What does true inclusion actually look like in today's classrooms? In this episode, Rod and Jal welcome Dr. Leyton Schnellert to the conversation. Drawing from decades as a classroom teacher and educational leader, Leyton challenges educators to move beyond deficit thinking and instead build classrooms around students' strengths, identities, and aspirations.
Dr. Leyton Schnellert is a Professor in the University of British Columbia's Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy and Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship. Dr. Schnellert is also the Pedagogy and Participation research cluster lead in UBC’s Institute for Community Engaged Research (ICER) and co-chair of BC’s Rural Education Advisory. His community-based collaborative work contributes a counterargument to top-down approaches that operate from deficit models, instead drawing from communities’ funds of knowledge to build participatory, place-conscious, and culturally sustaining practices. Highlights from his conversation with Rod and Jal include: why discussions around inclusion need to start with strengths instead of deficits; strategies for creating student, teacher and whole class profiles – and how those profiles can drive goal setting and accountability; how teachers can intentionally design learning for diverse learners; why project-based, place-based, and community-connected learning continues to be one of the most powerful ways to engage students; why belonging and "mattering" are important in the classroom, how the work of inclusion and belonging has adjusted to a polarizing political landscape; what it means to think big and start small; and one of the fastest lightning rounds ever!
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