Meeting with Aparna in a quiet cafe in sunny Guadalajara, Mexico this week, I felt like it was a melding of minds. With her 30 years and my 24 years in international and private education, we had a lot of common ground, including the challenges of becoming a female school leader. We also “Kevin Bacon’ed” our common contacts, previous schools and countries. It is indeed a small world when you get to meet someone else from the international realm, right in your own neighbourhood in Mexico.
What's the Diversity Collective?
Ms. Aparna Sundaram is COO, along with the founder Dr. Alan Phan, of the Diversity Collective, an organization that helps partner international schools find and hire more candidates from underrepresented groups, such as people of colour or people who identify as LGBTQIA+. As former international teachers themselves, Aparna and Alan understand the difficulties that teaching and leadership candidates coming from underrepresented backgrounds face when applying for jobs in international schools.
To quote Alan in a recent article he wrote for AAIE, entitled Why a Diversity Recruitment Platform is Necessary: “I have started The Diversity Collective in order to challenge schools to be inclusive of underrepresented groups, helping the underrepresented to become visible in their schools, encouraging the underrepresented to become school leaders, and empowering the underrepresented to change the whiteness, maleness, and heteronormativity of the international educational landscape.”
So this week’s job search tip o’ the week is to check out the Diversity Collective - it’s free for teacher and leader candidates, and they have partnered with amazing international schools who have taken the pledge to be more inclusive in their hiring practices.
