[Intro Music]

00:00:08:27 – 00:01:01:05
Hannah
Welcome to the Diverse Ed podcast. Diverse Educators is an intersectional community of educators who are passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion. Our vision: everyone is celebrated in every classroom in every school. Our mission: a collaborative community that celebrates its successes and amplifies the stories of diverse people. Our values: promoting acceptance, increasing visibility, encouraging celebration, creating belonging and enabling learning. In series two of the Diverse Educators podcast, we have ten episodes. In each episode our co-hosts, Mahlon Evans-Sinclair and Jess Boyd, will interview one contributor from each of the ten chapters of Diverse Educators: A Manifesto. Each conversation will reflect on how they have found and used their voice, discuss how identity shapes them as an educator, share the challenges they’ve had to navigate on their journey, and identify the changes they would like to see in the school system.

00:01:05:04 – 00:01:16:25
Mahlon
Hello and welcome to season two of Diversity Ed podcast. My name is Mahlon Evans-Sinclair, and I’m the founder of Educating While Black podcast and the director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Saint Clements School in Toronto, Canada.

00:01:17:17 – 00:01:33:24
Jess
And I’m Jess Boyd. I’m a former head of music and currently writing my Ph.D. in culturally relevant pedagogy. I work in initial teacher training and I also run an open access community music project. In this episode, we’re going to be talking to Bex Bothwell-O’Hearn from the Marriage and Civil Partnerships chapter.

00:01:34:12 – 00:01:48:03
Mahlon
So Bex, we’ve been talking a lot offline and we’ve loved what we’ve heard so far, but the listeners haven’t had a chance to be introduced to you. So could you introduce yourself in a sentence or more just outlining who you are and how you’ve come to be on this podcast?

00:01:48:20 – 00:02:35:01
Bex
Yeah, so I’m Bex I am a history and politics teacher, at a state secondary school in Ipswich in the county of Suffolk, and I am also the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion lead for my school. And on top of that, I run a voluntary network for educators on diversifying the curriculum. So this is for educators in Suffolk and Essex. And we’ve got like people from early years, primary, secondary, FE and universities and community groups. So we come together, we collaborate, we help each other, help the lone wolves who are doing the work in the schools. And then on top of that, I run Loud and Proud Education with my wife who is a primary teacher and we have a focus on LGBTQ inclusion.

00:02:35:26 – 00:02:53:23
Jess
That’s amazing. And you’ve got time for all of these things, I gather, and to write a chapter in a book and be on a podcast. Amazing. Can you tell us a bit more then? Let’s kick off and tell us a bit more about the intersections of your identity and how they inspired you to write and contribute to Diverse Educators: A Manifesto.

00:02:54:15 – 00:04:06:09
Bex
Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, if we think about identity and when I think about my self, the first thing when I was younger, but when I really realised that perhaps I would have to work a little bit harder was being a girl and not being able to play the school football team. And that’s kind of my first realisation that I was going to have to work a little bit harder. That being said, as I grew up, identifying and coming out as a lesbian or gay woman, I preferred the term gay. That’s really become the biggest like part of my identity. For a long time I faced many barriers and now I’m really trying to kind of find some joy in that, actually. And I also have dyspraxia, and if I’m honest, like that shows up in a different way for me, and it’s a part of my identity where I guess I’m not ready to be the poster girl yet for that. And I’m also an adoptive parent as well, and kind of the challenges, but also the joy that that brings, and the conversations that brings. So I try and bring all of that to the table as a teacher and as a person, but sometimes that’s hard.

00:04:07:00 – 00:04:11:07
Jess
Thanks for your honesty. We’ll, dig into the hard bits a bit later.

00:04:12:12 – 00:05:33:10
Mahlon
Cheers for that. Yeah, it’s a lot. And I think what I’m, what I reflected on kind of where I want to go with my next part of the question is thinking about the themes that you wrote in your chapter theme. So your chapter is on marriage and civil partnerships, and obviously that’s one of the nine protected characteristics. But then we’re also talking about intersectionality with this season of the podcast. And I wonder what it was that you wanted to add to the chapter for your essay that you might have thought was something you wanted to spotlight or may have been overlooked or not necessarily understood, and you’ve just given us a range of different intersections that you have. Being an adoptive parent is very different in terms of the legalities involved with what’s asked of what’s required of, for example, being understanding that, you know, and it’s interesting that you say that one of your first realisations was your gender was a bit of a barrier to hold you back. And I wonder how many people necessarily go through life even recognising that, male identified folk like myself, I guess, even recognising that there is something to do with how the world sees gender, and coming out as a gay woman as well, so you’ve mentioned a few different things, I wonder what marriage and civil partnership adds to that and what you wanted to add to your chapter in and of itself.

00:05:33:26 – 00:07:51:27
Bex
Yeah, I mean, it’s really interesting because as someone who for many, many years living under and growing up under Section 28, I knew that I’d never be able to get married under those laws. At that time. I definitely knew that having a child, like when I was growing up, same sex couples couldn’t adopt. And so I remember feeling like I just couldn’t join in with those discussions and that excitement about, oh, when we’re older, you know, you read those magazines like with the girls like, you know, at a sleep over and you think, oh, like that’s not going to happen for me or that’s not an option for me. And realising that young was really, really strange. But with the chapter, I kind of felt like, it’s hard, isn’t it, to look at something when it’s not your lived experience. And I felt that with civil partnership and marriage, for me, I was quite interested in how being married as a same sex couple shows up differently, or maybe is looked at differently by the world and maybe it’s kind of subtle, but in my experience, there’s a lot of questions, like today, I still have people come up to me and they’re like, like strangers, and they realise, oh, you’re married. And they go, congratulations. And I’m like, I got married in 2015, like, you know? And so I kind of wanted to think about how that shows up in the curriculum because I never learned about any gay couples growing up. I never learned that adoption was a thing. So even when me and my wife were looking at adoption and looking into getting married, like these were new things, like I had nothing to go on, you know, like no precedent for even planning a wedding. Everyone was like, oh, who’s going to walk down the aisle first? Like, how are you doing the seating? What are you wearing? And I was like, And I panicked. Like, I didn’t have anything to go on. I’ve never been to a same sex wedding before. Like, am I supposed to do it differently? And so I just felt like when my daughter’s at school, like, is she going to see anything like that? And if she’s not, is that going to make her feel like she doesn’t belong? Is she going to start thinking, oh, there’s something wrong with this? And so I kind of wanted to explore that and bring that to the chapter a little bit, if that makes sense.

00:07:52:22 – 00:09:15:07
Mahlon
Really makes sense. And I think it’s one of those ones where it’s an angle that doesn’t quite get explored. I mean, we’re going to talk more about it as the episode goes on, but I think something that’s really come to my mind from what you’ve just said and how you described it is that the heuristics that we’re given as children about how adulthood should look, like by this age, this should happen, by that age, that should happen by this time. You know, the notion of having a house by X-Y-Z age cut that off the list, the notion of retiring by a certain age cut that off the list. But then we have these sort of milestones that we traditionally hold up, and as you’re saying with like marriage. Yeah, I kind of feel the same. I definitely felt as a young person, kids and marriage were off the table for me for also identifying as gay and the notion of, yes, where can I get married? Oh, you know, who would I speak to? And I think as you’re saying, when you drill it down into what kids are exposed to, this is the conversation around representation and representation mattering. Because, yeah, getting to a, being of a younger age and understanding that anything is possible. So if it’s not existed, then it doesn’t need to because I can create it is as important as, you know, other things that may have been tried and tested before. I think is really clear from my angle to take this particular chapter.

00:09:15:28 – 00:11:04:10
Bex
Yeah, I just think it’s quite for me, it’s quite dangerous to not have representation. So like, you know, like you just said, representation matters, but representation is also like safety. Like, that’s my thing because if you don’t see that, that’s when you become isolated and you genuinely fear that there is no future, there is no progress for you. And I know that definitely I can only speak for myself and my experiences. I went through a difficult time at school when I realised, you know, that this was now an extra thing that the majority of the world at the time or in my school were not okay, with being gay, that I realised that perhaps things were going to be quite scary and quite tricky. And I was genuinely quite scared growing up. And, you know, I very easily could have gone down a path that was quite dangerous. And I did at a time really struggle with that and really battle my demons. And, you know, I just, I see it. I see it in schools now, like and also I think the big thing here with this chapter for me, I didn’t want to just write it for the people that have, are same sex parents that are married and in civil partnerships as same sex couple, I wanted to write this because, for me, it’s about all children and all people knowing about that, not just those kids that are in front of you in your classroom, or those people that are there at the table with you, you know, in your family and you’re like, oh, I kind of have to learn about this, you know? Like, [Jess: totally.] Yeah. So that was like my I thought this was a really good way of reaching out and giving that story to those those people.

00:11:04:20 – 00:11:24:10
Jess
Yeah. Yeah. It comes across so well in the chapter. So, you’ve kind of alluded to it, but tell me a bit more about kind of what were the key actions, takeaways, kind of those frustrations that you’ve listed. What would be the kind of top key takeaways and a call to action you wanted your readers to have after reading?

00:11:25:23 – 00:16:06:26
Bex
One of the big ones, and I do a lot of this in kind of the work I do in schools and in my own school particularly is, my big thing is how often do we actually find out about families and relationships that exist in our school? So in our staff, but also in our student families? Do we actually talk to parents because there’s actually a case there to think about how many kids have you got in your class or in your setting who they might not be identifying as LGBTQ+, but perhaps their parents are, or perhaps their uncle is or their aunt is. And that for me is about student voice and parental voice and forums. So how often do educators, do we actually ask questions and listen and want to find out? Or do we just shy away and think, oh, I’d rather not know because that would cause me too many issues. Then I’ll have to start doing all these extra things to represent, you know? So that was one of the big things. And then the biggest thing for me, curriculum, everyone’s talking about curriculum, right? Why it should be more inclusive, more representative. I agree. However, I feel like sometimes we pick and we choose what we’re comfortable with, which is fair enough in a sense, because we could we live in that kind of zone of our experience, our reality, our histories. But why aren’t we talking about adoptive families, LGBT families and relationships in that way? And why are we, I think there are really great couple of things in this chapter by other contributors, I think Kieran spoke about the fairy tale of marriage. Why are we always presenting marriage as the thing? And I know people probably think, well, you’ve done it Bex don’t be a hypocrite, but actually some of my feelings on that and my discussions with my wife since are really interesting as a result of this chapter. So when we were writing this chapter, there was a few people that were writing about, you know, the fairy tale and the Disney princess kind of idea of marriage being the ultimate goal. That we are in society, all of us are made to believe that if we don’t get married, we’re in some way inferior or we’ve failed. Right? And it’s really, really interesting that as a result of all the discussions when we were writing this chapter, we had a meeting on Zoom, I came away to speak to my wife. And I said, it’s really interesting because when I first met her and this is going to sound soppy, right. Soppy alert. When I first met her, I said, oh yeah, I’m definitely going to marry her. And after about a year, I remember we were, she was working in Slovakia and I’d gone over during half term and I said to her, at the most random point, I think we were in a swimming pool or something. I said, would you ever get married? It was like I was just testing the water a little bit and she went, yeah, but not now. And only when we don’t just have civil partnerships, only when we have full marriage equality. And I was like, okay, check. So as soon as we had full marriage equality, I was straight there, you know, down on one knee with, with the ring. Actually, no, I didn’t get down on one knee, I didn’t do that. I rejected that. But yeah, we, you know, we got engaged and it was great. I’m so happy. Our marriage means a lot to me. I take it very seriously. But we then had a conversation as part of this kind of work on, on the manifesto, and I said, what were your reasons for getting married? And she was like, what do you mean? Is this a test? And I said, no, because in reality, what has changed for us. In reality, we’ve made like public vows, we’ve made, and it’s a legal thing. But in reality, for us as a couple, nothing has changed. Like our love is the same. How we behave is the same. And I said, I just wonder whether, did we do it because for so long we were told we couldn’t, you know, because of like not having marriage equality, that then I was like, we fought for it, so I’m going to have to do it because it would be such a shame not to. And we ended up talking and we kind of had this realisation that perhaps that was a big part of it. And as much as we, as quickly as we can be given rights, we can have them taken away. And so, yeah, I thought it was quite interesting. But we’re not getting a divorce yet or anything like that. Like but I just thought it‘s quite interesting. So everyone else’s kind of contributions made us have quite, quite a poignant discussion actually about the nature of marriage.

00:16:07:25 – 00:16:18:08
Jess
That’s healthy, though, isn’t it? [Bex: Yes] Like we need to continuously reflect on who we are and we can only do that in community with others who are different to us?

00:16:18:28 – 00:16:19:27
Bex
Yeah, for sure.

00:16:20:09 – 00:16:24:24
Jess
That happened naturally for you because you’ve written in this chapter, in this team.

00:16:25:09 – 00:17:32:20
Bex
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s really interesting because I didn’t think that, you know, writing this, if I’m honest, I was just so like, oh my gosh, I can’t write, I’m a terrible writer because I’m dyspraxic I’ve always had like a bit of a hang up. And I was really, like panicking. And all I was focused on was, was my chapter, as I’m sure everyone was on my section. And I didn’t expect to read and connect with the other people in the chapter. And it to have a profound impact on on how I view relationships and marriage and how maybe I have fed into that. And as a result of that, I also had a conversation with somebody who is a gay man and he’s a lot older than me. And he said, I fought for marriage equality because I believed that there should be equality for everyone in every form. However, I personally don’t believe in the institution of marriage myself and as a gay man it feeds into like a lot of the patriarchal things that actually has oppressed the LGBT community for so long. And then I was like, wow, so then me and my wife had to have a whole other discussion.

00:17:34:12 – 00:17:34:27
Jess
It’s good.

00:17:35:12 – 00:17:37:11
Bex
Yeah, it was really interesting.

00:17:39:28 – 00:17:45:21
Mahlon
All of these things, like there’s, there’s three percolating thoughts that come to my mind that I think I’ll probably start the third one.

00:17:45:21 – 00:17:46:18
Bex
Okay.

00:17:47:10 – 00:21:35:12
Mahlon
There’s, well no, there’s something quite interesting to connect it also to how we, so I was on LinkedIn this morning and I saw like kind of an image that came from Instagram and is reminding people of the stages at which women were given incremental freedom. You want to call it that. And I say if you want to call it that, because kind of, to the point that you’re making, though a watershed moment happened, so something changed that you could do now that you couldn’t do the day before, whatever the case might be. In the grand scheme of things, what material gains has that, you know, as historians we probably always look at turning points versus continuity and change. I think it’s making me think about the idea of you know, that the other chap that you referenced with regards to the fairytale of marriage, we often put marriage on this pedestal, no I lie, we put the wedding on the pedestal. We put like the day itself on the pedestal, but we don’t put on the pedestal the aspects of relationships that come pre and post that watershed moment. They said a couple of vows. You’ve done a couple of things in front of a couple of people. If you are religious with it too, you’ve added in the religious factor to your union, but at the end of that whole thing you still go home. And you are still the same people that you were on the morning that you’ve done the thing. And so if you’re not willing to work on the relationships part prior, you’re not going to be really willing to work on it after. And I think, you know, zoom that out to societal levels. And then, you know, speaking to what you just mentioned before, I am going somewhere with this I promise you. You mentioned your gay male friend. The idea that like, yeah, society we often do the same thing. We really rally around watershed moments. And like, you know, equal marriage for everybody and this is what we’re working for. But then the moment that that happens, we forget that we still need to keep on with the keeping on. Right? What are the things that we like about this? What are the things that we want to change about this? What are the aspects of, you know, this watershed moment that we shouldn’t get? We shouldn’t forget in being caught up in it, being a watershed moment? And I think if I want to land it, the irony of it is bringing it back into school is the SRE curriculum, which is where a lot of this, a lot of diversity in relationships could come up and doesn’t come up. And it’s partly because the S was put before the R, so that it’s sex and relationship education versus relationships and sex education means that a lot of it is hung up in the mechanics of the type of sex that a person can have, which, to be fair, could just be done in biology. But we don’t really have the conversations about what is a relationship, what are relationships, you know, does it matter if you have more than one child, does your love for your first child diminish because you have a second. Does your love for your second change because you have one prior. If you adopt are you any less loving to your kids than if your kid is biological, we just don’t have these conversations. And so everything that you’re speaking to, I guess what’s making, what’s coming up in my head is how much pressure we put on kids to understand the world that we ourselves don’t want to engage in. We don’t want to have these conversations with adults. But then we expect kids to know how to flex with is it a safe space to have this question, is it a safe space to have this view, can I come to you and say I’m feeling differently than what I’ve been told to feel, but it’s just really making me think, you know, from how your chapter reads, sorry, your essay reads, and what we are speaking about right now the idea that we often prioritise the event, but we don’t look at the sort of trajectory of things and keep on keeping on in a long term fashion.

00:21:35:25 – 00:26:32:09
Bex
Yeah. And how it shows up every day, like because you’re right, like nothing really changes in, you know, in terms of practical things, once you’re married or when you become a parent or whatever. But the, the only time it’s like you keep, you keep getting reminded of it, that’s the thing. So you know for me I walk around, I’m very clear. You know, I wear a wedding ring. You know, I don’t walk into a room and go, hello, I married my wife in 2015 because I just love the fact that same sex marriage was introduced. Like that is not the first thing you need to know about me when I walk into a room. You need to know what drink I want, you know, but it’s the same, isn’t it? I think most people who are from, you know, have a protected characteristic or have parts of their identity that people seem to be obsessed with. You know, you would say, you know, I don’t walk into a room and go, hi, I’m gay, and then here’s my name second. And yet that still happens today, 2023 that is still happening, where you walk into a room and someone makes that the conversation first. And it’s really interesting that I mentioned earlier about, you know, when people congratulate us about being married and I’m like, you weren’t there, you don’t know us, it was a long time ago, where’s the card and the gift? You know, but this woman, we went to a local theatre, it must have been a couple of months ago. We were sitting there and it was a comedy evening by a female comic. And we knew it was going to be, you know, it was some sexual jokes in nature and a lot of like women’s humour and what it’s like to be a woman and things like this. And we sat there and my wife sat down and she was next to another person who was a lady we assumed to be a lady of perhaps, you know, 60, 70, more mature lady. And we sat down next to her. And it’s really, you know, in our kind of reflection, sometimes we pre-judge how people are going to react to us. And I know I do that. I know I do that. And it’s something I have to work on, But it’s like a defence thing, I think. And we sat down and we sort of did the look to each other, and said okay, we’re sat next to like an older person. We’re sat here and my wife just had her hand on top of mine, like just cute, you know, a little moment. And then the woman clocked it so she saw it. And I was just like, oh my gosh, I’m not ready. I’m just here for a night out. Friday night, after a long week of teaching, I’m not here for a discussion about our sexuality. I’m just not ready for it. And so we had already prejudged this woman. Right. And that comes from the lived experience. It comes from how in school growing up, both of us constantly had to hide those little gestures. And in the end, the woman looked over and she said, oh, she goes, are you excited? And we said, yeah, yeah, we’re excited. Are you, she said, yeah, I love comedy. I love to get out. And okay. And then she just went and I thought, she’s going to bring it up. Here we go. And she said, oh, how long, are you married? Are you married? How long have you been together? Are you married? And I said, yeah, we are married, have been together. Well, I’m going to get this wrong now on a podcast, but I’m going to say 13 years, we’ve been married like for ten years or so. I hope that’s right. Anna, sorry. And she said, oh, well, I think it’s marvellous. Congratulations. Oh, it’s lovely. I hope you have a really nice evening. And in that moment, my wife was like really polite and she was like, yeah, you too, it’s really great. And she was like, smiling at me, but I don’t know why, but as much as I was really happy that we weren’t about to have some homophobic attack that I had assumed, I felt like this anger that she even needed to congratulate us or mention it because that just made me feel like it’s still a new thing. It’s still not, you know, accepted. It’s tolerated, which is like the word I hate. And yet actually, when I reflected, like over the next few weeks, I realised that’s kind of on me a little bit, that’s on me a little bit as to how I expected her to come at me, she didn’t, and I still wasn’t happy. And I don’t think that’s necessarily because I want to have a discussion about it. It’s that I just feel like it’s a reminder each time that I’m still not, my marriage is still not as accepted as everyone else’s, and my relationship is still not the same.

00:26:33:24 – 00:29:08:22
Mahlon
I hear all of that and thank you for sharing that, because even in hearing you say it, the anger is in me to. And yeah, the idea of like, you know, which direction is the traffic coming. I don’t know if it’s going to be a homophobic interaction. I don’t know if it’s just going to be a casual interaction. I don’t know if I could step out into the road. I don’t know. So I fully get the confusion in that moment, too. And I think like to bring it to something that you wrote in the essay with regards to schools and the curriculum. There’s something in there surrounding the idea of, you know, I’ll go back to it, whose responsibility is it to train or teach others about difference and what we often do, you wrote in the chapter the idea that when you were asking students who were interviewed about different family ties, you said that children interviewed explain that the impacts of different families not being represented or taught in schools, claiming that the job of explaining gay people always falls to them. And in addition, you also said while it is crucial that we give children a chance to talk openly about their families, it’s down to schools to lead and commit to usualise same sex marriage and adoption, If we leave this for young people to have to constantly explain, we are inferring that their family does not belong. And that kind of I guess, put it this way, that makes sense as to why that interaction that you just described comes to pass, right? Because there is no level of usualising the idea that this is my family type. My family type looks like this. What is yours? What is yours? What is yours? They’re all equal? What we often do is say here is the normative family type, and everybody’s family type that doesn’t look like this is less than, and that’s the inference that you’re taking. Because even if you try to take different and it’s divergent and it’s diverse and all these euphemisms and all these euphemisms still sound like mine doesn’t look like this, that somehow mine is inherently wrong. And so I guess, you know, in thinking about what you’ve just described in adult form as an interaction, the question still goes back to, this is more rhetorical question. How fair is it to put on kids? You know, the explanation that comes is my family is the one I was born into. It just is how it is. And here is one side. Here’s another. Here’s another. Here’s another., They’re all equal, which goes beyond tolerance. It just goes to the fact of they exist. There’s nothing that you need to tolerate about them. They’re just there. And so, yeah, it’s just that was the reflection I had of your story. What does that look like in student form and how does that lead to adults then in the moment too.

00:29:09:09 – 00:32:22:00
Bex
Do, you know, the the thing that I’ve seen happen in the past, particularly like RSE when I’ve spoken to like colleagues from primary and secondary and my network and I say, you know, oh, you know, do you represent all family types? And they’ll say, oh yeah, when we do something on families, we like do a slide on same sex families, single parent families, blended families. And I remember like years ago I taught sociology A-Level, there’s a whole unit on families and households. And I remember feeling like really awkward teaching it because I was like, why do we do one section on every family? Why can’t we just talk about the nature of relationships and families, acknowledge that there are those differences? And you’re absolutely right. It is. This is the nuclear family and then here is everything else. And I find that really difficult. And I think, I mean, going onto the thing you said earlier about whose job is it to do this, I think, and in my experience in my school, all the work that we’ve been doing stemmed purely from children that came to me and said my family is like yours, because I had shared that. And from that we then said, right, we need to give these students a voice. We need to listen to them. And if we do not listen to them, then how on earth can we make our curriculum, RSE education, PSHE, our history curriculum more representative of them, if we don’t even ask them or we don’t include them. So I think there’s one level where we need to involve them when they want to volunteer that information. However, it doesn’t work, if then, you know, imagine you’re in a space and you have queer children, they come to my classroom because they know I’m a queer teacher. You know, they see my little pronoun badge or on my lanyard, and they know that’s a safe space because that’s a visual cue to them. They come to my classroom and by accident, and this has happened in every school I’ve worked in, by accident this group has emerged. And I love it because it’s authentic and it evolves and it’s brilliant and there’s no rules and it’s not you know, you must have this criteria to be part of it. And they come to that room and they share their experiences, like their joys, because that‘s the other thing, it’s not just about, you know, the challenges, because being in a same sex family is not a challenge all the time. Every day is not awful. It’s actually joyful. And so giving them a chance to just talk about that freely, and then they come and you are there as an educator, as a leader, and you are listening. And that is a privilege to listen, that they are sharing that with you. And then they go into their classroom and they have the RSE lesson, they have their history lesson, they have their science lesson. And no one still represents them. Yet there are the leaders listening, having the privilege to hear their story, but not acting upon that. That’s not okay. And it’s something, I’m getting very animated because I’m so passionate about that. However, the actual structural change has to come from the top. We can’t leave it to kids to be able to, you know, to have that pressure on them. Otherwise it’s not real change.

00:32:22:11 – 00:33:59:02
Jess
A hundred percent. And we’re only audible. Those that can see us, Mahlon is clapping right now, but for you, you’ve gone into something that I don’t know, our listeners know about yet because they might not have read your chapter yet. So let’s just hone in as a last question to you then. You set up and have set up in different schools you’ve worked in diversity and community groups, right? And I wanted to share a few of my favourite quotes that you wrote around setting this up. You said: I needed a proper audit of my privileges, bias and knowledge of protected characteristics. This led to setting up of a student diversity community group. Hearing their own lived experience, it became clear that our school had to act. And you just talked there about this action physically and practically. Even with a badge saying your pronouns, right? There’s something about acting, not just having these cool, interesting conversations. You then said we are neglecting certain narratives. There was the setting up of a language toolkit. And then what I loved, you said that whilst enlisting students to help diversity in curriculum is powerful, they need to see that educators are doing the majority of that work. So on all of those things, if you could, if you could say right now to the entire education system on how to be more inclusive, how did you go about doing that? Because you’ve done some very practical things along your career to make more inclusive spaces. So share the nuggets of wisdom of action for us, please.

00:33:59:19 – 00:44:33:13
Bex
Okay, so the first thing is you have to work on your self. And I learned and I’m going to rep Aisha Thomas of Representation Matters here because she has really helped start my journey. So what I mean by that is I was very clear about, you know, recognising what perhaps some queer students needed, not all because I only have experience as a gay woman, but I had some idea. But I needed to recognise that my own bias, my own goal, my own anti-racist journey. I didn’t even understand the difference between not being racist and anti-racist. Like, say, like four or five years ago. Aisha Thomas kind of was a big, big help in that. So the first thing I would say is go along and just listen. I went to like a webinar on anti-racist curriculum. I knew nothing about it. I just thought, this sounds like something we need to do. And the reason I thought this is something we need to do is because of students who, when they had kind of come to me naturally as queer students, I ended up having students that just didn’t feel like they belonged. So from all different intersectional identities came along to this space. And that’s when I started to hear about the daily racist incidents. The daily homophobia, misogyny, everything. And so I realised that actually I had perhaps prioritised LGBT experiences, but I need to learn a bit more and I can’t lean on just those students to share that because why would they share that with me as a white educator. That’s not a safe space to do that, I need to get to a point where it can be a safe space to do that. And so the first thing was I started reading. I read everything, I read books about race, I read books about bias, I read books about representation. I went to free webinars, like in the evenings, my wife was like, are you going to come and have an evening? I’m like, no. And because I just felt, how can I and how dare I even start to talk about this if I don’t reflect on myself and I don’t think that you can do the work if you don’t do that. That was my first thing. And my second thing in terms of like the practical element was I then went and I listened to a webinar and I went to my school and I was not equality, diversity and inclusion lead then. I was a history teacher doing her thing. And I went to my school leaders and I said, look, we are not doing enough for our students, particularly for our students from black African-Caribbean communities, because although our staff is predominantly white British, our school was very diverse. So we realised we weren’t doing enough for our students in terms of acting, in terms of our curriculum, our policies, our practice. We weren’t showing up, so we thought, oh, we’ve got these spaces now. We set up these student groups, which in honesty they just evolved, no one actively set them up. I then led them. So what were we doing? My question to the leaders in my school was, what are we actually doing to prove and to show that we are making a commitment to change? And it was difficult because I think not everyone, well I know not everyone really understood. And I was really lucky that our deputy headteacher is really passionate about teaching and learning and was a, is a history teacher as well. And it was really great that he then went on a journey and he was very much like, I am cisgender and a white, straight 55 year old man and he’s, you know, he had done very well. He’d done amazing work with history and projects and planning and was an advisor. And he said, oh my gosh, I’ve just been reading and I’ve been learning. And I realised how I am to blame for a lot of this, for this history education, I should have done better. And I said, yeah, me too. And with that he really backed it and he said, we need to diversify the whole curriculum. It needs to be a long term thing. It needs to be in every subject. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa. We can’t like, we need to slow down. Like and actually the group of students at the moment that really need this are our queer students because they’re speaking openly. But we also need to think about how we are white staff and how that shows in our language, in our lessons. So my kind of top tips and like the practical things we did was make sure you’ve got student forums, student spaces, but spaces mean nothing if we don’t do anything with it. So what we did was we said to students, come along to our history department planning meeting, what do you actually think of our curriculum? And I’ll tell you, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done because teachers, we educators, we get precious over what we plan because we like to think we are doing an amazing job and we are in lots of ways. We did like an anonymous survey of our curriculum and asked, we genuinely ask questions. Do you see yourself in any of these lessons? What, how do these lessons make you feel? Which role models would you like to see? That was really difficult. I remember coming home and feeling like the worst history teacher in the world because overwhelmingly it was, there were comments. I don’t see myself reflected. There were even comments, one that really sticks with me, a student said, I see myself reflected, but my friends don’t. And I thought, whoa, that’s like really like, you know, useful oversight and insight to recognise that they would, but their friend wouldn’t. And it was really uncomfortable. But we then decided to ask about other subjects, and then I shared this. So this anonymous feedback and these quotes with all staff. And it was scary because I did not want to go down the route of saying, you’re all useless, we’re all terrible. I respect my colleagues. I respect how hard the profession is and how we all have those core values. But at the same time, I kind of needed to show them the truth. And that was hard because it very much felt like I would be, I was like, I could potentially make myself a bit of a target here, a bit vulnerable here. From that, we then decided to set up staff groups on diversifying the curriculum. So leaders within our school can choose different groups that they work on to have a whole school impact, particularly those on the upper pay range, which have TLR responsibility. And we wrote diversifying the curriculum into the school improvement plan, into the main aims for the school. And then we were like, right, we need representation from every subject here and it needs to be a subject leader or a head of year, a deputy head, assistant head. We need everyone here. They need to be willing to do it. We don’t want anyone turning up and going, oh, we’ve been made to be here because that’s not going to help the work. We’ll get to them later. You know, we will bring them along later. We’ll show them. And that’s what we did. A small group of us, we went and we audited our curriculum. We got in Aisha Thomas from Representation Matters who came in. She did an online session for us because it was the pandemic. She came in. She then she checked our work. So every year she’s come in to hold us accountable and saying, you say that you’re going to do this. Have you? Let’s have a look. And it’s quite scary sometimes because you really don’t want to like talk the talk and not walk the walk. So that’s like the first kind of big, big thing we did. And that really led to a lot of changes because the biggest thing that I would say is it led to conversations between staff. So although I get on really well with staff, no one had ever felt like they could talk to me about identity or sexuality openly in school, and all of a sudden they’re like, Bex, I’ve got a student and they want to use these pronouns, but I don’t want to get it wrong, you know, what do I do if I get it wrong? And I was like, so grateful to even, that they even wanted to talk about that in a professional setting because that was so alien to me. I’d say the second thing that we did was go, we can’t do this on our own. So the biggest thing I’d say to educators is reach out to local community groups, reach out to your museums and your archives, reach out to your youth groups, because not only do they get funding to help schools, they want to help schools, and they often feel alienated. So we worked with, like the Windrush Select Committee, like Windrush Group in Suffolk. We worked with an organisation called BME Support, We worked with the local LGBT youth group, we worked with the Bangladeshi community, the Roma community, and we worked with like autism groups and we just said, you know what? Can you help us? Can you come and train us? Can you come and have the conversations with us? And then can you check when we’re making these changes to the curriculum, can you check, can you like, because I don’t want to, you know, we need help with language, we needed help on everything. And so just having those people involved in our school enriches the experience of the school, enriches the opportunity for children to see themselves reflected just by having those visitors come in. And that’s kind of where we started. And to be honest, I’m really, really proud that throughout year seven, all the way through to year 13, every single student in my school will learn LGBT history in every year all the way through. Yeah. And it’s not just America and the movement. We’re talking in Berlin and Germany in the twenties and thirties. We’re talking about British UK movement. We’re talking about the intersectional, amazing Ted Brown. We’re talking about Bayard Rustin, we’re talking about all these great people and because it’s not about, we don’t call it LGBT history, we just call It really good history.

00:44:35:01 – 00:45:47:27
Jess
Bex, thank you. I hope you acknowledge that you have actually modelled quite a lot for a lot of people. That’s why I’m really glad we drew that out. Two things that really stood out from what you just said. One is that you’ve really modelled shifting from these really interesting on trend at the moment DEI conversations to what do you do next? You’ve really outlined what you can do next. There’s no excuse after listening to what you’ve just said, for educators to not have an idea of what to do next. Secondly, you did not think that you could do it all in your own power and you didn’t go down the saviourism route, and you collectively with community, said, let’s patchwork this and try. And I love that. I love that. I really erm, yeah. Massive, massive, massive thank you for stepping out of those awkward, silent, comfortable British spaces and modelling how we can move forward on being more inclusive. We’ve got to stop there, I’m afraid. We thank you so much for for giving up your afternoon to share with us and for all the work you’ve done and your contribution to the book. It’s amazing.

00:45:48:17 – 00:45:53:05
Bex
No worries. I really enjoyed it. I loved talking to you, too. I’m going to talk to you again. You’ll never get rid of me now.

00:45:53:18 – 00:45:54:04
Jess
Yes, yes, yes, we can be friends.

00:45:54:04 – 00:46:09:08
Mahlon
We are absolutely going to continue after the recording stops, not even an issue. So we’ve been Mahlon Evans-Sinclair, Jess Boyd and Bex Bothwell-O’Hearn. We’ve been your co-hosts and your guest of season two of the Diverse Ed Podcast. See you again soon.

00:46:09:27 – 00:46:10:14
Jess
Bye.

00:46:13:23 – 00:46:28:11
Hannah
[Outro Music] Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Diverse Ed Podcast. Check out the show notes for the recommendations of today’s guest. We’d love to hear what you think, so do leave us a review. We’ll be back soon with another author from our book Diverse Educators: A Manifesto.