that the power of a well -designed and realized inclusive place space can truly transform a community for the better. So can you elaborate on that a little bit? I think you already shared a bit, but I’d love to hear more. 

Cody: Well, I think it all boils down to one of our key philosophies, which is it’s not the stuff you put in the playground that really matters that much. It’s the people that are invited to be within it. And so the true magic of Harper’s Playground is nothing to do with what we actually put in there. It’s minimalism. And when you create a space that really does draw the widest variety of people, people love variety. They just do. We just we love it. And so it’s so you create connections with different types of human beings. So you learn about stories from different types of people. So it’s just magic. And it’s all about making sure that the widest variety of people can be there. 

And I think the benefits that we’re talking about, we hear about people who meet future mates at you know, at spaces like this, or people find out that they can help each other, you know, it’s just the power of community. And there’s a bit of an epidemic in this, especially in this country, but really globally taking place of isolation. The U .S. Surgeon General put out a report just this year, Our Epidemic of Loneliness, and social isolation is killing people, quite literally reducing their lives, lifespans. And their number one recommendation to combat social isolation was physical environments that encourage social connection. So I guess that’s what I’m talking about. 

Lori: Yeah, brilliant. Well, in March, SENIA is holding its annual in person conference and our conference will be in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. And the theme for our conference is designing for inclusion. And so I’d love for you to talk about the design elements that go into making a playground. What does that planning process look like? 

Cody: Well, a good design process certainly begins with site selection. So, you know, the design work doesn’t doesn’t start once you already have a place selected it’s choosing a good location for us with outdoor outdoor play environments that includes everything from existing tree canopy back to nature being so important and the shade that big trees offer Other amenities that you’re going to engage with so we think about everything from bus lines and parking to bathrooms that existing infrastructure. That’s so important to think about when you’re thinking about designing for inclusion is what’s already there, like what, what, where, where, where is it even physically with other surroundings. In terms of like Is it at the center of things or is it at the edge of town kind of thing, you know, is it going to, is it going to be closer to everybody. 

So there’s all those considerations in the beginning, but once you have a site. And that’s often where we come in because we do often work with people who have a site already. And we’re thinking about inclusion, it first does start with accessibility. And if it’s not accessible then it’s never going to be inclusive. But if it’s only accessible, that’s just not enough, but it’s the first layer of what we call physically inviting. So, to be a physically inviting space it has to be accessible and then the next piece is adaptive. What is so accessible gets you to something adaptations allow you to use it. The most users to use it. So that’s the first order of business for us is physically inviting. Then we like to talk about socially inviting. Designing for social connection includes things like circular seating areas with cutouts. So a wheelchair can fit into a notch, let’s say, and be seated next to a friend and not in the way. If there’s a circular seating and there’s no breaks in it, then the wheelchairs are in the way. As an example, choosing features that encourage and support multiple people using them at a time, because inclusion is really about connection, not just about being in the same location. So for us, that’s a group swing, let’s say, or things of that nature. Also, we add a lot of nature because, natural materials put us in a better social frame to connect with one another. So we design for social connection and that’s what we call socially inviting. So again, number one, physically inviting, number two, socially inviting. Then number three, we talk about emotionally inviting. That next layer, when we’re really emotionally safe and happy, we’re even more likely to connect with friends and have a good time. And so that’s where we put in artwork and good design. Good design is hard to totally qualify and quantify, but you know it when you see it. Luckily, nature has been well designed. I don’t know if you know who designed nature, but I know that they did a good job. 

Lori: Absolutely. 

Cody: There you go. Physically inviting, socially inviting, and emotionally inviting. That’s a big part of it. 

Lori: Fascinating. So most of our listeners are currently working at international schools worldwide across the globe and so they may not be able to take part in building some like supporting a community space but more so maybe working with their own school playgrounds to be to make them radically inclusive. So might you have some suggestions on how they can get started? Or is this something that your group does? 

Cody: Well, yeah, we do. We do consultations all the time. We’ve been working with schools. In the very beginning, when we were just starting out, we were really prioritizing community playgrounds. Just because they’re open to all all the time and a school is really more of a private setting for such a long part of the day, but as we’ve grown we’ve turned our attention to schools and schools are. We want every outdoor and even indoor environment to be inclusive. It’s pretty simple, you know if you add some boulders and some trees. That that often can really transform a space. You know, most schools, at least in the US are just vast wastelands of asphalt. And so when we come in and help folks we have them carve out a certain area to remove the asphalt, plant some trees, put in some boulders, and that’s a great start. 

It really, children are so hardwired to play that they will play anywhere. We just have to do less harm by creating like hot. You know, hot deserts of asphalt with a plastic structure on them that just doesn’t work. But so, you know, it can be as simple as a it’s not rocket science. I’m here to tell you if I can figure it out, anyone can figure it out. Yeah, and the boulders I imagine they they not only encourage climbing but just hanging out and being with one another. So that social piece. 

Lori: Yeah, fascinating. They’re also really tactile typically for, you know, running your hand on so children who need and are drawn to different sensory inputs boulders are great for that too. 

Lori: And your website has pictures of all the different playgrounds that you’ve supported along the way. And so I’ll put the website link in our show notes for our listeners to take a look at as well. So tell me about your job title, Chief Play Officer. 

Cody: Yeah, that’s a dream come true to have a title that I want. I never set out to be an executive director, which is what I was before this. And it speaks to my desire to remain playful all the time. And to remember and to focus on the fact that we are designing spaces for play. And that play. Play is fascinating. I love, I’ve read so much literature about play. It’s almost impossible to really define what play is. It has such a multifaceted beautiful gem of a thing. But I love it. I love the fact that play is so good for us and that it brings forth joy. It’s enjoyable to do and it’s so healthy to play, not just for children, but for everybody to hold on to play and to remain playful. And so I have that title and I wear a hat. I know this is not video, but I wear a hat with the word play on it all the time. 

Play is the way. I like to say that play is actually the way we’re going to create a better world And then one of the things that I love about play is play is is play is naturally inclusive if you’re excluding people from a game, then you’re not playing because Play would play would never exclude plays is is is such a egalitarian empathetic perfect state of being that I think it’s a it’s an ideal that I just try to keep at the forefront of everything I’m doing. 

Lori: I love it. And also, so you’ve got your hat that says play and then your sweatshirt says inclusion is dope. I love. Do you sell those? 

Cody: They’re for sale on our website. 

Lori: Are they? Awesome. Okay, I’m going to get off here and buy one. immediately. 

Cody: Yeah, we have. I’m an older man now. It’s amazing to say that because in my mind, as I said, I’ve never grown up. I’m a little bit older at least. I’m 54 years old. We have an associate board that came up with this merchandise line. They were like, we need to attract a younger audience to Harper’s Playground. And so that was their idea to come up with this merch line. Inclusion is dope because dope is good. It turns out the kids and it’s also eye catching and all the rest. But yeah, inclusion is awesome. 

Lori: Yeah, that’s a great, great phrase. So what’s next for Harper’s Playground? What do you have going on that you’re excited about? 

Cody: I’m excited about so many things. We just opened our largest, most ambitious project this past weekend in Vancouver. So we’re gonna spend a lot of time celebrating it and activating it. We do an annual fundraiser that will be at that playground September 23rd. 

But we have two projects in the Pacific Northwest that we’re designing in a town called Bothell, Washington. It’s a suburb of Seattle. We have one really exciting project in Selma, Alabama. It will be John Lewis Memorial Playground. 

And then we don’t have the project actually to speak of yet, but I have to make it happen. I promised Harper’s younger sister Lennon that she would get a playground of her own in New York City. And so I’m behind schedule on that. So I have to make that happen sooner than later. 

Lori: Ah, go Lennon. 

Cody: Yeah. 

Lori: And does Lennon have design, like her own design for this playground or ideas? 

Cody: Lennon has a lot of ideas. She wants everything possible in there, and it would be my job to help her learn the art of minimalism so that we make make room for the people. But she is Lennon is 14, and she has spent 13 of those 14 years completely immersed in Harper’s playground work. She always is recognizing if a place is not accessible and she she’s not only committed to the work, but she wants her own playground in her own name because her sister has many in her name. So there’s a little jealousy thing there. 

Lori: Well, sure. Who can blame her? But it is often the siblings who take on this role and there are, I don’t know, eyes and ears on inclusion. 

Cody: Yeah, for sure. 

Lori: Well, Cody, I think we’re about out of time for today. But thank you for your time. Thank you for your commitment and compassion and for building a more inclusive world one playground at a time. So I really appreciate it. 

Cody: Lori, thanks for having me. It was a fun conversation. I hope that people enjoyed it. 

Lori: Oh, they will. And I’m sure you’ll be getting a lot of purchases of your sweatshirts upcoming. 

Cody: They all, every penny goes to building more playgrounds. 

Lori: Perfect. 

[Outro music plays]

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/podcasts. Until next time, cheers. 

[ Outro music plays ]

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

Show #79 The 4 A’s of DEIJ

Show #79 The 4 A’s of DEIJ

Host Lori Boll speaks with Kevin Simpson, the founder of one of SENIA’s partner organizations, AEILOC, which stands for the Association of International Educators and Leaders of Color. Today Kevin and I speak about AEILOC’s important  work, address privilege, and touch upon the intersectionality between SENIA’s and AEILOC’s missions and visions. Kevin shares the 4 A’s that all international schools should think about when addressing DEIJ work; Acknowledgement, Awareness, Action, & Advocacy.

Bio

Kevin Simpson is a native of Flint, Michigan who owns and operates KDSL Global, an international education consulting company which launched in 2016 in the USA and in the United Arab Emirates. He and his team have served thousands of schools, educators, and leaders worldwide in over 60 countries. He was an international school educator and leader serving in Laos, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Simpson is founder of the Association of International Educators and Leaders of Color.

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Resources from Today’s Show

Transcript

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 hour of content in under thirty minutes, leaving you with time for a true happy hour. 

Lori: Hello, listeners today, I speak with Kevin Simpson, who’s the founder of one of SENIA’s partner organizations, AIELOC, which stands for the Association of International Educators and Leaders of Color. Kevin has worked as an international school educator in Laos, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. And on top of all that, Kevin owns and operates KDSL Global, which is an international education consulting company which launched in 2016 in the USA and in the UAE, he and his team have served thousands of schools, educators and leaders worldwide in over 60 countries today. Kevin and I speak about AIELOC’s important work, address, privilege and touch upon the intersectionality between our organizations. I really know you’ll enjoy today’s conversation as much as I did. So now on to the show.

Well, hello, Kevin and welcome to the podcast. 

Lori: Hello, Laura, thanks for having me. It’s exciting that you’re here. I really appreciate you being here. Kevin, you’re an important part of two organizations KDSL 

Kevin: Global and AIELOC. In fact, you’re the founder of AIELOC, right? I am, I’m the founder of AIELOC. We’re celebrating, we’re still in year six, but we’ll be celebrating year seven soon. 

Lori: Wow, congratulations. For our listeners who may be new to your organization, tell us what it is and what called you to start it. 

Kevin: Definitely. So, AIELOC was set up initially as a Facebook group. What had happened was we had some colleagues who shared some unfortunate situations around recruitment that dealt with race and gender. And so I think it was sort of this increase, being curious, are these experiences we’re having in 2017 that we’re being told, don’t apply for certain positions because you don’t fit these identity markers. And so it sort of moved from a Facebook group into an association in 2019. And at that point, our focus became on those that, you know, were being impacted, tended to be folks of color who identified as a person of color, whether it was around race, multiracial, but also gender and then it sort of sort of morphed, to be honest, you all these other stories came out around. Yeah, this has happened to me and this is my background, this is my identity marker and this is why I’m not able to progress within the International School ecosystem, whether it was in leadership or teaching positions.

And so for us, our big three became focused on advocacy. How do we advocate for ourselves? But not only that, how do we advocate for each other? So this sense of community advocacy learning again, what do we need to learn? as it relates to ourselves, learn about the, the ecosystem and about others. And then our, a component of research because we found a lot of people were doing doctoral programs or the PhD/EdD. But they were like, there’s not a lot of research when it comes to, you know, issues of race, gender and class at times in the international school space specifically. And so, yeah, so we’re in year six. It’s been a labor of love. I honestly see it not as, you know, in terms of letters, you know, in terms of DEIJ, I see it in terms of people and humans. I feel like if humans aren’t on my calendar, if humans aren’t on my whatsapp, if humans aren’t in my email, that’s a problem. So we for us, it is about relationships. It’s about people, it’s about making sure that people are able to be themselves and flourish within our international school ecosystem.

Lori: That’s amazing, amazing work. And we’ve had several members of AIELOC on our podcast in the past, Dominique Blue, Daniel Wickner, Joel Llaban. So they’ve all shared the tremendous, impact AIELOC has had, in their lives and, helped us learn how to be more of an ally in, in your work. So, we appreciate you greatly. So, how do we get people to think outside of their own experience when it comes to, you know, racism and other forms of discrimination? 

Kevin: Oh, yeah, that’s a great question for me. I, I think it honestly comes down to, you know, one word. I’ve been reading this book by Doctor Tom. He was one of the speakers at a conference I did in Dubai before and he wrote on SCL some years ago, wrote on leadership. He’s with ASCD and he has a book out on empathy. and it’s specifically around like being a leader and thinking about radical empathy and, you know, we think about the word sympathy and empathy and I always think about it is when I come to fully understand and fully listen to people and acknowledging them and not stopping there but thinking about like, how could I be of support. And so I think for us a lot of it is dealing with empathy. 

And so I feel like there are so many just stories shared and obviously work around child protection that, you know, came and was, has been a part and that is gonna always be a part of our system and, you know, I feel like, and a lot of us feel like, and we’ve said this, that, you know, when it comes to discrimination, racism, sexism, whatever ism we want to call it because there’s a lot of ISMs in this world that falls underneath that same categories, like, how are we protecting each other? How are we being a source of support for each other? And I think as leaders and as teachers, and it’s interesting, this ties into the session I’m gonna be doing for the conference because I know we’ll get there. But that, you know, how are we making sure that everyone has a voice, like literally, and I, I think that’s the piece. It’s like if there shouldn’t be this, we only listen to certain people, we only listen to certain groups. Like how do we truly, really make sure that everyone has a voice and it’s being heard and listened to and if it’s in a situation where I don’t know what to do or what to say that I am doing something, I’m seeking an outside resource if we don’t have it within our, you know, our zone or our location, our geography.

And I really feel like that’s it. And it’s been interesting to see different leaders come in at different points like we’ve had people say that, oh my goodness. I just read this, I just heard this, I just saw this. I need to be doing more work, you know. So you know, call to action because to say like that we, we can’t say they’re not, you know, that they’re, we live in this perfect international ecosystem. We can’t say it’s been solved. You know, we heard stories last year of, oh, that Deij thing. We have it down we’re doing, you know, it’s like, oh, wait a minute, we wanna all know what you’re doing over there so that we, you know what I mean? So we can all be doing what you’re doing since you’ve, you know, “fixed it and got it” and did it while everyone else is like, I’m a work in progress. You know, you, you will admit that, you know, when it comes to ableism, when it comes to language, when it comes to, again, there’s so many different identity markers when we think about diversity of this world. And again, I think that’s the thing for me that is the, the joy, but also it’s the pain at times. It’s the remembering that, you know, I’ve been brought up a certain way. I’ve been, you know, bred a certain way. We’ve been, you know, we’ve been schooled a certain way. And so a lot of this is unlearning. It’s unschooling, you know, and for me, it’s, it comes back to what I went to Michigan State and they really talked about this lifelong learner. And to me this has been a, you know, a real big reminder of what it means to be a lifelong learner.

Lori: Yeah. Beautiful response. Well, and it leads me to my next question. Do you have any, advice for someone? You know, you, you mentioned the, the school that says they’ve got it, the DEIJ, you know, down. So what advice might you have for someone who’s experiencing diversity dishonesty where a company or an organization or an international school works hard to look like they’re invested in diversity and slowly realizing the continued lack of internal changes to support their diverse community.

Kevin: Yeah. and we’ve definitely seen that. I think it’s from the stance of, you know, either I put photos here, I put a message here and again, it might appear as though we’re doing whatever we say we’re doing, you know, and I think it comes back to like mission and vision, you know, I, I was always big on it when it came to strategic planning and when it came to accreditation and any sort of external, internal looks at ourselves as an organization, a school organization was. what are we, what are the words saying? And how are we living the words? And to be honest, I think there has been a lot of this, you know, and again, good intentions, our intent is we wanna attract whoever we want to attract those that have normally not been at our school. You know, whether it’s parents, teachers, leaders, but it’s, you know, I, I come back to the four A. My four A always ask and sort of get a sense of where people organizations are. 

  1. Have you acknowledged your history? So let’s look and see who you are or who you have been as an institution. So, historically, all your leaders have been males, they’ve all been white, just acknowledge it and say it, it is what it is. But at the same time, if your students, your parents are saying we want to push and move towards, you know, a, a male or a place that is a little bit different. We want to ensure that our applicant pool does not mirror what we have been historically. Then again, say that that’s, I think that’s the biggest thing. Say where and who you are, you know. Number 2 is awareness. So how are we making ourselves more and more aware? What do we need to do once we have made that acknowledgement? Now, we want to increase our awareness of whatever we say we want to focus on and hone in on. So that means like there’s gonna be some financial, financial resources that are designated towards that specific focused, they’re gonna be professional learning, internal, external that are focused on that. And then with the awareness comes the action again, what are we doing and what are we consistently doing? You know, and it shouldn’t be a, ok. So we did this year one and two, but we’re talking about the life of your institution. If you’ve acknowledged it, you’ve increased awareness, you know, that that action is gonna be ongoing and you’re gonna be thinking about policy long term. What can we do that’s gonna be even beyond a leader and a teacher who’s there. So 5, 10 years from now, how we know that that change actually stood the test of time, you know, it just wasn’t about an individual being there. And finally advocacy. So again, it, it’s beyond my context, it’s beyond where I’m currently standing and sitting, how am I in my global community being an advocate for or like you said earlier, about being an ally, being an advocate for others, you know, outside?

Lori: Love it, love those A’s. It’s interesting in the autism world, there’s also the four A’s which are very similar. So that can lead us right into that intersectionality piece of your work and SENIA work, you know, for SENIA, we’ve recently changed our mission, or not our mission, Well, yeah, we changed our, but we’ve also changed our, but we’ve also changed our vision. and it’s very simple now and it’s just to live in an inclusive world. So what? Yeah, because, you know, we, we are in our mission, we are advocating with for disabled people and empowering our educators. But that vision just to live in an inclusive world, we want to include everyone in that vision. So what are your thoughts on our intersectionality? 

Kevin: Definitely. And I love it. I, you know, I was reading on it and reflecting on it and like you’re saying a lot of times it doesn’t even need to be a paragraph to live in an inclusive world. So how do we, you know, going back to like words and actions? So when we do conferences, how are we doing that? And it was interesting, we had our, we’re planning our conference coming up and guess what, what we talked about yesterday? How inclusive were we being? Are we looking at? You know, and not just for people to film, how specific are we being but also making place for. And it was interesting that the comment came up about the word other because a lot of times you’ll see when you’re filling out forms, it’ll say if it’s, you know, here are some of the different markers other. And so we’re like, how do we, I know. So we’re like, how do we, you know, exit the use of the word other because we don’t want anyone to feel other, you know, that people are feeling included. And then again, if, you know, and noting that, you know, instead of using the word other, how we phrase it differently.

And I feel like, you know, definitely, like you said, in terms of intersectionality, that’s, that’s what we want too. We want this free flowing, you know, where we’ve really thought about everybody, you know, we really thought about everybody. And I think that’s been a growing point for us, you know, as a because again, we really did the root of beginning and getting started was race and gender because that’s how the Facebook reform, you know, it was, you know, someone being told they want a white man, you’re a black woman, they don’t want, you know, they want someone from the certain country and it was like, what, you know, and so that, you know, the focus was and then through out, you know, through the, the last few years, again, that intersectionality of neuro diverse individuals, thinking about ableism, thinking about language and knowing that this work really, it’s, it’s bigger and it’s more and for us to not you know, think about it for us to not acknowledge and to not collectively work side by side. What are we saying? Because we’re actually, we’re actually doing what’s already being done. And so I always, as we mentioned, it’s interesting when we talk about inclusion, going back to the acknowledgement, I’ve asked actually schools and people, you know, you know, they’re saying we’re, we’re inclusion, we’re inclusive, we’re to, we’re towards being inclusive. I said, well, have you had that conversation about exclusion? You know, it’s like, let’s go like now it’s like, let’s acknowledge who and where we’ve been, we want this, this is our vision to be inclusive. But where have we been? Why have we been there? And why has it taken so long for us to really, you know, acknowledge, I remember like early years in, you know, being in international schools where there were situations where they wouldn’t let kids in because they’re like, we don’t have the resources, but there was no attempt to solve it at, at the same time. Just like, well, what are we doing? Well, trust me when I say that’s still happening, you know, and it’s, it’s that always that line of we don’t have the resources.

And so my, my response is always, well, let’s get the resources exactly. You know, and I mean, I know that’s a very simplistic answer, but it can be, it can, it can work, right? Because it’s almost like how else will change happen when and how will occur and who’s gonna do it. So, always say that same response. Guess what? Here’s now the same response. Nothing. And I guess you have to want to, you know, you wanna make it happen. So instead of always falling back on that, that response.

Lori: So well, have you seen successful DEIJ initiatives or programs in our international school community? 

Kevin: Yeah, great question. I where I see them, you know, there’s, there’s a range of them. And to be honest, I was on with our some of our leaders yesterday, most recently, we have some new fellows who are coming on board. We’ll be announcing them soon and we talked about in the classroom, you know, I think a lot of times what we’re hearing and seeing is, oh, you know, there’s, the leadership team has formed a DEIJ, you know, team or committee and, you know, they’re gonna attack this, they’re attending this and they’re bringing this and they’re looking at this. But I’m like, but let’s come back to the heart and soul of it in the classroom every single day. So how are those literacy? How are those math, how are those homeroom, those advisories? Because for us, it’s about the life of the institution. And so when you say the life of the institution as everybody, you know, so it’s not the couch over here with a team or it’s everybody you know, the parents are aware the students are, you know, so I think so for us… 

I think Kristina Pennell-Götze, she definitely stands out in Germany in terms of the student action and students taking action group that stands out. There’s a student and again, a lot of these are gonna be students, let me be frank. There are student groups of alumni, Organization to Decolonize International School. And when I’m citing these groups and organizations again, it’s coming right back to what we want as part of the, the SENIA virtual conference too. Acknowledge those that we have heard of maybe but maybe some that we’ve not heard of. There’s a Black student alliance group that’s out of Vienna. It’s reset revolution out of you, you know, so I can keep going on on it’s students in Vietnam. So know if I’m saying more students than I am saying teachers than we were in our meeting, guess who we were talking about centering even for our January conference in Vietnam. Students. How are we gonna consistently make sure that they are a part of this? Not an add on but they’re at the center of this, you know, and I’ll be honest, the thing that keeps me going artist do you know, I love the teachers. I love the leaders. I see where we are as adults but the students will hold us accountable. You know, they were saying you said this you know, and you’re doing this, so your words said this, but your actions either are or not matching. And so that’s for us, we want that and we have some, again, phenomenal interns who again will hold us accountable, you know, and that’s, that’s what we want to hear and see more of and from. 

But again, like, I feel like the adults are in that learning mode that, you know, team mode again, doing some great things around recruitment, you know, and changing practices. But I think the, the better places that, where I see it is where the students are actually taking, their, the students are leading, the students are actually are in the driver’s seat, their voices are given space in place. But like I said, yeah, there’s a lot of professional learning going on with teachers. There’s a lot of, you know, doing curriculum audits, there’s a, there’s a lot of that stuff and again, places that know it’s gonna take time because things have been done a certain way over time, really get it versus that we’ve arrived and we, you know, we got it, it’s, it’s, it’s all handled, you know, because even the place where it’s been done 30 plus years, I mean, they still are like, we’re a work in progress, there is work to be done, you know, and we’re constantly thinking about who’s, you know, who are centering, who are we not centering? Who’s been included, who’s not been included and how do we make, you know, make sure that we are consistently allowing space for our own learning and growth.

Lori: Yeah, you know, I keep bringing this back to SENIA but everything you said or it just reminds me, you know, our original logo was the student at the, at the center and it soon changed to a heart. So our, our logo is a heart and that it all focuses around this. The student being the heart of every decision that we we make at and that it follows our mission. So I’m with you. So here’s a, here’s one, they say this is from one of our one of our senior members. I, I reached out and asked if someone could help me with this question. So his question is they say that when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression, what are some ways we could provide our international school school communities to understand and reflect their privileged identities? That’s a biggie, isn’t it? 

Kevin: It’s a biggie and it, you know, in this day and age we, we both know it is controversial. Let’s be real. You know, we, we’ve seen, you know, you know, I’m in the States, but I obviously my feet and my brain and you know, hands and things are all over the world. And so, you know, obviously we hear these stories of, oh, we don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, you know, we wanna as though that’s the world that we live in. like, so it’s just like, wait and, you know, I think for me and, it was a conference I was at recently and that this was a talk and it was about, some of the things done when it comes to, the different trips that, you know, youth groups take. And, and I don’t remember we did a trip but it wasn’t a trip in the form in which, you know, I think it’s more service related, you know, ie we go to a country, we might volunteer, we might give some money and then we leave. Yeah, I mean, let’s be real, let’s be, let’s be real. like what message are we sending? Like, what does that say and what learning is actually happening? And so I feel like when it comes to that privilege, it’s that it, again, it has to be this ongoing work and acknowledgement of sort of where folks are at where when it comes to access, what we have access to how others in our context are and what that means. So I remember when I moved to LA and they said people live on $2 or less a day. Yeah, I literally went, I’m in my math mind, went straight to like, OK, so two or less. So if you do get two on that day you know, times a week you’re talking 14 times, you know, in a month you’re talking 56 do you know? And I literally went to, whoa wait. Ok. So I’m making this like an average, you know, it heightened my awareness of, you know, when it came to passports and came to, you know, treatment. And so, and for me, I feel like if I’m not using my privilege for the good of others, that’s an issue. So how am I thinking about access, not for myself. So how am I putting myself over here to the side? 

But how am I looking and thinking about others and not in a short term type of thinking for, you know, format, which is where I think some of the study trips, you know, wrong, I’ll be frank, you know. So it’s like, how are we establishing ongoing relationships and partnerships and thinking long term? And so I think in the same sense of privilege too is the same thing. And I remember someone saying like people who do the type of work we do, it’s not about money, it’s not about rich. It’s, it’s not about, it’s same thing with teaching. It’s not, I ain’t going to teaching because I want to be whatever. When it comes to money. It was, it’s never been about that. You know, it comes to that heart that you said of it. It comes back to centering students, it comes back to things that I can’t even see that are gonna be like the messages and emails I get from students from like 2005 when I first went overseas that were like, like, wow, that was 18 years ago. And like you all are added me on Facebook, which you can now because you’re over 18, you know, you’re, you’re now grown adult. So again, it’s those things that, you know, we can’t see. So again, when I think about, you know, it’s, I think about individual privilege, but also I think about sort of this collective privilege and to know that, you know, our space, there is a lot of privilege and it could be used in different ways. And so I think once we make that we’re more aware and have that heightened sense of that. It’s how we think about it, but a collective good. 

Lori: Yeah. everything you say, I’m just always, I’m just like, feel like I’m learning so much and you’re so well spoken, it’s just beautiful. So, thank you. Let’s hop on over to your, our virtual conference that we’re having in November and people can watch our videos, sorry, people can watch our videos for six months afterwards. So that’s great news. But tell us about what you’ll be speaking about. 

Kevin: Yeah, I sure will. So, number one, I’m excited about the, the theme I feel like unifying voices of inclusion is one that is so timely. you know, one thing I think that in partnerships such as with SENIA and other groups and organizations just looking for, you know, how do we compliment each other? So what are opportunities to obviously do core and create space and think about again, what doesn’t exist and what hasn’t been addressed and how can we enter into that space so far? This session, I’m very excited. The word voice came to me and, you know, obviously looking at the, the theme of the conference, but then I’m, you know, we live in an acronym world when it comes to education. I literally like literally just looked at the word and I thought about, OK, what’s currently going on, you know, messages that we get that we hear at a or things that are sent to us. And I just thought about, you know, how much, how much are we really valuing and putting value and you think about value, you think about the work value and amount and things like that, but how much are we truly valuing those in the community who are like willing to do the work that we’re doing? Who are, you know, taking a step out, who are going against the norm, going against history, history, their story going against narratives. And so in the session, which voice taken word is value, organizing individuals, com committed to equity. And so again, I think I want less of my voice and I want more of the voice of others. So in terms of me, so and folks who know me know that I’m never going to, it’s never gonna be all about me anyway. So I’m gonna be like, who’s out here doing this work? That again, folks might not know about folks that may, they may know about and groups and how do we give them a platform and let others know who might be at the? I’m thinking about doing this, you know, or oh, I’m not for sure and let them know that there is a community, there are others who have did what you’re seeking to do. And so I think that’s the, the format that, that we’re going for. 

Lori: That’s really exciting. I can’t wait to see it. So, well.. I think, oh no, before we pop off, I’d love to know what’s next for AIELOC. Do you have goals for this year for the future, where are you at? 

Kevin: We do. So we got some big stuff. So we’re excited to launch and this was talked about almost over three years ago. Again, thinking about sustaining the work. We’ve seen an increase in international schools who either are bringing on a DEIJ leader some which I would say in less in a full-time capacity. And again, we feel like we will advocate for if someone is in DEIJ leader role that they they’re working number one across the entire organization school, they are on, they should be on senior leadership team, they should be paid accordingly. It shouldn’t be a percentage type of thing. So in place this is where they’re, you know, sort of getting started with those roles, you know, we definitely advocate for making sure that it’s not a, I’m a DEIJ leader plus these five other things because that’s not gonna work, you know. But we’ve seen an increase in that. And so we are collaborating with Sunny Buffalo State University for the first DEIJ certificate program. Again, we felt like there’s a lot that’s on offer, but we needed something that’s specific to the international school space. So we’re excited to launch that at the end of September. And then that’ll be so we’re starting with the first cohort course. It is new. So go slow and learn and then, but we look forward to, you know, moving it out in other parts of the world as well and growing that. 

We have our fourth annual. It’s funny, I thought it was the third and I’m like, oh, it’s the fourth annual virtual conference on the 5th November that’s live, but it’s also recorded same thing and people can access it, they can’t make it live because of the time zones in collaboration with the Women of Color and ELT. So we’ve been doing a conference since 2020 with the focus on representation, identity, anti-racism, equity and justice. 

And then we’re doing our first in-person conference. We’re excited. I know January 26th to 28th, in collaboration with UNIS Hanoi Vietnam. So we’re very excited about that. That’s up and coming. So those are a few of the things that we’re working on. We also have our cohort three of our spring league as a color program. It is the largest, we have 15 folks this year. We went from seven. Yeah, so lots of leaders, a lot of more people are, are are have signed on as mentors. We had like a large interest and so that’s exciting. 

Lori: So, wow, it is all very exciting work. Congratulations on all of it. 

Kevin: Thank you. 

Lori: So now I believe it’s all we have time for today. So thank you so much for your, for your wisdom and your time you spent with us today, Kevin. We really appreciate it here at SENIA,

Kevin: We appreciate you. 

[Outro music plays] 

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/podcasts. Until next time. Cheers.

#98 From the Margins, For the Margins

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On this episode of the SENIA Happy Hour podcast, host Lori Boll speaks with Maymouna Sakho and Dr. MaryAnn DeRosa about their collaborative project “From the Margins, For the Margins.” These two passionate educators share their personal journeys and how their experiences have shaped their approach to inclusive education. Maymouna and MaryAnn discuss the importance of developing a mindset that celebrates neurodiversity and different ways of learning, rather than viewing students as problems to be fixed. They explain how their monthly meetups exemplify their strategy of distilling mindset, knowledge, and practice into accessible steps for educators. The conversation highlights their unique approach to professional development in inclusive education, emphasizing joy, practical strategies, and the power of building a supportive learning community. Listeners will gain insights into how these educators are working to transform learning support practices in international schools and beyond, with a focus on student agency and dignity for all learners.

Connect

Resources From Today’s Show:

  • Book: Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Transcript

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 hour of content in under thirty minutes, leaving you with time for a true happy hour. 

[ Outro music plays ]

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

Bio

Maymouna Sakho is an educator, inclusion and equity advocate, and systems builder.  Maymouna is the founder of Sakho Learning Consultancy – dedicated to supporting individuals and organizations to innovate through embracing and implementing equitable and inclusive practices.

Maymouna’s passion for working to create equitable and inclusive spaces comes from her experience of growing up between two cultures, having to learn a new language and system, and finding a place and voice for herself. She is a connector of people and ideas and loves to engage in conversations about inclusion and serving others – particularly children  – to reach their fullest potential. 

She serves as the Chair for SENIA International Africa Board, mentor for the AIELOC Aspiring Leaders of Color Program, and is a co-founder and co-trainer for AIELOC’s Learning Support Affinity Group For the Margins, From the Margins with Dr. MaryAnn DeRosa. Additionally, Maymouna serves as a co-chair for MSA Accreditation Evaluation Team Visits and as a member of CIS Accreditation Evaluation Team Visits.

MaryAnn DeRosa Ed.D is a passionate progressive educator with over 24 years of experience working in the classroom as a lead classroom teacher, special educator, and instructional and SEL/Equity coach. As a teacher leader and teacher trainer, she has led professional development on topics including SEL, Equity and Inclusion, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, UDL, and Cultivating Creativity.   MaryAnn earned her doctorate from Northeastern University in Boston, with coursework focused on social justice and equity in education.  Always from a change agent lens, her research centers on fostering creativity and designing inclusive, justice-centered engaging learning environments.   MaryAnn has spent her career teaching in Washington DC charter and public schools as well as in international schools in China, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and in Milan, Italy. MaryAnn is a member of AIELOC and an ASCD Champion in Education.  Currently, MaryAnn is an education consultant and Professor and Curriculum Designer for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners at Relay Graduate School of Education.

Connect

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#97 Building an Accessible Digital Future: From Personal Journey to Global Change

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Show #97 Building an Accessible Digital Future: From Personal Journey to Global Change

On this episode, host Lori Boll speaks with Alexandra “Zandy” Wong who shared her personal journey with hearing loss and her mission to make the digital world more accessible. Zanday’s experience inspired her to found the NextGen Accessibility Initiative, which has reached over 200,000 youth across 119 countries. She discussed key aspects of digital accessibility, including proper captioning, alt text for images, and color contrast considerations. Currently pursuing a master’s in Applied Digital Health at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Zandy outlined her vision for a fully accessible digital world, emphasizing the need for inherently accessible platforms, cultural shifts in perceiving disability, and ensuring assistive technologies are available to all.

Bio

Alexandra “Zandy” Wong is studying for a master’s degree in Applied Digital Health as a 2024 U.S. Rhodes Scholar. She recently graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in Public Health. Her research and advocacy focused on creating a world where accessibility is universal and having a disability is celebrated. She has contributed to research surrounding the accessibility of patient education materials, U.S. hospital websites, and the digital public health response to COVID-19. She has also drafted federal legislation concerning the accessibility of U.S. federal agencies’ social media accounts and served as an advisor to UNICEF, UNESCO, and the U.S. Department of Labor on increasing access to education and jobs for youth with disabilities. In the community, she is the founder of the NextGen Accessibility Initiative where she has helped over 200,000 youth across 119 countries gain access to accessible education. She has shared her story of growing up with hearing loss in interviews with the Guardian, the Washington Post, and Teen Vogue and is a 2X TEDx Speaker. In her free time, she enjoys running and playing the piano.

Connect

  • Email: alexandrawong2002@gmail.com
  • Website: NextGen Accessibility Initiative
  • LinkedIn

#96 Leveling the Educational Field with Assistive Technology

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#96 Leveling the Educational Field with Assistive Technology

On this episode of the SENIA Happy Hour podcast, host Lori Boll speaks with Maymouna Sakho and Dr. MaryAnn DeRosa about their collaborative project “From the Margins, For the Margins.” These two passionate educators share their personal journeys and how their experiences have shaped their approach to inclusive education. Maymouna and MaryAnn discuss the importance of developing a mindset that celebrates neurodiversity and different ways of learning, rather than viewing students as problems to be fixed. They explain how their monthly meetups exemplify their strategy of distilling mindset, knowledge, and practice into accessible steps for educators. The conversation highlights their unique approach to professional development in inclusive education, emphasizing joy, practical strategies, and the power of building a supportive learning community. Listeners will gain insights into how these educators are working to transform learning support practices in international schools and beyond, with a focus on student agency and dignity for all learners.

Bio

Jeff Sisk is the Senior Manager of Assistive Technology Services (ATS) in Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia, the 12th largest school district in the United States.   He has been working in the assistive technology (AT) field for over 25 years and actively participates in the planning and implementation of district technology initiatives.  Jeff collaborates with regional assistive technology partners and hosts a biennial assistive technology conference.  Jeff also regularly speaks at state and national conferences and has provided technology auditing and training for the United States Department of State’s International Schools.  He has served as an Adjunct Instructor at George Mason University for more than 15 years and has co authored an Assistive Technology Industry Association’s (ATiA) Assistive Technology Outcomes & Benefits (ATOB) Journal: “Voices from the Field – The Assistive Technology Services Experience of the 2020-2021 School Year”.  Prior to his career in assistive technology, Jeff was a special education teacher.

Connect

Resources from Today’s Show

Transcript

Transcribed by Kanako Suwa

[Intro music plays] Welcome to the SENIA Happy Hour podcast with your host, Lori Boll. We know you’re busy so we bring you one hour’s worth of content in under 30 minutes, leaving you time for a true happy hour.

Lori: Hello listeners and welcome to Happy Hour. Today’s is all about assistive technology. And I speak with Jeff Sisk, who is the Senior Manager of Assistive Technology Services in Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia, which is the 12th largest school district in the United States. He has been working in this field of assistive technology or AT for over 25 years and actively participates in the planning and implementation of district technology initiatives. He collaborates with regional assistive technology partners and hosts a biennial assistive technology conference. Jeff also regularly speaks at state and national conferences and has provided technology, auditing, and training for the United States Department of State’s international schools. He’s served as an adjunct instructor at George Mason University for more than 15 years and has co -authored an Assistive Technology Industry Association’s Assistive Technology Outcomes and Benefits Journal. Say that 10 times fast. And the journal is called Voices from the Field, the Assistive Technology Services experience of the 2020 -21 school year. Prior to his career in assistive technology, Jeff was a special education teacher. So I’m really excited about today’s show. We speak all things AT and I learned a lot from Jeff. So I’m excited for you to hear it. So now on to the show.

Well, hello Jeff and welcome to the podcast.

Jeff: Hi, how are you doing today, Lori? Glad to be here.

Lori: Well, I’m doing great. Thank you. So I’ve already told the guests, the listeners, what your background is. Given your extensive experience in assistive technology and your role in shaping technology initiatives in such a huge school district, we’re eager to dive into your insights. So to start off, how do you see technology currently contributing to inclusive student learning environments?

Jeff: Sure, as you mentioned, I work in a very large school district. It’s the 12th largest in the United States. So we have very diverse populations with very diverse learning needs. And I always considered that exciting.

And I also really kind of came in at a time with technology, really in its beginning of evolution in terms of how it’s being used in the classroom. So I was, I began as a classroom teacher, you know, kind of exploring methods and I was a special education teacher to improve students’ abilities to read and write and perform really any classroom task in time. And so I think it’s very exciting now that we have so many one -to -one computing initiatives that are in schools and students have access to so many broad technology tools.

And these tools can really foster that inclusive learning environment that you spoke to. So there’s so many opportunities for personalized learning, where students can self -select tools that best meets their instructional needs and best accommodates their learning deficits, and then also speaks to learning strengths that they may have, there’s better opportunities to collaborate. And of course, that also lends to different types of learning projects and experiences inside of classrooms. And we’re example of that even right now, even though we’re not necessarily doing with some education, but it allowed us to connect and even have this conversation, the technology that is available now. There’s just more tools for enhanced learning experiences, better ways for students to express themselves in literacy, reading and writing, mathematics and projects, and really just engaging and creative approaches that otherwise if those technology tools were not around, they just really have the opportunity to grab a hold and use those. And it’s just a matter of just really acknowledging that they’re there, recognizing that they’re there, and creatively in building them and implementing them in your instruction.

Lori: Great. Thanks so much. We really want to dive into that assistive technology piece today. So first off, can you just define that for us? What is it?

Jeff: Yeah, so by law, it’s actually been defined in the Individual with Disabilities Education Act federally here in the United States, IDEA, as any tool and or service that will increase, improve, or maintain the functional capabilities of a student. So I feel like that definition, more maybe loosely defined, levels the playing field for students that have some type of specific learning need. It’s just providing them access to curriculum. And the technology tools build those supports to allow them to engage in classroom content at the same level as their peers. 

And that’s really exciting for me personally. And I’ve watched a lot of students over a lot of years be able to access instruction, be able to be part of classrooms that they otherwise would have been excluded from. And so that’s assistive technology really at its core and why it is a required tool for those students rather than just even being a beneficial tool for those students.

Lori: Thanks, yeah. I know that when I was first teaching in a classroom for students with more higher support needs really, I learned that assistive technology could be something as simple as a button that students push that has one saying on it, right? Versus all the way to maybe an iPad where they’re using Proloquo2Go or some sort of communication software to help them actually make choices. 

Jeff: Yeah, speech, thank you.

Lori: Thank you, I can’t speak right now. So, yeah, so I thought that was really interesting is that it doesn’t have to be these complex, like assistive technology is not necessarily this complex system. It’s everything as you described.

Jeff: Yeah, another analogy that I’ve heard or just that many, many people have access to are eyeglasses or contact lenses. That is increasing, improving, or maintaining your ability to perform within that classroom.

And I think that that’s a really good example, too, that most people can relate to, because they’re not going to be able to visually see or participate in anything going around them unless they had those eyeglasses or those contact lenses, or even the LASIK surgery would be the medical, you know, surgical version of that, which is not assistive technology, necessarily. But, but, you know, that is usually just kind of assumed that it’s there to participate in doing what you’re going to do in the class that day. And so I like that analogy, too. I think there’s a lot of good things there that you’re pointing out that people jump to me to, you know, this more advanced, you mentioned the iPad with Proloquo2Go as an augmentative communication speech generating device, very high tech, but those low tech accommodations can go a lot away. The simplest, I’m a big fan of simple and easy. Those are the best assistive technology tools or the simple and easy assistive technology tools.

Lori: Well, let me put you on the spot. What are some other easy assistive technology tools? 

Jeff: Sure. So there’s a couple I think that we’re going to speak to in a little bit. And again, I think that even simple and easy is changing. So it’s really where you’re accessing your reading materials and writing materials and your content.

And I’m seeing more and more of that actually happening on the computer as opposed to in a paper format. And so those tools I’m finding are being built into your computer systems more and more all of the time. You just have to really just kind of know that they’re there. And so the two places that I go to first are speech to text. So that is having the auditory supports for your computers to read to you. And then the opposite is… I’m sorry, I just reversed that. I meant to say, text to speech, excuse me. So that will have your computer read aloud to you.

But then the flip of that, I think is just as convenient, which is what I’ve mentioned first, speech to text. And that is allowing your computer to dictate and write to you. Those are a couple of clicks away on every computer, pretty much that’s out there in whatever operating system that’s out there. And you can even say that you have it in your pocket and every person that has a cell phone is carrying around those tools in their pocket. So their phones or their computers can read to them and provide auditory supports and additional auditory processing for that information, or then provide written dictation tools so that you’re not necessarily having to type or even express yourselves where you’re writing through that. Typing can sometimes be a barrier, of course, and that’s just an easy way for them. Do you just put those thoughts onto a document that can be cut and pasted and manipulated very easily? So those are the two places I think I would go to first in this day and age. 20 years ago, we would be looking at more paper supports.

Lori: Right. Well, years ago, I hurt my arm and I needed to use speech -to -text, and I realized that I’m much more efficient and effective in my own writing when I use speech -to -text, so I use that quite often. And I always use it when I’m text messaging. My daughter calls me a boomer. 

Jeff: So can I ask you, because I know the difference in how that looks in terms of the evolution of these technology tools, The tools that you were using that long ago, I would assume were much more difficult than the tools that you may have access now. Is that a correct statement?

Lori: That is true. When I would use it with my students, we would have to have them sit down and they’d have to train it to recognize their voice patterns and all of that. Now, that’s not necessary. 

Jeff: Yes. 

Lori: You just start and it works.

Jeff: Yes. That is amazing to me. I remember that’s to me how technology can evolve. I remember the first time that I saw that in a Google document. I see that in a lot of educational environments, not just here in Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, but many, many other places where their Google documents are just being opened up and used as the main word processor for students. When that tools menu included that voice typing option, It wasn’t announced. There wasn’t to me a lot of press around it. It was a call that I got from a friend of ours in the IT department. He just said, Jeff, have you checked this thing out in Google? I looked and I saw the drop -down and I was like, that is fantastic and I wonder how many steps it takes to set that up exactly what you’re describing. Wonder how long I have to read to this computer for it to learn who I am. But instead, in a couple of clicks, it magically worked and what a game -changer for a lot of kids. That was just a great day, great leap in our technology evolution.

Lori: Also just a great example of universal design for learning, right?

Jeff: Yes.

Lori: It’s not just a great tool for our students who have neurodiversity or whatever. Anyone can use it and it’s beneficial. So you were talking about using assistive technology and some of the tools you use. Can you share a success story of how assistive technology is significantly improved as students learning experience?

Jeff: Sure. I’m glad you asked that because I’ve been involved with professional development for a number of years, close to 20 years. And my role as an assistive technology coach and now as an assistive technology administrator. And as good as I think I am, there is nobody better than a student speaking to how they use assistive technology. And those stories carry so much more weight than I could ever carry in terms of getting up in front of a group of teachers and explaining the benefits of assistive technology.

And we have developed a group of students here that anybody could look up and see. If you look for Fairfax County Public Schools, AT Ambassadors, Assistive Technology Ambassadors, they’re students that are willing to share their story. And we have done on our public webpage and there’s one I’ll specifically point out because she’s just a fantastic story. They’re all fantastic stories. So I guess I shouldn’t favor one over another, but she’s just a student that I’ve been working with for a long time and her name is Emmy. And her story was first published in a, it’s a great video. It’s only a three, three and a half minute video. It’ll tell the story very well and you get to actually see and meet her in fifth grade. And it was about the time that she was diagnosed with dyslexia and not revealing any confidential information when I tell the story because her and her family are very open to telling this experience. And her family participated in this little video segment that we have towards her assistive technology use and assistive technology tools.

When she was diagnosed with dyslexia, she wanted to explore what that actually meant for her. I think that there was a little bit of fear associated with that for her, that diagnosis, and also what the impact with that would be for her at school, and how she could continue because she liked being in the classes that she was in, but she was struggling with reading. We were able to document basically her own advocacy where she looked into the tools that she wanted to use to support her reading needs on her school -assigned computer, and then her going back in and showing her teacher and others in the school the tools that would best benefit her so that she can continue participating in her fifth grade class. We were able to capture that video just before COVID.

And that became a great, of course, we relied more on computing technology than ever for instruction during COVID closures. That became a great way to give a student example of how they self -selected the assistive technology tools that best met their needs, and then how they were able to communicate and implement those in their regular school setting. To this day, Emmy remains one of our most active AT ambassadors. She is in 10th grade. She is in advanced academic placement classes, and she still uses those tools to have speech to text for, yes. And text to speech, both. I’m gonna reverse those back and forth in this whole conversation, so I apologize. Apologize, Emmy, if you turn around and listen to this, how she advocates for the use of those tools and those academic settings so that she can access all of the reading and all of the writing that she needs to do and keep up with the pace of those rigorous classes. So she remains with us as a fantastic student example of assistive technology integration in a universal design for learning environment and as a success story. And again, she’s not the only one. These are just the students that are willing to share their stories. I go back to that because we have many, many others with similar stories.

Lori: Well, first off, well done, Emmy, if you’re listening. And I think it, first off, advocacy is something you mentioned there that Emmy advocates for herself. And I’m curious about the advocacy piece in terms of a student learns of what works for them. Is it the expectation of that student to share that with the teachers? Is there anything from your position at your school where you also advocate for the student?

Jeff: Absolutely, Lori. We really take, we’ve really, especially over the past two or three years, more recent years, a really strong emphasis on that universal design for learning approach that you mentioned. So we don’t want this to be one person, whoever that person would be, to drive this type of instructional change. It’s what we call our collective responsibility. It’s the collective responsibility of a team inside of a school to advocate and to use these types of technology tools. 

And if you go back, I’m gonna again mention the video again, what I love about the video, it’s hard to tell in that video who is actually driving the change for Emmy to use these technology tools inside of her classroom. Everybody speaks to the experience. And what I mean by everybody, it is Emmy, it’s her teachers, it’s her family, administrators, there is an assistive technology coach that is technology support within the school. There’s also another technology support personnel we would call our school -based technology specialists. All of them are active in the conversation so it doesn’t feel that it’s coming from one place and this person prefers to do it and that other person may disagree. It is that a Collective role of everyone to ensure any success because at the end of the day, that’s what anybody wants, right? we all want our students to succeed and That’s where we find that success is best met when everybody participates in it.

Lori: Yeah, thank you for that and we’ll post the link to that video in our show notes so everyone can actually get to it. 

Jeff: Absolutely.

Lori: So That brings me around to what are some common misconceptions about assistive technology? you’ve mentioned that it’s collective effort have you had pushback and What is that pushback and why?

Jeff: Yeah, I’m gonna go to two c -words here where where I think is the the pushback for assistive technology use and the first one is is cheating that we have run across some perceptions that are out there that these technology tools presents an advantage for students that’s unfair to other students that may not be receiving that advantage. But again, we go back to that definition of increase, improve or maintain. That’s all we’re looking to do is level the playing field. And that’s what I mentioned to earlier with that inclusive learning experience and the great things that technology tools can offer us. That is that personalized learning.

And go back to pretty much everybody has a cell phone and pretty much everybody has an iPhone and they may have pretty much the same model. But if they open their iPhones, they all look very different. It’s customized to the needs of the individual. And that’s what we go back to with the technology and technology and learning. We can customize a lot of our tools to the needs of our students locally. And then that they are going to take those tools to use to benefit them and support their needs. And I get back to that Emmy example. Emmy’s not cheating. She’s never been cheating. But she does have dyslexia. She does have something that prevents her from reading in a traditional way. And so these technology tools are accommodating that. And that allows her to participate in those advanced academic placement classes. You can even see with these types of tools that I mentioned in that universal designed environment, everyone has access to these tools. And so other types of students, such as English language learners, may benefit from using them also because they’re auditory. Excuse me, may provide additional auditory processing for what they’re attempting to read. So.

It may become a cumbersome tool for others, as an example. So it might get in the way and it might not be reading in the way that, say, a more visual learner may be able to interpret and read that text. So that’s where I think as a barrier that we’ve been working to overcome, I think that as more people familiarize themselves with the tools, the more they realize that that’s not the case, that cheating is not going on, that it actually is fostering learning and that we’re working to meet learning objectives for students. 

On the flip side of that, the other C -word that I refer to is the crutch, what we refer to as the crutch. So that if my student uses these tools, they’ll never learn to do this independently. And any body of research and any professional experience that I’ve come across actually fosters the opposite. It does the exact opposite. So. We’ve been talking a lot about text to speech, and I got it right that time, and I made sure that I watched myself before I said it. But really a different example of this is speech generating devices, so that a device that will foster communication, verbal communication for students that are nonverbal, for either physical or cognitive reasons or both. We’ll find over and over again with a speech generating device, the more a student begins to use a speech generating device, the more verbal they actually become. Because they start to understand the process of communication more and more and the benefit of communication more and more. It’s not cheating, it’s not a crutch, it does nothing but promote learning, and that’s the beauty of assistive technology.

Lori: Yeah, for sure. I know when I was using Proloquo to go with a student, her mom actually took away the iPad because she was convinced that it was taking away her ability to be verbal. 

Jeff: Sure. 

Lori: So we talked our way through it and it all worked out, but those are some misconceptions that definitely happen. So thanks for sharing those.

Jeff: Yeah, sure.

Lori: All right, so what’s the process of assessing a student’s needs and then matching them with the appropriate AT?

Jeff: So basically, what we do when we explore AT use with students is we’re always trialing the technology tools that are out there, and we look for the least restrictive tools for students as possible within a universal design for learning environment.

But with all of that said, we fall back on a framework that’s been established by a researcher for assistive technology a long time ago, Joyce Havala.

And it’s called the SETT framework, S -E -T -T. And the acronym that first is the student. And that makes sense that the student comes first, right? Because we want to know what specific learning needs that they have. And in an attempt to explore some technology accommodations that would be appropriate for them. So identifying student need, that’s the first piece. And then the E is environment. So what is the student’s learning environment? How are they accessing instruction? How are they participating in reading, writing, and other classroom tasks? How are they engaging and collaborating with other students within the classroom? And again, how do those needs then interact with the environment?

And then the first T represents task. What tasks are they attempting to perform? Are they attempting to write sentences, compose sentences, are they attempting to compose paragraphs, longer essays, read longer readings, shorter passages, or just exploring a reading in itself or even letter identification? So student, environment, task, and then finally the last two, we get to the tool. That’s when we finally make that determination. A lot of people like to work in reverse. Like, I’ve heard of this, so let’s try this. And typically when that approach is taken, it flops. I feel like kind of we’ve seen that like every time again and again just because something’s been discussed or advertised or shown somewhere. And this might work here, but there’s less consideration with those first three elements first, that student, the environment, and then the task. When those are really considered first, then you can begin that exploration for the tool, and then it really makes that commitment to the tool more lasting in that process. I’ve seen a lot of different types of, what we would say, assessment approaches. To me, none of them are, say, formal assessment approaches other than they’re based out of that set framework each and every time. And we have our own processes here in Fairfax County in Virginia, but we base them off of SETT.

Lori: Great. Thank you for that. That’s a new one for me. 

Jeff: Okay, sure. Yeah. 

Lori: Well, let’s talk about future. I mean, the future seems like it’s now, right? With all the AI and everything happening. But what are some possible future technology growth areas that will positively impact our classrooms?

Jeff: Yeah, you brought up the speech to text and I got that right, you know, this time again, instead of reversing it yet again. So we brought up that experience, right, with the Google document piece. And you don’t know what’s gonna hit you until it hits you. One thing that I like to go to, I feel like I’m very nerdy when this type of topic comes up. So my nerdiness is really flaring like in these moments. But I almost see the developments and technology developments that become accessibility developments almost happening in the world of video games first. It’s really kind of amazing, like the innovations that happen there for people to engage, and that’s really kind of the main thing, how they’re engaging with technology. As opposed to typing, a lot of video games don’t give you the time to type, right? So you need other access methods to engage with the technology and the dialogue that’s happening in that environment.

And I say right now that I’m really excited, and this really kind of really speaks more to students today with physical disabilities, more severe physical disabilities specifically, maybe some cognitive disabilities, but with eye gaze technology. And that is technology that’s tracking your eye movements so that it will engage and explore and assist you with reading and writing, not necessarily gaming, inside of a computing environment.

And so that I see is really kind of growing very, very rapidly now, as well as we mentioned, augmentative communication with speech generating devices. I think that’s becoming more inclusive. Fortunately, you know, for those student populations, I see more and more growth in companies that develop that type of technology, as opposed to really kind of developing a more intensive and expensive augmentative communication system to being tools that were easily accessed through a touch device, as you mentioned before, such as an iPad or any type of tablet. And that then becomes more recognizable to more people outside of that augmentative communication device user, because that’s an important part, too. So we may we may teach and use this with some of our students, but when we go to interact in an environment when people have not seen that type of communication before, that becomes a barrier.

So the more that those systems become more and more inclusive and more of a tier one approach inside of our multi -tiered systems of support, the better that is for kids or adults that use those types of tools. And then lastly, you mentioned AI as well. And I’m really excited for that. And I will say that in our district, we’re really kind of wrapping our heads around that, as that’s really growing unexpectedly very quickly for us at this time. Yeah. So how this is going to build processes for writing, because we all know what happens. And AI is far from perfect. And we just say, I’d like to have an essay on the French Revolution and what magically then will pop up. And with that, does it accurately convey what it’s supposed to convey inside of that documentation? Is it what we really kind of sought for as a task within the instruction, you know, and our teaching and in our learning? So I think that we’re figuring that out right now, but I think it also proposes some potential, you know, rewards for students that really are dysgraphic and that have executive functioning issues and struggle with the organizational processes of writing. I think there can be a lot of benefit with those students. And that’s exciting as we continue to figure that out and learn more about it.

Lori: Yeah, I keep exploring this AI. A recent one that’s come up for me is Ella Kids. And it’s great because it creates social stories. And you can kind of design the character yourself based off this, based off your student. And they’ll do like a cartoon version or a clay version or whatever version, but create a whole social story for you. 

Jeff: Yes. 

Lori: Within seconds, it used to take me hours, you know, and then get the clip art and put it in and everything. So that’s been really great. Just on my end as a teacher. But also I wanted to just go back to your discussion about using the AC device in public. An example, my son loves Starbucks and so he’s learned how to order a specific drink on his iPad.

Jeff: Excellent. 

Lori: And so we practice, I mean, it took a really long time, but we practice and he’s got it. But when we took it into Starbucks, they couldn’t hear it, they didn’t know how to read it. You know, it was just all that kind of like wonky kind of, oh, this is awkward. But as we kept going in there, of course, they were more and more accustomed to it. But I do think that’s kind of the future, is trying to get society to be more adapt, I don’t know what the word is.

Jeff: Aware, just awareness, 

Lori: building that awareness, sure. Yeah, and interacting with the kiddos and with their devices is so important, so.

Jeff: Yeah, there’s multiple means of communication, and I think that’s a learning experience for everyone. And again, I do see, I see at least in my kind of corner of the world, less segregation between those student populations. And that is just a great approach for universal design as we continue to do that in many facets in our educational environments.

Lori: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, Jeff, I think that’s all we have time for today. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your wisdom with us.

Jeff: I am happy to talk about this stuff anytime. It’s very exciting for me. It’s been my life’s work and my life’s passion. Thank you for inviting me, and if you ever want to talk more, I’m always happy to do so. Awesome.

Lori: Thanks a lot.

Jeff: All right. 

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