00:00:00 Rosemary

If you’ve completed or are currently enrolled in Compassionate Inquiry training, you’re invited to attend the third International CI Conference in Vancouver, Canada, from October 30 to November 1. Dr. Gabor Mate is returning as our keynote speaker and masterclass presenter. Enjoy engaging workshops and inspiring demonstrations with Sat Dharam Kaur, CI facilitators and practitioners. Whether you join us in person for three days of shared inquiry with CI cohort partners and colleagues from around the world, or attend virtually to focus on the teachings, tap the link in the show notes to learn more, take advantage of early bird discounts and secure your place. And yes, there will be dancing.

00:00:49 Kevin

So when you ask young boys, young men, how they want to be educated and what they want to see, and what works for them, what do they tell you?

00:00:57 Susan

When I took on this research, I thought, what I don’t want to do is another… yet another piece of research that kind of says, here’s what’s going on. What interventions do we need? So we use a process that we call Appreciative Inquiry. So by Appreciative Inquiry, it means we steer very clear of making any negative judgments about boys and young men themselves, or making any negative judgments about educators or school sellers. So we come at everything from a place of what works and what works well. The only questions we asked in our research is, what are the things that are working well for you? What are the things that inspire you? What are the things that enable you to grow? What are the things that enable you to develop? And we ask the teachers the same questions. What do you like about boys? What do you like about working with boys? What are the things that you appreciate that they bring into the room? What ways do you see them responding to you when you use particular methods or styles of practice? And from that, what we wanted to do was to try and build a way of responding more positively or more affirmatively to boys in education in a way that might make it a chance or some opportunity to make some difference.

00:02:09 Rosemary

This is the Gifts of Trauma Podcast, stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry.

00:02:25 Kevin

So welcome to another edition of the Gifts of Trauma Podcast from Compassionate Inquiry. My name is Kevin Young and I am really happy to be joined today by… I don’t know how I would describe you in relationship to me, Susan, a friend of my sister, almost family member. I’m not sure, but this is Susan Morgan. And Susan, you’re the principal investigator… to give you your formal title… of a really interesting project that we’re going to talk about later on, I really want to get into that and get your thoughts on that, rather than me introducing you. Susan, how would you like to introduce yourself?

00:03:03 Susan

Thanks for that, Kevin. And yes, I think any one of those three things would fit. I think we could consider ourselves friends as well as a friend of your sisters, as well as part of your broad extended family. And it’s really nice to be invited along to talk to you. I’d introduce myself in this context, as you said. I’m the principal investigator of a piece of research called Taking Boys Seriously. I’ve been doing that research for a number of years now, maybe seven or eight. But I’m also a lecturer in community youth work here in Ulster University, and I’ve been lecturing in community youth work for about 20 years. And prior to that I was a youth work practitioner. So my background in a professional way, is in working with young people in formal ways and communities.

00:03:47 Kevin

Thank you, Susan, I appreciate that. I’m really curious, Susan, and maybe because I know a little bit of your history, I can maybe join dots together. But what brought you into this line of work? Why this? Why are you here?

00:04:00 Susan

Why the boys?

00:04:02 Kevin

Yeah, why the boys? Why the youth work? Why that interest? What has but has done that for you?

00:04:07 Susan

That’s an interesting question, Kevin. And because you do know me, that’s probably why you’ve asked it. You might know a little bit of the history of that. I came up through youth services as a young person. I had, I’d say, maybe a mediocre to poor experience of formal education. And mostly how I was engaged as a young person was via youth services. So I was involved in youth clubs and I became a young leader at the age of 16/17. I went on to represent other young people in my own community in an organization called Northern Ireland Youth Forum when I was 19/20. And from that I became inspired to actually do youth work as a job. So I moved into, as a young leader, working with young people in my own community, and then went off to university to study youth work and became a youth worker as a profession,a  youth worker, and ended up in university, incidentally or accidentally. I was invited to join the team 20 years ago on a continent for a number of months and ended up staying in a university. But it wasn’t part of my career plan necessarily. Does that answer your question, Kev?

00:05:15 Kevin

It does. Isn’t. Yeah, it does. Maybe it does. Technically, knowing you and for full disclosure for our audience, you’re a friend of my sister. You’ve been a friend of my sister for 40 years, and there’s a big group of you women, and I was going to say guys and girls, and women and men now, and you have your own families. And it seems to be more than a line of work for you. You seem to be deeply embedded into it. You seem to be very passionate about it. And I’m just wondering what’s driving that.

00:05:44 Susan

Yeah, I think you’re right about that. Youth work, I think for most people who go into it, is vocational. It’s a place where you are free in some ways to engage with young people in a way that can be very authentic. And it’s different from perhaps other, I don’t know, professional interactions that you have with young people. So in youth work, your driver is to start with young people themselves and where they’re at and with the experiences that they bring to you, and then use those experiences in order to help them reflect and grow and develop and find their voice in their way through life. But it’s a real privileged place to be, youth work, because unlike maybe lots of other types or ways of working with young people, it’s entirely voluntary. And by voluntary, I mean young people voluntarily participate in it. They choose to be with us as youth workers, and they choose to be with us because what they get from the experience of youth work is something quite special and part of my own history of being involved with it. I got an awful lot out of it as a young person, too. So it helped me learn things about my development, my emotional intelligence, to develop my capacity to have a voice in places that I never would have imagined that it could have been possible to be heard in ways that I didn’t realize that I could, and also open doors for me that wouldn’t have opened in any other way. So being able to go to university, for example, that was never on my radar either, to ever be able to do that. And I was encouraged and motivated by youth workers to be able to do that, to find. To actually be able to appreciate myself as an intelligent person, came via that. Being involved in those services and the people who were around me on that. And that includes not just the youth workers, but as you mentioned earlier when we were talking earlier, youth work actually creates those environments where young people learn from each other as well. So that collaborative, cooperative way of being as a group of young people and learning together is a very powerful experience as well. And as you rightly said, the young people that I came up with through youth services are still my friends and very strong friendships as well that are there. It’s interesting because the question you asked is… I do tend to go into the professional part of it, but it’s been a while since I’ve reflected back to where that came from. It was many years ago now.

00:08:20 Kevin

And maybe you’re right, Susan. I have that insight because I see you and your group of friends do what you do, how you interact with young people. You know, I even see how you engage young people in your own family and in my sister’s family. And it’s always very inclusive. It’s something that I noticed just feeling it in my heart right now. It’s really inclusive that you all go out with your kids and I see you all having great fun and everybody’s playing ball games and the adults are having a beer and the kids are doing… staying up late and there’s music going on and it’s a posse. There’s a fair collective of you. I’ve never seen a time where the kids are shunned or chased or put somewhere else, and I really admire that. I think that’s something really special. And I think it’s important when we move into what we’re going to talk about, the work that you do and how we engage with young people. So I think what I’ve seen of you, you embody what you’re actually talking about on a professional level.

00:09:17 Susan

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Kevin. And I think that’s a good observation because certainly for me, I think youth work isn’t something that you do just as a job. It’s a person that you are. And the value base that underpins youth workers, underpins your personal life as well. And I think that’s absolutely accurate. I think maybe what you witness is that there’s good, strong sort of empathy and understanding of young people and respect for them and dignity with them, and just an appreciation really, for young people being relevant as who they are now, not just as what they’re going to be in their future, or what they’re going to bring as adults into society, but just an appreciation of who they are at any stage of their lives. So we’ve always appreciated all the children and young people that were both in our families as well as in our practice. Yeah.

00:10:12 Kevin

Is that line something that you have written down, Susan? An appreciation of young people as who they are now and not what they are about to become. That’s a really beautiful sentence.

00:10:21 Susan

Yeah. I don’t know that I’ve ever written it down, although I do talk about. Maybe get talking about when we talk about the research. Those values are very strong in the research. So I do use as a Research methodology, a thing that I call Appreciative Inquiry. And I can tell you a little bit about that when we start talking about the research, because that’s a really important part of it, the appreciation of young people. It’s not quite that, but it’s linked to the same concept of.

00:10:46 Kevin

What was the term you used there, Susan? Appreciative inquiry.

00:10:50 Susan

Appreciative. Appreciative inquiry as a research methodology. And I can tell you a little bit about that.

00:10:56 Kevin

I do, and I’m writing that term. It’s a lovely. I mean, our organization is called Compassionate Inquiry and it kind of stands alongside it. Appreciative Inquiry is really beautiful as well. It has a really.

00:11:07 Susan

Yeah, yeah. I’ll bet there’s some comparisons you can make to what we did and what we do and why we do it in the particular ways that we do.

00:11:15 Kevin

I bet there is, too. Even the name. That or that part of that name. So then, Susan, I mean, I’d love to chat about the research and the technicalities of it and what you do and who you do it with and where it gets done and sort of stuff. And I’d love to talk about outcomes. What have you learned and maybe what has changed and what you would like to change. But quite often when there’s a research project, there’s an identifiable challenge or problem or thing that needs to be looked at. Would that be true in saying that there was something that needed to be sorted out?

00:11:46 Susan

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:11:48 Kevin

You got the job of sorting it out then?

00:11:50 Susan

I don’t know that we sorted it out yet. Yeah, you could say that. The problem.

00:11:54 Kevin

The problem.

00:11:54 Susan

So we. Yeah, there’s a problem. The problem came about because… or at least the sort of starting story as to how I got involved. It’s not quite the start, but universities… Earl Street University has a widening access and participation strategy. And that strategy is set up to try and make sure that we are reaching students from communities who wouldn’t normally come to university or who wouldn’t normally access higher education. And one of the parts of that strategy is to identify who those groups are. And one of the groups that were identified was working class boys. And I used the term working class deliberately. What other people would use the term… maybe socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. And boys from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities were part of that group. But tracking back previous to that, I’ve done some work around gender conscious practice. So I would have had a history and research with girls, actually more than boys, and had worked with a colleague around that in the past. And when that came up as part of our writing access and participation strategy. I started work with a colleague of mine, Ken Harland, and he has a history of working research with boys and men. So we approached to say that we would be interested in taking it on as a research project to try and work out what was going wrong. So the problem is that there’s a gap in outcomes, educational outcomes for boys and men right through the educational system. And that is right from primary school through to post primary school through to further education through to university level. So it’s the entire way through the educational system. And it has been in place for years, decades, so probably 30 years by now. And it’s a very stubborn problem. So it has been researched quite a bit already.

00:13:45 Kevin

Can I ask you just a quick question there, Susan? Is this specific to the north of Ireland or have you looked…

00:13:49 Susan

Okay, no, you were right. And you said that. I think you said that, Kevin, in your own opening gambit, when you said that you think that some of these issues to do with men are not just in Northern Ireland, it’s right across most of the Western, most of the Western world, in various guises. But men are doing less well than women and boys are doing less well than girls, particularly those from poverty, our communities that suffer from poverty. So it’s been a… It’s a long term sustained issue. And what we wanted to do was to try and find out not so much why, but what we could do in order to try and do something about it. And that, that was. Yeah, that was basically what we set out to do. We set out to try and find out what we could do in respect of a long term stubborn problem. Because there has been many interventions that have been put in place. There has been lots of consultations, lots of policy initiatives, lots of funding, and really nothing has changed in any significant way over decades.

00:14:55 Kevin

Yeah, thank you. I don’t want to take this conversation too far this way, Susan, but just as you chatted there, not why, but what, it would be really interesting to. And I guess maybe you’ve done this, but to have some conversations at some point around the why as well, because that’s maybe where the trauma world sits, you know, and the work that we do then, and that then links back to the support of families and young mothers and it links to. Are you aware of the ACEs studies and that type of thing. So I guess all of that early years stuff would lead us to having young boys and young men who are not engaging in the educational system.

00:15:34 Susan

What I was going to say to that is that the why question? I can give you maybe a little bit about how we speak to that in our research, but I haven’t done much research into that. So I could tell you maybe some stories, but on a professional level I wouldn’t be able to talk about really much of the psychology of adolescence and those things. But I can say what has turned up in respect of the research that we’ve done and where we put then put our focus of that, please.

00:16:02 Kevin

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Susan, I’m really happy for you to speak professionally and I’d love to hear your opinion on your thoughts and.

00:16:09 Susan

I’m very cautious about that. Of course.

00:16:11 Kevin

Use academics. Use academics always.

00:16:13 Susan

We are. Yeah, of course we are. Because it only takes you to say the wrong thing. If you can’t stand over it, you can’t say it. It’s part of the rules of engagement, I’m afraid in academia I know this is the difference between. Yeah. Getting and that. I think that’s interesting, Kevin, because most of the time that I do any interviews about research, I’m not speaking to somebody I know or somebody who knows me. So it’s an interesting dynamic.

00:16:38 Kevin

It is.

00:16:38 Susan

Even just some of those earlier questions because I’ve looked, I hadn’t even thought about that because it’s been so long since I’ve actually even thought or engaged with thinking about, how did I end up here, even in youth, work wise. I’ve been here for so long. I’ll tell you a little bit about the research, and then you can interrupt me and you can ask some questions. So let me tell you a little bit about what we did, please. So the gap was the gaps established. There’s a gap in relation to outcomes for boys and young men, particularly those from poor backgrounds, right the way through the educational. We talk about the educational pipeline. So. Right the way through the educational pipeline. And it has been there for some time and as you rightly said, it’s not just here, it’s across a lot of the Western world. So when I took on this research, I thought what I don’t want to do is another, yet another piece of research that kind of says, here’s what’s going on. What interventions do we need? I thought what we need to do is actually a piece of research that might have some chance or some opportunity to make some difference. So right from the beginning, as one of the, what would you call it, a guiding principle of the research, we come back to it all the time when we’re trying to make decisions about the Research, we come back to it all the time. And that is, are we making a difference? And if we’re not, then we’re not doing it. So is it something that has the potential to actually make, to do something, make a difference for boys and young men, or be transformative in some way? So what we did was we thought that the best way to find out how to respond to the problem of educational underachievement or the gap in education was to ask the real experts what could be done. So to us, the real experts were boys and young men themselves. So we wanted to ask them what they thought were the things that worked best for them in education. And the other experts are obviously their educators. And by their educators, we always talked about that real broad family of educators too. So educators to us are not just teachers, they’re also youth workers, parents and peers. So other boys themselves. So we talk about this idea of asking the real experts what way we can address the problem. And I said to you, earlier on, that we used a process called Appreciative Inquiry. So one of the things, and I’ll maybe talk about this a bit later in the podcast, which is a bit about the negative narrative for negative social discourse that follows boys and men. And really connected to that, we wanted to do something that wouldn’t reinforce that negative stereotype. So we use a process that we call Appreciative Inquiry. So by Appreciative Inquiry, it means we steer very clear of making any negative judgments about boys and young men themselves, or making any negative judgments about educators or school sellers. So we come at everything from a place of what works and what works well. The only questions we asked in our research is what are the things that are working well for you? What are the things that inspire you? What are the things that enable you to grow? What are the things that enable you to develop? And we ask the teachers the same questions. What do you like about boys? What do you like about working with boys? What are the things that you appreciate that they bring into the room? What ways do you see them responding to you when you use particular methods or styles of practice? And from that, what we wanted to do was to try and build a way of responding more positively or more affirmatively to boys in education in a way that might make a difference to them. It has been, it’s been very interesting, it’s been an incredibly interesting piece of research for lots of reasons. But the Appreciative Inquiry bit of it has been, I think, one of the biggest successes of it, because what you find, or what we find is that people are inspired to talk about the things that make them grow, that make them feel enriched, that make them feel actually like they have got some control over, over what happens in their lives. And for school, it was really important as well, because schools are often at the front line of judgment and criticism. So for schools to actually be able to talk mostly about their best practice and the things that they knew that they do well meant that they engaged with us in ways that it’s difficult sometimes for researchers to get schools to engage with them. And so with thousands and thousands of boys and thousands of educators that have talked to us so far and informed our research, that process was very helpful.

00:21:06 Rosemary

We’re taking a brief pause to share what’s on offer in the Compassionate Inquiry community. Stay with us. We’ll be right back.

00:21:16 Kevin

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Kevin:
Can I pause you a little second, Susan? Because I just see how much that’s lighting you up that, that part. And I can really see how you’re lifted by talking about that. And it’s really beautiful to watch. And you asked earlier, and I just jotted out a few things quickly. You asked earlier about how Appreciative Inquiry and Compassionate Inquiry might overlap a couple of the little pillars, if you like, of our work. And I just thought a couple off the top of my head is, yeah, see the client for their true sales, not what they present. So if someone comes in presenting with an addiction, you’re seeing the person, not the addiction. Give the client a taste of victory. Helping our clients see what they’re doing really well. See them for their potential, and just thinking of all of those things that you’ve said, just overlap with that. You were going to say something, but before you do it and maybe you’re going to come to it, I’m really curious then. So when you ask young boys, young men, how they want to be educated and what they want to see and what works for them, what do they tell you?

00:23:16 Susan

I think it would be good to backtrack a little bit because this will help frame it for you. Because what they told us is one part of where we went with the research. But when I talk about the research, I talk about three different ways or three ways that we have framed it. And this sort of, it’s an earlier question that you were asking because you were saying what is wrong? And this talks to you a little bit, what are some of the issues that we deal with, and also in broader ways that we try to approach it. So there’s three things and the first one is, we use this concept called compounded educational disadvantage, right? So the concept of compounded educational disadvantage, we talk about bricks in a backpack. So for every boy, it’s just an analogy to help people understand maybe what are some of the things that holds boys back. So we talk about bricks in a backpack. And for each brick in the backpack it means that it’s more difficult for a boy to make his way through successfully through the education system. And we talk about three main ways that form the bricks. So for example, the first thing or the main indicator of educational underachievement is poverty. So we say, right, so for example, maybe working class boys don’t have good schools or maybe they don’t have personal tutors, or maybe they don’t have access to travel, or access to the arts, or maybe there’s a negative association with education in their families or their communities that gets passed on from generation to generation. And whilst those things are outside of the classroom, there are enormous indicators in relation to how people develop their emotional intelligence, their social mobility, their cultural capital. So we say that those are bricks, those are some of the bricks in the backpack. The second set of bricks then that we talk about are masculinities. We talk about masculinities in lots of ways, but for boys, if you look at how society has patriarchy and power, and high patriarchy and power have been held by men as well researched, understood and well known. And you made some reference to that earlier when you talked about some of the geo global political politics that we have at the minute and where power lies and how power is used. So power and patriarchy have been understood for quite some time now. And then you have feminism a the women’s movement. So we’ve had over half a decade of challenges to patriarchy and that has transformed gender role significantly in society. Women have moved into places that 60 years ago would have been unimaginable. So that has changed society in a way and speed as well. So things have changed significantly and perhaps mostly in the west over the last 50 to 60 years. And when you kind of see social change happen to that extent, what can happen in respect of that and often does, and you see it in relation to racism as well. But what happens in respect of that is a backlash to it. So there’s a kind of a need to re establish the cultural norms and the backlash comes. The backlash has been coming for years. So things we talked maybe in through the 90s and the noughties about this idea of a crisis in masculinity. I don’t know if you’ll remember the campaign of fathers for justice. They were the superheroes that used to scale. They were. They were fighting for the same rights or access to children that they said they didn’t get in the courts. And now what we have is what we know as the manfluencers or the manosphere and those kind of digital impacts on young people. And it’s a kind of a push towards trying to re establish male.

00:26:48 Kevin

And do you think, Susan, is that because of a perceived threat to male par? Is that what you’re saying?

00:26:55 Susan

Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

00:26:57 Kevin

Okay. Yeah.

00:26:57 Susan

So if you think about it in sociological terms, some of those are direct backlash or direct reaction to a change in how power is held. Because if you have a social movement that changes the dynamics of where power lies, then power has to be lost somewhere for some degree. And power, power has to be lost or power has to be given away, whatever way that you see that. But it creates new dynamics and those new dynamics change the way we are. So some of that has… creates part of this story where I go on to talk about how that’s experienced by boys and young men and what happens to them in respect of that. Because we talk in the research about this kind of confusing masculinity. So boys and young men are caught in the middle of all of these dynamics. And if you think about Northern Ireland as well, and our history of, I mean our history of conflict here, how things were worked out in communities that maybe didn’t engage with the state, for example, and violence has been part of that as well. So if you think about boys and young men being caught in the middle of all of these dynamics, trying to work out who they are, that’s what adolescents do. They try to find out or try to work out who they are. And it can be very confusing. So when we talk to the boys in our research, they talk about feeling a lot of pressure to be powerful, to be strong, to be brave, to be intelligent, to be in control, to be mature. All of those things that we associate with masculinity. And yet at the other side of that, they feel also. They talk about feeling powerless, and they talk about feeling weak, and they talk about feeling judged and dismissed and misunderstood and blamed.

00:28:39 Kevin

And afraid, I would imagine, as well, afraid?

00:28:42 Susan

They don’t. They really would use that term because that associates with something in particular.

00:28:47 Kevin

It’s so taboo.

00:28:48 Susan

It’s taboo, right? So they. They have this kind of a dynamic of a very confusing space where they’re trying to work out who they are and trying to make their way through life. So you put that beside poverty, and then you have these confusing, what we call confused masculinities. So they’re trying to work out who they are.

00:29:07 Kevin

The word I use to describe it is traumatized masculinity.

00:29:10 Susan

But, yeah, maybe traumatized is a… Is maybe a good word to use for it. And it comes out in all sorts of ways. So it comes out in all sorts of behaviors as well. They might have trouble with their social or emotional health. Teachers talk about this, and boys talk about it themselves, actually, this kind of a struggle with getting into these power struggles. So they talk about power struggles and getting into power struggles and not being able to back down because the fear of losing face is stronger than the fear of actually what trouble might follow the fact that they’ve got into this power struggle in the first place. They tend not to ask for help. So they’re much less likely than girls to seek help. They hide emotions as opposed to show them because of a fear of looking weak. And I’m talking about specific sets of boys. And of course, you’ll know, Kevin, that boys are not a homogeneous group. They’re all different. But there’s that kind of a hegemonic masculinity that. That drives a lot of how boys participate with each other in hierarchies within boys themselves, and also how they react or interact with others, girls and teachers and women included in that. The other part of that is what we call a negative social discourse or a negative narrative that follows boys as well. So people talk about boys as feeling as problem boys as underachieving boys as violent boys as toxic. Boys often also describe themselves in those terms. So if we ask boys, how would you describe yourself? They can start to use some of that language in relation to themselves, as well. So they kind of own some of that too. And it becomes maybe a. It becomes sometimes maybe a thing that plays out. So they. When you tell somebody something about themselves, often enough, they start to own that. Yeah. And they start to live up to those standards and to those ideas. And then the third thing in their backpack is educational approaches. So we talk a lot about the need to swing from instrumental approaches in education more towards relational approaches. So educational approaches that don’t work for boys. So these kind of real didactic, sit still, long hours, no interaction, behave yourself, seven hours of a day in a classroom, driving towards examinations being the ultimate goal – get in the way of boys succeeding in school. So those are three of the main things that we talk about this idea of poverty, of masculinities, and of educational approaches as being the bricks in the backpack. And then what we do is as part of the research process. So as I said, the research is aimed at making a difference. So you make a difference by removing the bricks. And most of what we’ve done in the research has been talking about how do we work towards taking some of those bricks out of the backpacks so that we can enable our boys to thrive or to do better in their education.

00:32:08 Kevin

It’s really insightful. As you were telling it, I was imagining… and I went to school 100 years ago, but I think it, of my own journey through school. And yeah, it was just what you were talking about was very relatable. One of the things that is arising for me right now as you talk about that is the difficulty in using a system that is creating a problem to solve the problem that the system is creating. Do you know what I mean by that? Because the way our schooling system’s set up and the way our society is set up and the way that we’re even universities now, there’s a great argument that universities are no longer a place of free thinking, creative individuals. And they’re specifically designed to put people through an educational process that prepares them to go and work and… Yeah. And conform. And maybe that’s a question for a different time, but maybe I’m just feeling some sympathy towards you’re identifying a problem within a system that the system is causing and then hoping that the system will solve the problem itself. There’s a little vortex could go on in there and you could spin around forever, couldn’t you?.

00:33:10 Susan

Yes, but yeah, of course, one of the ways, when I talk about the research to educators and schools and the boys themselves, we talk about it as exactly what you’re describing we talk about it as system change. I suppose maybe one of the things that I was saying earlier when I said that there has been a lot of research done about this already and there has been numerous interventions already and exactly as you described, those interventions won’t do anything because what you’re trying to do is put a sticky plaster on a system that doesn’t work. It will do something for some people some of the time, but it certainly won’t change anything to any extent. So we talk about in our research one of the other things. rhat we have the continuing our. What is that compounded educational disadvantage, which is the backpack. The second thing.

00:33:57 Kevin

Ded. Yeah.

00:33:59 Susan

And the second thing then that we talk about is the ecosystem. So we talk about how do we work with an ecosystem in order to be able to transform something from what it is to be something where boys can thrive and flourish and that requires us all to do something. This might sit well with your Compassionate Inquiry. One of the other terms that we use in the Taking Boys Seriously research is the idea of gifts. So what we say is that you have a big system that’s dysfunctional. It just continues to create dysfunction. Right. So what happens is if you try to approach it from a place of… So like primary schools need to do something or secondary schools need to do something, if we’re telling them that they need to do something, you might make some changes, but you’re not going to make anything significant. So some of the things that were really important to us, was one, that the education system and all of it’s… That’s from policy to practice to funding, to parents, to boys themselves, all take some responsibility for the change that needs to happen. So when we talk about how we shift or change the education system, we talk about it being like a movement. You’ve got to do something that is working in tandem. Lots of movements, as you know, start from the grassroots anyways. They start from the bottom up. Quite often they’re not led by policy or by governments. They start from the bottom up. So we talk about it as a movement and what we say is that in that system that each of us has our gift to bring. So when we go into scenarios where we’re talking about how do we approach the gap in education for boys, that we don’t ask people what’s wrong, we ask, what gift have you got to bring to the table? But I can share with you, I’ll share with you in a minute some of the things that we found out. But what we do is we say what is the gift that you bring to the table in order to be able to make a difference. And what that does, Kevin, is that it prevents a thing that can be very dangerous in any sort of system change, which is that everybody gets to blame everybody else. Right? So it takes away that capacity for somebody to say, oh, we’re doing all we can, but it’s the parents, or we can’t do that because the primary schools haven’t got them sorted out, or it’s policy. We can do everything we can, except the policymakers don’t let us. It takes away that capacity to just keep passing the buck to somebody else, to be the problem or to solve the problem. So we just say, look, don’t worry about what anybody else is doing. This is what boys are telling us works for them. These are the things that you need to do. What is the gift that you have that you’re going to put on the table that’s going to enable that to happen? So it gives people an opportunity to position themselves as part of the solution and it gives a collective way of being able to transform something. And the word gift seems to work really well. So people get that. They get that. When I’m talking about the research, I say the gift that I’ve brought to this. I’m a researcher, so I’ve. I’ve given you that gift. Here it is. I can tell you this, but that’s my gift. I can’t change what happens in schools or in communities necessarily, or in policy. That’s other people’s gifts to bring to the table. So what gift are you bringing? And it works really well. It’s the ecosystem idea. The gift is a good scenario. And the third thing then that we talk about is the relational approaches to education. And I’ll share those with you because…

00:37:13 Kevin

Yeah, please do. I just want to share. I was reading a lot about them, Susan, around your research on the website and thank you for covering all those terms. And I want to share with you another thing as well. But when often doing our work, certainly with individuals, the. The whole central part about Compassionate Inquiry is that I know nothing about you. And my job is to create an environment where you feel safe enough to learn about you. That’s it. I have no magic. I’m not a healer. I don’t. I just create a space that is nonjudgmental, compassionate, patient..  And one of the things that we do is that we would invite our clients to make a recommendation for themselves. What is that that you might be able to do for yourself that might Help you with this thing that’s going on in your life. I’m not giving them the answer. I don’t know. I’ve got enough challenges in my own life to be telling someone else what to do. So I really like that idea of gift and just inviting people to, what can you bring? There’s almost something in it as well. Susan. I’m thinking, oh, you’re sneaky because it almost would prevent someone. You can’t really step down if you’re being asked to bring the gift. You’re almost boxing people in, and I’m saying that playfully, but you’re almost boxing people in to take responsibility because it’s the responsibility for the thing that they can bring. So you have no excuse.

00:38:28 Susan

There’s no excuse. Exactly.

00:38:30 Kevin

You can’t not do…

00:38:31 Susan

That’s exactly right. And people will only engage when they’re interested in engaging anyway. So my assumption is, if you’re at the table or if you’ve come along to… We’ve had numerous conferences or if you have called us to say, what is your research doing? My assumption is that you’re interested in doing something. There’s an assumption that you’ve got a gift to give there and everybody does. We all have a gift to give, particularly to this type of a scenario. Because if you think about poverty and you think about confusing masculinity, you think about the negative narrative that follows boys. There’s so many ways, and this is outside. Most of the work we do is talking about what happens in school itself. But when you talk about the whole wider social system, everybody has a gift to give. I’ll give you an example actually of one way that we engage that.

00:39:17 Kevin

Please.

00:39:18 Susan

I haven’t even told you about the principles. I’ll tell you about them in a minute. But we had a four star pizza or pizza outlet and they’re, I think they’re mostly in Belfast. So they work in the communities in Belfast to have five or six different franchises around different communities, working class communities, where the boys are from. But they came to the university, we’re based in the city center. And they came to the university looking to… I think they were looking to find out ways to sell pizzas to students. I can’t remember the name of the guy that owns the organization, but it was him that turned up. And I don’t know how he managed to end up with me, but he did. So by the end of it anyway, he had agreed that what he would do was… So we have these things that we call the Taking Boys Seriously, principles of relational education. And you’ll find them on our website. So there’s 10. Yeah, you’ll find there are 10 principles of relational education that we say underpin any good practice with boys in education. And these were all informed by boys themselves. So the boys and the teachers told us that these were the things that actually made the difference and helped the work. When the four star pizza came up, they were looking to think about. They were thinking about selling pizzas to students. But when they left, what they’d agreed to do, right, was they’d agreed that they would put that set of principles up in their pizza outlets. So they would, they’d have them on the wall. And all of the boys who took part in the Taking Boys Seriously research got a pin, an Ulster University TBS pin. There’s thousands of boys in all the different schools and around the city. Got a pen to say that I’ve taken boys seriously research pin. And if they wore their pin into four star pizza, they were able to get. I can’t remember whether it was 10 or 20% off the price of their pizza. Now what that did. So whilst that sounds like that’s a nice little thing, but it’s more than that. So. Because what that does, is it, one, it brings the broader community into part of the ecosystem. So that was a gift that they were able to bring. It shows the boys the positive messages about them are being reflected in their communities in places that they wouldn’t necessarily see them. So seeing it in your pizza shop is quite different than seeing it in your school. You nearly expect your school to do things like that. You don’t expect to see it in other places. And it just brought a sense of pride to those boys who were involved in informing this piece of research that it was being recognized outside of their own classrooms, and that it was being reflected back to them. So those very positive messages that are getting reflected back to boys are part of that broader ecosystem. And we’ve got lots of little examples of how that has happened or where that has worked or how people have…. Or how some of our research groups have made that become part of the solution too. So it’s not just schools, it’s not just youth services, it goes well beyond that.

00:42:02 Kevin

Yeah, I was looking at your. There’s a lovely little. Almost a little mind map thing or a little piece of vine. And it’s. It’s the tree. Yeah. And I see lot. Lots of.

00:42:10 Susan

Oh, yeah, it’s the tree. Is it? Or the vine.

00:42:12 Kevin

Yeah, the vine. Lots of things on there that was.

00:42:15 Susan

Our very clumsy way of trying to represent an ecosystem. Neither Andy, who’s another researcher on the project, nor I are particularly skilled at making these things look beautiful. But that was our kind of way of trying to represent like we’re an ecosystem where all these things come together.

00:42:31 Kevin

You’re being cruel to yourself. I think you’ve done well there. I would love to spend some time talking about… a minute ago I was thinking of the word outcomes, and that’s a clunky word and I don’t want to use that word, but successes. Maybe there’s a better word to use to talk about some of your successes and maybe there’s still some struggles there. But would you do me a favor? Would you read the 10 principles? Even if I don’t have time to go into them too muchm because I just think they’re really cool. Would you read them out for us?

00:42:57 Susan

Yeah, yeah, sure. So the first one is, I mean, I suppose these principles came from, obviously from the voices of our boys and educators. So again and again we heard how important it was to have good relationships. And that becomes principle one. Recognize the primacy of relationship, is probably the most important one of all of the principles. Because without having a good relationship, which is underpinned by dignity and respect, which is principle two, demonstrating dignity and respect, it’s very difficult to engage anybody in any way that’s transformative. So recognizing primacy of relationships one, demonstrating dignity and respect is number two, utilize a strength based approach to learning. And that is really important because I suppose very crudely, if you hear. So let’s say if I say something like if you don’t do that, you’re going to fail. So for boys, in particular, that’s a very black and white thing. And what they quite often hear is very simply the word fail. Not if you do that, you’re going to fail. They hear the word fail. So there’s that kind of dynamic that goes on. And it’s like saying to a toddler, for example, who’s holding a glass, like a glass of juice, right? So they’re going to spill the juice. You can see it. And instead of saying to the toddler, don’t spill the juice, because what they hear is spill the juice, right? And they spill the juice. So instead of saying spill the juice you say, hold your cup up straight. So the whole thing about using strength based approaches to education is that it’s about always being conscious of affirming and appreciating and using language that builds. One of our schools talked about… the teacher in the school said that their approach was always catch them in the right. So that’s their whole approach in the school, is to always catch them in the right. So you’re never looking for ways to say, don’t do that, stop doing that. You only look for the things that they’re doing well and you lift them and build from that. Number four, then is challenging an affirm masculine identities. And that is really important. And I suppose in some ways this is the one that school struggle, schools, formal education struggles most with, is trying to find ways to do that, find space to get boys being able to talk about what it is like to be a boy, talk about masculinity, talk about some of the pressures that come via masculinity, try and make sense of the worlds that they’re in and to be critically reflective, to try and ask good questions and learn about themselves in safe environments where they’re not being judged or blamed or controlled or any of those things, so…

00:45:32 Kevin

Susan, I’m still learning. You said it’s difficult for boys. I’m still learning that myself and I’m 51 years old. So imagine what that’s like for a 14 year old.

00:45:41 Susan

Yeah, well, exactly. I mean, for all of us, reflecting is a really important part of education. And when we talk about relational education, those are the types of things that we mean. So we mean find ways to have good conversations with young people about who they are as full of knowledge, promoting positive mental health, which is really important. And if you put that against some of the things that I talked about earlier on in relation to masculinity, where boys are much less likely to confide or much less likely to talk about what’s going on for them, or see it as a sign of weakness to be able to show any vulnerability, those things become incredibly important for work with boys. So how do you promote positive mental health and environments where boys can actually talk about themselves in emotional ways? Identifying blocks to boys learning; a whole range. That’s a whole range of things. And that comes from just even things like sitting too long in a classroom, being expected to listen for long periods of time. I mean, the boys talked themselves about… they learn far better sometimes from just talking to their mates about what their teacher has said. But then they say, but our teacher never allows, we’re not allowed to talk. So you can’t just check out – what does that mean? Or things like that. So just all those little blocks that kind of happen consistently to identify those and work to them, connect in context to boys learning and we just talk about, you know, bring who they are into the classroom. You can start any lesson on history or geography or religion or IT or anything. You can start from what do you know about that? What’s your experience of it? How do you see it play out? So bringing that in to being, to starting where boys are at, engaging meaningfully with boys, creative learning environments, is all sorts of different ways of engagement as well. And maybe alongside the number one is number 10, which is, value the voice of boys. We talk a lot about empowering practice. So that is finding ways where boys get voice, where they’re able to have influence and where there’s some interconnection so they can collaborate with each other, with others to learn.

00:47:48 Kevin

As you’re reading those out, Susan, I’m thinking of the spaces and places outside school and you know, the reason I’m having this conversation with you and the reason I’m doing this little bit of being curious around what it is to be a man, or a young man or a boy in the world today. As you read those, I don’t see… Let me catch them in the right. Let me do it. Let me frame this positively. I think it would be a much better world if those things, those 10 things were approached in society and in workplaces, in families. We think about a family, recognize the primacy of relationship, demonstrate dignity and respect, utilize a skills based approach to learning those positive affirmations and promote mental health. If that was in our workplaces and in our society and if that was demonstrated in our popular culture, in our music, or our movies, it feels to me like that would be a much better place, a much better world to live in. So not just in school.

00:48:48 Susan

Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly right. And so when we talk about that idea of the ecosystem, the ecosystem includes all of those things. So it includes broader culture, it includes family, it includes everything. So anybody who engages with us is what I say, here you go. That is what boys and educators have told us makes a difference. So what are you, what’s the gift that you’re bringing to the table? Enable that to happen.

00:49:13 Kevin

There you go. So don’t do that.

00:49:14 Susan

Yeah, there you go. There’s your answers. You’ve got them.

00:49:18 Kevin

Susan, I was reading that the research seems to have been going on long before you got here. So something from away back in 2006 or something, was that right? And there was a…

00:49:25 Susan

So there was an initial. There was an initial taken boy seriously, research that happened between 2006, published in 2012, that had worked with, I think about 375, I’m going by memory here, but I wasn’t involved in that piece of research, although I was peripherally, but not as a lead researcher that I am now. So it has been very long term. That piece of research, the early piece of research, identified what some of the issues were, and it identified some really good. There was, I think about something like 11. There was 11 recommendations came out of that research. And what happened to that was that some schools took on those recommendations and changed their practice. And in those schools, really good things happened, but not all schools, and it didn’t become sustainable. So the second part of our research, and that’s why I talk so much about ecosystem and culture change and bringing gifts to the table and grassroots action and all of those things to say this can’t be just an intervention that happens to some boys sometimes whenever something like adolescent shows on the TV or we get a Louis through doing a program on the manosphere, and people are going, oh, we want to talk about boys again. So it happens for a short period of time and then it’s shelved again. So the whole process of taking boys seriously, this part of the serration of it is to say, we need to keep doing this, needs to be consistent. These are the things they’ve always been, the things they’re going to be, the things next year and the year after and 20 years down the road. And what we need to do is keep working on these things. That’s what we need to do. So what we do is we actually get schools intentionally putting these into practice. The schools that engage with us. And we have a process by which they can do that and measure the change and involve the boys in that. That’s exciting for the skills that they learn.

00:51:13 Kevin

So would you talk to me just really briefly, Susan, then, a little bit about your, I suppose, the academic word or outcomes and stuff. Yeah. And I know we’re talking about. We’re talking about people here. We’re talking about young men and boys. What’s it looking like when, you know, when boys and young men come through this process, is it different? Is it different right now? Are you seeing results? Are things different? Are things changing?

00:51:33 Susan

Yeah, I mean, when you think about trying to change to the extent that we talk about. So you’re…

00:51:40 Kevin

It’s big.

00:51:41 Susan

I mean, it’s massive. Of course it is. Right. And it’s part of the reason that I use that ecosystem thing as well and talk about just culture change, because culture change. Think about feminism and the women’s movement that was generations in making any actual change to how society functions. So change is slow and slow to happen and we’re always in a hurry to try and fix things as well. So we have this real sort of fix it approach sometimes to be thinking, oh, we’ll fix this bit or we’ll throw a bit of money here and we’d throw a bit of money there and that’ll be all right.

00:52:13 Kevin

Very patriarchal, I might add, this idea of fixing things. But that’s a whole other discussion of.

00:52:18 Susan

My dad as well. He’s a real fixer, actually. I suffer from it myself a bit, being a fixer, like, well, we’ll just fix that. It’s a long time in the making. So I encourage people to see this is a long haul. When we have evidence that shows that when schools, and I’m talking about schools mostly at the minute, because schools is where we’re putting a lot of the energy at the minute. When schools are putting these things into practice, there’s definitely evidence to say, or to show, that this makes an impact to boys engagement, to their attendance, to their. To. I hate to use the term behavioral issues.

00:52:53 Kevin

Yeah.

00:52:54 Susan

And to the outcomes that they get, which is at the minute measured in GCSEs. And here it’s measured in GCSEs. GCSEs, A to C, five GCSEs. Now that’s. I don’t talk about that so much because for me, that is part of the problem in the system is that we measure schools and we measure children against these things that, whilst they’re important, they’re not as important as many other things in their lives and who they become and how they become that. So there are things in the research that are about the purpose of education itself that need to be addressed. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t start. So it’s kind of like if you start there, people think, oh, well, that’s too big. We can’t change the education system, right? So they go, we can’t do that. So we don’t start there. We start with, what can you change? So you can change Kevin, the way you talk to your daughter or your son or your nephew or whatever. So you can change that. You can change. A teacher can change what they do in that classroom. They’ve got the control of that, they’ve got that gift. We can all do something. And if all of us do something, I always say all of us is better than some of us, right? So if all of us are doing something, you will start to see change happen. That’s how things transform, so there is evidence of transformation. It is being. There are, I think now something like we’ve gone from a research project to impact projects. We now have what we call the boys impact hub. Those impact hubs are made up always of that broader educational ecosystem. So you’ll have university schools, primary sector, you’ll have sometimes policymakers, you’ll have sometimes community representatives, sometimes politicians. It doesn’t matter who’s in it. We just say, get it together, take the principles, see what it is, what gifts you have, that you’re going to start to make some differences across the world. So there’s about 14 of them at the minute across England, Scotland, and we have one here in Northern Ireland as well. So everything is working towards trying to put new processes, new approaches in place in schools that might actually have some long term sustained impact or transformation to boys experiences of education.

00:55:06 Kevin

Susan something that I really love, something that really lights me up, is watching people get lit up by what they do. And I don’t care whether that’s playing guitar or knitting or painting or running, whatever they do. And again, I suppose I have one eye on my own self coming through school and not having a great experience of that. And all of those principles, I don’t know, that, I don’t know that I would recognize one of those principles through my schooling. And to think of a young man that I was having, someone like you fighting in his corner, it’s really uplifting. It’s a real wonderful thing to watch. So thank you. And I’m going to fire you a little landing trick… It’s not a trick question. That’s no, excuse me for that, because it’s not a trick question. It’s a playful yet serious question that I like to ask people to finish. And I’m going to tailor it slightly with the conversation we’ve just had. The question I normally ask people is if you had the ear of humanity and could whisper something into the ear of humanity, what would that be? But what I’d love to ask you is if you had the ear of the people that were guiding or directing or facilitating the lives of young men and boys, what would you whisper into the ear of the people that were doing that?

00:56:27 Susan

I think what I would say most times and do, is that you have more power than you think you have. We all have got personal power to be able to do some good and to be able to change things for others. And if we choose to use that power, we’ve got some chance of actually doing so as well. I think people feel like they can’t… I think, Kevin, when I look at big things like the education system, right, or. And look at that on a global scale, there was just this idea that we can’t change that because it’s too hard, right? It looks too big and it’s too hard and it’s too unwieldy. But my response to that is, we made it. We did that. We did it. Nobody else did that. We did it. And if we did it, we can also undo it. And that’s, I think, what I mean when I say you have more power than you think you have. We do this in terms of humanity. We did it. We do all of the things that we don’t like as well as all of the things that we do. And that means that we can also change the things that we need to change as well. So we can. We’ve got the power to do that. So let’s do it!

00:57:40 Kevin

Susan Morgan for president. That’s what I say. Susan Morgan for President.

00:57:45 Susan

Can you imagine?

00:57:46 Kevin

Thank you. Thank you for coming on here and thank you for talking about what you do and how you do it. And I think in this case, Susan, what is really apparent is your ability to talk about who you’re doing it for, which is young men and boys. I think that’s what has landed with me most. That’s what I’ve heard from you, the people that you’re doing it for. And that’s really beautiful.

00:58:08 Susan

I think maybe it’s useful to say that in my experience of doing this. So I’ve been doing this for, I say, seven or eight years now, I’ve been leading this research. And in my experience, people do want to help. They can see that we’ve got something that we need to address. I mean, the other thing. The other thing that we say In the research is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with boys. There’s something wrong with the system that’s around them. And that is the thing that we need to fix. We don’t pathologize boys. We don’t say, it’s not boys. We’re trying to fix. You’ve got to fix something that we’ve got to fix the things that surround them. And I think the majority of people appreciate that that’s exactly what needs to happen. We’ve created an environment where it can be incredibly difficult for them.

00:58:50 Kevin

And as you say that, I’m just thinking what I think, and I get that it’s maybe controversial is, I also think that there’s nothing wrong with men. And I think that there’s possibly something wrong with the environment that we are in as well that is having an impact on how we show up. However, that’s another podcast. Susan I just want to say officially. Susan Morgan, thank you for coming on the Gifts of Trauma podcast. You have been an absolute delight.

00:59:16 Susan

I hope it’s useful to someone, somewhere. Kevin it was really nice and it was lovely to connect with you as well.

00:59:21 Kevin

Thank you.

00:59:22 Susan

Thank you for the invitation.

00:59:28 Rosemary

The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. 

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