What is Inclusive Education? Symphony not Cacophony

Primarily, celebration collectively ensures the safety, sense of belonging, and respect for each and every member of our community. This requires empathy, understanding, and an open mind towards those who may have different practices and identities than our own. Celebration also shares and demonstrates acceptance of practices that may have historically been marginalised. As the International Baccalaureate Organisation identifies in their values, there is a clear humanitarian need to “celebrate difference” as part of an intentional mission to support intercultural understanding and acceptance. Research also clearly states that the best ways to eliminate discrimination is through this form of celebratory education (Blaisdell, 2016; Gillborn, 2019; Gillies, 2022). 

Specifically in the Mulgrave community, we also have to honour what our students have shared with us over the past three years through surveys. They have experienced discrimination in school environments that have not supported their identities, cultures, neurodiversity, sexuality, and race. Thankfully, with sustained and intentional work we now have strong positive metrics with 90% of students reporting feeling safe and experiencing positive wellbeing. In addition, we have year-on-year improvements from both parents and students who are reporting with 95% and 91% agreement that “students are learning how to effectively interact with people with different backgrounds and cultures”. The challenge now is to ensure 100% of our students feel safe, seen, and experience belonging. 

It is important to make sure everyone in our Mulgrave community understands that celebrating difference and diversity does not take anything away from core teaching and learning and has always been a strong feature of Mulgrave’s ethos.

We weave in celebrations and acknowledgements of Norouz and Navroz, Lunar New Year, Islamic culture, Indigenous Reconciliation, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Neurodiversity Month, and more as themes not as replacements for core teaching and learning. Cultural celebration and exposure is not an ‘agenda’ or a ‘curriculum’ but rather an expression of our values. Quite the contrary, research indicates that depicting an array of identities, cultures, and lifestyles in our texts and teaching material increases the quality of expert literary appreciation and the understanding of narrative, metaphor, simile, tone, and critical theory in those students studying these texts, as an example. Additionally, research is clear that teaching cultural sensitivity enhances social emotional literacy, which in turn improves academic learning and provides all students with stronger psychological protective factors in the face of growing mental health challenges.

This is worth pausing to emphasise. Regardless of a student’s cultural heritage, skin colour, gender identity, sexuality, or learning preferences, every one of them benefits from being immersed in school cultures that celebrate and accept difference and diversity. 

As we work together on Mulgrave’s new strategic plan for the coming years, a key compass point will be evidence based teaching and learning and global best practice in education. I am challenging every area of our school to demonstrate impact on student learning and what we are calling ‘learner confidence’. As educational experts have emphasised for the past 25 years, you cannot create high achieving school cultures without first creating safe and inclusive cultures that actively celebrate diversity. 

The question at this point might be “OK, but why has there seemed to be more of a focus on some cultures and identities than others?” 

This is a question that Mulgrave must always consider, listening carefully to our families. We are a very diverse community and there are very different cultural, religious, secular and values based contexts. Any institution that takes on the necessary and courageous work to promote intercultural understanding and an appreciation of inequity, global challenges and inclusivity will always be challenged in this work. 

To help us all understand our considered approach, there are some important clarifying points:

1. Students come first. That is a simple but powerful compass point for the best schools in the world. To create a safe and inclusive space to enable ‘learner confidence’, our first priority is to address what students themselves identify as needing attention. This has been a global shift since 2020 and Mulgrave is no exception. It is a great sign of our school’s health and strength that students feel empowered to provide honest and authentic feedback on not only their safety and sense of belonging but also their learning, values, and sense of enjoyment. If we have focussed on some areas more than others, we can trace this back to what our students have asked for. I had direct experience of this at the start of the academic year when I took a grade group through the aims of our intercultural/diversity course. We began by asking for anonymised feedback about any experiences of prejudice and marginalisation. The results aligned with our broader survey data and informed our approach this year. 
    
2. Reconciliation. If we consider our focus on Indigenous culture and reconciliation we have to acknowledge our location in British Columbia, on Squamish Land and our responsibility to Canada as a nation. The whole country has committed to a deep reconciliation engagement and education is key to this. British Columbia had adopted and mandated our First People’s Principles of Learning and there are statutory requirements to follow a number of Indigenous courses and curricula for students to earn the BC Dogwood Diploma. In addition, as part of the Independent Schools Association of British Columbia (ISABC) we have protocol agreements with our local First Nations which also reflect the International Baccalaureate Organisation’s commitment to prioritise honouring ‘host culture’. This essentially means that you cannot expect our students to move into areas of intercultural understanding that connect with the traditions reflected in our school population without first fully understanding our host culture, which is the Squamish Nation and wider Coast Salish cultures. In terms of research into intercultural understanding, this is not a zero sum game; in other words, learning deeply about our local First Nations culture enhances and increases the cultural receptivity our students can have towards a range of different cultural traditions represented in our Mulgrave community.
   
   This is not an exclusionary agenda. The First People’s Principles of Learning are shared by many other traditional cultures represented in our school. We intentionally make these connections to ensure we honour our own family cultures as well. I witnessed this first hand in a Grade 11 Theory of Knowledge lesson where the notion of intergenerational respect and holding up Elders was tied to the thinking of Confucius in China and the poetry of Rumi in the Persian tradition. 
    
3. Our mission, vision and values. Aside from ‘students come first’ and our required commitment to nationwide reconciliation, our third compass point (but certainly not in order of importance) is our stated values. I have highlighted a few below:
   
   “Our sense of community and friendship is founded on humility, empathy, commitment, and inclusion.” Our community is defined by inclusivity and this value statement is very significant for Mulgrave. Our commitment is also to families and recognising our population’s own cultures and traditions. This is why we regularly hold parent information sessions on a number of topics related to inclusivity. We also encourage families to come and discuss in more intimate environments their concerns and requests. On a personal level, every conversation I have had with families has been extremely positive. I invite all families to attend information sessions, raise questions in these forums, and then perhaps follow up with personalised meetings if more discussion is needed.
   
   As we teach our students, face to face dialogue is essential to conflict resolution whereas what is being called ‘snipe and type’ often distorts and magnifies misinformation. In an age of social media, where Whatsapp groups and other forums are dominated by ‘keyboard warriors’, it is essential we model more productive ways of resolving differences and clarifying concerns. 
   
   "Mulgrave strives to equip lifelong learners to thrive in a culturally diverse and interdependent world.” During a session I hosted with Early Years and Junior School parents discussing the best age appropriate approach to understand new societal norms of gender identity, one father’s powerful response is memorable: He was imagining his daughter graduating in 2036 and challenged us all to think about how complex and different the world will be in terms of gender identity, sexuality, cultural expression etc. It made me stop and think because it is a strong point mirrored in our values. Our responsibility is to equip our young people for a future we cannot see yet and it is certainly going to be even more complex and nuanced than today.  
   
   I have the confidence that the important family and cultural/religious values held by many of our families will be carried by our students into their adult lives. I do not see a contradiction at all between our school’s responsibility to equip and expose our students to a diversity of identities and cultures, with some of the represented cultural traditions of our families. Young people have the ability to code switch between complex languages, cultures, and identities on a daily basis (and have done so for generations). Additionally, there is no evidence at all that the educational exposure which we see reflected in the norms of Canadian and BC education in any way ‘confuses’ our children. 

In conclusion, I am hopeful we can recognise the incredibly important role celebration plays in a contemporary, 21st Century international education context. I also hope we also understand that it is just one part of many elements of a Mulgrave education and does not ‘replace’ any other important strand of our provision and approach. I really would like to receive thoughts, feedback and comments linked to this piece or even better, to have a conversation or dialogue in school focussed on this topic if needed. It is very important for us to stay connected to our families and ensure all of our community members understand and value our approach. Our incredibly strong Council of International Schools and Engagement survey metrics (more to come on this in my final message of the school year) in this area indicate an extremely high agreement factor in terms of inclusivity, intercultural education and DEIJ, however, that does not mean that differences of opinion or views should not be aired and expressed by families. I welcome the opportunity to address any of these collaboratively.