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THE ALLEYNIAN 709
OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
The Alleynian student editor, Arjaan Amos Miah (Year 12), catches up with Dr Malcolm Cocks to talk about the Diversity and Inclusion Alliance at the College and his role as Director of Diversity and Inclusion Fostering
Arjaan Amos Miah: What is the Diversity and Inclusion Alliance, and how did it come into being? Malcolm Cocks: The Alliance is a body of volunteers drawn from the staff, students and operational staff. Its purpose is to act as an advisory group and a ‘think tank’ of sorts on all matters to do with inclusion. It was born in the period of collective reckoning and re-evaluation of our commitments to racial inclusion in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and combatting racism is rightly a key focus of this work. But in many ways the Alliance was also an opportunity to bring together various strands of work that support our aims to be a fair, supportive and inclusive community. There were lots of people who wanted the opportunity to share ideas and to see these translated into wider policy and practice. As I drew up the Road Map to Racial Inclusion in consultation with Ms Whittington and others, it became apparent that we wanted to pool collective resources and to hear from people at all levels of the College. With this in mind, I invited some of the many people who had already been doing this work to form an Alliance, and since then it has grown into a body of about 25 volunteers who dedicate time to various aspects of inclusion. So really the Alliance exists to spearhead new initiatives and to bring renewed focus and energy to existing ones. In its broadest terms, the Alliance is there to play midwife to a cultural shift in the College towards robust anti-racist, anti- sexist, anti-homophobic cultures, and more generally, to ensure that the benefits of inclusion in its widest sense are available to all in our community. AAM: Why exactly was the role of Director of D&I created and to what extent is it part of a wider plan or part of a direct response to a growing movement? MRC: In some ways, the role should always have existed, and this is of course work that many colleagues already engage in informally. The BLM movement was a clarion call to focus this work and to speed it along. I think that many schools have recognised that they need to respond actively to racism – in most cases because they want to get it right for their pupils and their communities. The scoping and mapping out of the work to be done by the D&I Alliance made it clear, I think, that there needed to be somebody charged with taking the work forward. It would be dishonest to say that the role of Director of Diversity and Inclusion would have definitely been created without the impetus provided by the Black Lives Matter movement or that period of re-evaluation that took place in the lockdown. But it has grown naturally out of the recognition that the work that we have to do as a school is significant and wide-ranging, and that it’s useful to have somebody leading and shaping that in a visible way. AAM: What, in your view, might be the differences between the experiences of minority students, teachers and workers here at DC, and non-minority ones?
MRC: I can’t answer this in a very granular way because we don’t know enough about what these experiences are or how these groups feel. And that’s part of the challenge we face — we want to have this specific granular knowledge but we don’t want people to feel that their lives are under scrutiny, particularly if they are already vulnerable. The hope is that we will develop a culture of speaking to our pupils and staff about their inclusion needs and listening carefully to all who hail from historically marginalised groups. We also hope to launch a comprehensive survey to capture data on all protected characteristics to calibrate our response, focus our resources, and gain a clearer understanding of who our community is and what it needs. The Alliance will also hope to engage with external partners to help us better understand the perceptions of our community towards race or gender or LGBTQ+ identities. To attempt to answer the question more directly though: I think, from experience, from research, and from what I hear from the students, there can be a sense of carrying a double burden – you’re doing your normal work or study and you’re also navigating a dominant hegemonic culture where you have to work harder to belong, to gain acceptance, or to consolidate your authority, if you happen to be a teacher. This makes complex demands on your personal resources and energies: sometimes this means inhabiting a language, accent, dress code or even hairstyle that is either alien to you or may not reflect your ethnic background, your sexuality, or your economic or class position. It may mean having to put up with small putdowns or microaggressions or even gross mischaracterisations of you in order to keep the peace. I think that, speaking to my own situation as both Zimbabwean and British, mixed race, and gay, I’m very aware of the emotional and linguistic dexterity that has sometimes been required of me in terms of how I negotiate life in contexts that may be hostile to one or more of these aspects of my identity. The specific work of inclusion is that of not allowing hegemonic culture to dominate and erase difference, and of helping people to recognise that when we can all be ourselves, we work and learn from a position of strength and confidence, and that this benefits us all. Inclusion ensures that the benefits of a diverse community are available to everyone. I think that, speaking to my own situation as both Zimbabwean and British, mixed race, and gay, I’m very aware of the emotional and linguistic dexterity that has sometimes been required of me in terms of how I negotiate life in contexts that may be hostile to one or more of these aspects of my identity. The specific work of inclusion is that of not allowing hegemonic culture to dominate and erase difference, and of helping people to recognise that when we can all be ourselves, we work and learn from a position of strength and confidence, and that this benefits us all. Inclusion ensures that the benefits of a diverse community are available to everyone.
inclusion
in
schools
ARTWORK — ALEXANDROS DOUROUKLAKIS (YEAR 13)
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