Education

Spotlight #001: An interview with Dr. Carmen Poole and Jeremy Beckman

Spotlight #001: An interview with Dr. Carmen Poole and Jeremy Beckman

Get Inclusive’s Spotlight series features interviews with prevention and compliance experts who are taking an innovative approach to their work. If you know someone we should feature, please email hello@getinclusive.com.

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An interview with Dr. Carmen Poole and Jeremy Beckman, the authors and creative leadership behind Get Inclusive’s prevention and compliance training courses.

“Get Inclusive is really a fantastic unicorn space for me where I get to not only research and write in the areas that I have training and have profound interest, but also I get to work in the space of curriculum design and teaching and learning and working on figuring out the best ways to teach people things.”

Dr. Carmen Poole, director of content, shared this insight about the work she gets to do through Get Inclusive. Poole and Jeremy Beckman, head of product, shared how their different educations, work experiences and personal passions brought them into the niche, “unicorn” field of creating prevention-based educational programs at Get Inclusive.

Question: Can you tell me a little bit about your background, your education and what brought you into this world of working with prevention-based programs?

Poole: “My background is in academia and in social justice education. I was a terrible student, which is how and why I realized how important actual learning was, true learning — the sort of difference between being spoken to and spoken at, and I happened to be one of those students that responded poorly to being spoken at, and discovered late that the book world was where I belonged.”

“And so I studied in history and political science, in university did my masters in history, and went on to get my PhD in the history of education. That was at the University of Toronto. My research interests were largely in African American, African Canadian history, women's history, women's studies, feminist studies, and other social justice cognate interest areas. But in my master's year, I developed an interest in curriculum: the history of education, how decisions get made about curriculum, who decides what we learn, and how we learn it, which ended up turning into a much larger project for my Ph.D. dissertation, dealing with ethnography and the politics of representation among African Canadians in southwestern Ontario.”

“After teaching and the Ph.D., I wanted to look into the adult learning space a little bit more specifically. Working with Jeremy at LawRoom was really a great opportunity where I could combine or reconcile or marry all of my academic interests in human rights and social justice, in minority studies, diversity studies, feminist studies, women’s rights with corporate training. It's the unicorn space that I had the privilege to enter into, and to me, Get Inclusive is really a fantastic unicorn space where I get to not only research and write in the areas that I have training in and have, like, profound interest in but also I get to work in the space of curriculum design and teaching and learning and working on figuring out the best ways to teach people things that they may or may not want to learn.”

Beckman: “I went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and got a degree in visualization. Visualization is ... an application of cognitive sciences to how the brain works regarding visual information or visual communication. It tends to fall into one of two categories — if you're actually talking about the application of visual communication to a professional area — and that is either education or advertising and marketing. It just so happened that one of my professors was an instructional designer who worked in the adult learning, performance improvement, online education area. So I dove into to e-learning, and that's where I started my career.”

After working at a content creation agency that made custom courses for large corporations, Beckman said he wanted to create materials that tackled more than management and sales training.

“So in a way with online education technology and instructional design for online education and the LawRoom opportunity provided me the opportunity to move into a space that yes, was compliance, and in my world that's considered grunt work that people who are creating, say, custom materials for large organizations, is actually really uninteresting. But to me, it was interesting because it was an opportunity to move into an area where oftentimes what is actually required mandatory by law, in terms of training, is actually addressing really important issues.”

“And I thought to myself: Here's an opportunity to take on the challenge that is turning compliance training experiences into something that is more than what it has been historically for the sake of actually addressing the underlying issues that compel organizations to do compliance training to begin with. So in other words, sexual harassment — now [there] was an opportunity for me to focus on creating training content that hopefully actually helps address that issue for individuals and workplaces where this actually occurs.”

Question: Can you share a little bit about what projects or programs you're working on now?

Beckman: “Get Inclusive is, as you can imagine by its namesake, this organization that was started in the spirit of expressing and sharing and promoting messages that are essentially pro-diversity and are really about proliferating the merits of inclusion. What we're currently working on is essentially a set of training initiatives that are squarely aligned with that mission. The sexual harassment and discrimination prevention program that we're working on called Groundswell is something that we've already launched into the world, but we're actually expanding it and will continue to evolve it as customer needs change or as customer needs are actually being discovered.”

“We recently completed a course for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is a program that is designed to prepare employees to provide people with disabilities with accommodations to be able to do their jobs. One of the reasons why the ADA training is incredibly important to us is that the problems associated with the community of people with disabilities and employment are massive, and they're actually psychologically based. So this is a great opportunity for us to release into the world attitudes and perspectives that will hopefully help to not just prepare people who are in a position to have to provide the framework for providing people with disabilities an accommodation, but also hopefully convince that individual and other individuals in the workplace that being an organization and being an individual that is, in fact, not hostile towards people with disabilities working in their in their workplaces, which that's the way it is right now. It's an opportunity for us to hopefully help address the stigma associated with providing an accommodation for them to do their work.”

Poole: “The ADA training is very importantly filtered through the lens of disability diversity. Disability as a diversity subject is an important one to consider and often one that is forgotten. Other types of diversity are celebrated or can be celebrated, but it seems, in certain spaces, that disability is not one of them, it’s not included in the initial inventory space of diversity. That's absolutely something that we wanted to address and speak to. And so it's not only a course about accommodation (it's certainly a course about accommodation), but it is one that is looking at disability as a diversity issue as well.”

Get Inclusive is also working on refresher courses for their Title IX and bystander intervention programs for higher education.

Beckman: “We're creating refresher content that is a follow up training for, say, subsequent years for faculty and staff who took training on Title IX and for students who have taken our product called Voices for Change, which is the Campus Save/Title IX training that students and incoming freshmen students take. We're currently engaged in the creation of this ongoing training effort.”

“Also, there is a goal for us to develop training topics on in other areas for students; specifically, that is expanding to specialized training perhaps for Greek life and for student leadership and possibly some others. Essentially population-specific, targeted education in the same subject area. That is an area of enhancement that we're hoping to develop.”

Question: What drives your enthusiasm and your interest in this line of work? Why is it important to you?

Poole: “For me, the challenge and the joy has everything to do with wanting to contribute. Not just ‘doing my part,’ but being able to contribute to workplace culture or campus community culture or an individual's ability to tap into their own power and to use that power to … make the world a better place. It's this exciting space where we can take really big problems and break them down to individual-level contribution to sort of mitigate the impact of those things. So if we're talking about sexism and racism and these great big topics that are hard to solve on a global scale, they are possible to address on a one-to-one or one-to-10 or one-to-20 or whatever it is...that being that little drop in the ocean is still a drop in the ocean.”

“For me, the passion comes out of the notion that change is absolutely possible and to remind people that individual actions and individual efforts do make a huge difference in the world, and the more people who believe that the better. If one person reads one page in one training and that alters their path or alters how they respond to the person walking through the door, that's a huge thing for me. Being able to contribute to culture change and to the way people think about their place in the world is really what keeps me going.”

Beckman: “I want to be able to see myself as an instrument for good in the world, and I'm hoping that that's what I'm able to actually fulfill here working at Get Inclusive on the subjects that we're working on.”

“I’m astounded by how astounded I sometimes am by little ‘aha!’ moments I have. Those ‘aha’ moments have led to incredible insights that have changed how I see the world and how I see myself in it. And if I’m not being delusional in thinking that there’s a possibility that we might actually provide these kinds of ‘aha’ moments, whether they’re minor or they’re major … I want to be able to do that. I believe that in doing so, that’s the way in which we possibly do have the ability to make a difference in the world in this doing good sort of sense.”

“I also love and, to be quite honest — I’m often intimidated by just the massive scale that is the multitude of considerations that we have to incorporate to do what we do. That in and of itself is actually compelling. I’m compelled by the nature of the challenge that is producing an actual commercial experience for organizations who don’t necessarily want to spend the money on what we make, for people who have not asked for it, is in fact part of the challenge that is compelling to me."

The Facts

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EMPLOYEE AND FACULTY POPULATION (FTE)
get inclusive products
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Role IN Evaluation
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Why they left

Q&A

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