COE Connections Episode 11: Mark Tucker and Mari Guillermo
In our 11th episode, Associate Professor Mark Tucker and Assistant Professor Mari Guillermo from San Diego State University's No. 3-ranked rehabilitation counseling program discuss their collaborative work to level the playing field for people with disabilities.
Listen on Soundcloud and Apple Podcasts.
Mari Guillermo
And it continues to strike me that we can do more, and we can do better. When it comes to disabled communities. Whether that be an employment in education. And when I say we, I'm not just talking about communities and society. I'm also talking about rehabilitation professionals and rehabilitation systems so that we can really do a lot more and do better. And I think that's what sustains me in this work.
(intro plays)
Rachel Haine-Schlagel
Welcome to COE Connections, the SDSU College of Education, research and Scholarship Podcast Series. I'm your host, Rachel Hanee Schlegel. I'm the Associate Dean for Research for the College of Education and an associate professor of Child and Family Development at San Diego State University, a Hispanic-serving institution on the land of the Cumier. This is our fifth episode of the season, and we are trying something new. Talking with a research team.
We are here with 2 faculty members from SDSU's Department of Administration, Rehabilitation, and post Secondary Education, also called Arp Associate Professor Doctor Mark Tucker and Assistant Professor Doctor Mari Guillermo. Both Mark and Mari Teach and are alumni of that department's rehabilitation counseling program.
They are also both part of the Interwork Institute at SDSU, which focuses on promoting employment, education, and training for individuals with disabilities. Mark is the coordinator of Arps, rehabilitation counseling program. He joined the Faculty full-time in 2014. After spending 14 years with inner work.
Earlier in his career, Mark worked as program coordinator for a Southern California-based nonprofit agency providing case management, crisis counseling, and vocational planning services. His areas of research include examining the associations between post-secondary education or training and vocational rehabilitation outcomes for adults and transition-aged youth with disabilities.
Mari has directed and coordinated grant-funded projects at Interworks since 1990 and joined the faculty full-time in 2020. Her research interests include career and work-based learning experiences for transition-age students and multicultural counseling and cultural humility. Her research interests include career and work-based learning experiences for transition-age students and multicultural counseling and cultural humility.
She currently serves as the project director on the Long-term Training Rehabilitation program and the Rehabilitation Improvements in Services and Employment for Underserved Populations, or Rise Up project both funded by the Rehabilitation Services Administration at the Department of Education.
Mark and Mari were Co. Principal investigators on the California's initiative, promoting the readiness of minors in supplemental security income or Cal Promise program and California's career Innovations Demonstration project. Welcome, Mari and Mark, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.
Mark Tucker
Thanks very much, it's nice to be here.
Mari Guillermo
Thanks, Rachel.
Rachel Haine-Schlagel
All right, let's get started. So I wanted to start out today by asking about the roots of your collaboration. How did you get started working together?
Mari Guillermo
So for Mark and I, I would say it was back in 2013 when we started working on the Promise Grant, and that's to promote the readiness of minors in supplemental security income. It was a grant that was funded in partnership with the California Department of Rehabilitation and the Interwork Institute was charged with taking the lead on the Training and technical assistance and the evaluation of the project. And so Mark and I, we're able to bring our experiences and expertise both in rehabilitation and disability. Mark has a really strong lens when it comes to program evaluation, and I have a lot of experience conducting training and technical assistance on previous projects.
And then, prior to 2013, we've worked on a number of needs assessments with State Agencies throughout the country. So we've worked for a bit together on Interwork Institute, but really, in 2013 is when both our forces joined together.
Mark Tucker
I would say we both worked at the Institute for quite a while, Mari longer than me. In the first few years, I think we worked on different floors and didn't really interact a whole heck of a lot, and then smaller projects crept up where we had a chance to kind of work together a little bit, and then that gradually grew over time. And then, with the Cal Promise project that really took off because we both had pretty central roles on that project, and it gave us a chance to work together for for a number of years.
Rachel Haine-Schlagel
And it sounds like you have really complementary expertise that go so well together in taking on a large project such as Cal. promise.
Mari Guillermo
Yeah, I really think we really live by that idea of an asset orientation approach in the way we look at how disability services are provided, but also in the way we collaborate at the Interwork Institute, you know, taking each person's strengths, their passions, their interest, and making it work in complementary and supplementary ways to reach the project goal.
Rachel Haine-Schlagel
So, let me ask you both. Why do you focus on what you do?
Mark Tucker
I think I think we can relate this back to rehabilitation counseling the general focus of our degree. I have to explain it in kind of layman's terms to folks who don't know what it is. I'll often say it's about leveling the playing field for people with disabilities. And particularly with regard to things like employment, education, training, participating in the community. Those are all areas where folks with disabilities have traditionally been marginalized, and we have to square that with the idea that disability is incredibly common in our society you look at. You know the number of folks or the percentage of folks in the United States. As an example, we have disabilities, it's a large group.
And so we have this, this huge segment of our community that's being marginalized, and that marginalization limits their aspirations where they go in life, what they can do, how they can participate in our community, and as a society we all lose out. I think when folks, when a significant proportion of them are marginalized, can't achieve, or are held back from their achievements are expected to do so much more to achieve. So I think that's kind of, at least for me, and I suspect probably for Mari too a little bit. Although I'm sure she has her own lens on this. I think that's one of the main reasons that we do it, rehabilitation counseling is one of the vehicles that we see for helping to kinda narrow those gaps are help to kind of minimize that marginalization that folks with disabilities experience in our society.
Mari Guillermo
Yeah, and for me it's very similar. When I started the master's in rehabilitation here at San Diego, my first job in San Diego, I moved to San Diego to to be in the master's program. My first job was as a job coach, and that is providing support to disabled individuals. At the work site. You know, helping them get oriented to the work and the responsibilities that they will be responsible for, and at the same time I was learning how to be a job coach, I was learning what rehabilitation counseling was about as I was progressing through the program. At San Diego State, and it continues to strike me that we can do more, and we can do better when it comes to disabled communities. Whether that be an employment in education, and when I say we, I'm not just talking about communities and society. I'm also talking about rehabilitation professionals and rehabilitation systems so that we can really do a lot more and do better. And I think that's what sustains me in this work. And knowing that okay, we've done well, you know with the current 5-year funding for any given project, but there's always lessons that are learned from that, that can take you then to the next level along the way.
Rachel Haine-Schlagel
Yeah, I mean, I think that really learning from those lessons and continuing to enhance the research, the scholarship, the training. The technical assistance that we all do in our colleges is so important. And I think it's a wonderful privilege we all have to be able to work on different projects and continue to learn and grow and hopefully have big impacts on the community.
The next question I want to ask you both is to describe an example of the impact your work has had on any community. It could be locally, regionally, nationally, internationally, and I know Interwork does a lot of international programs. What is an example of sort of the impact that your work has had?
Mari Guillermo
So, specific to the transition grants, the Cal Promise grants specifically what we did over the 5 to turned out 7 years of the project. We did focus groups throughout the State of California, where the project concentrated on talk to students, their families, the support coordinators, and service providers as well as the administrators at the schools. What struck me most was what we heard from the students and families in terms of how the project impacted them. The theme that ran throughout was that up to the point that they became involved in the Cal Promise project, they've never been asked, what are your dreams? What do you want your child or what do you want to do after you leave high school after you've completed your high school education? That expectation was not there, and have just being asked that question really struck the families, and then related to that was being provided the the support and the validation. You know that, yes, this is a reasonable goal and we can help you to do that. And how will we do that? And the service providers, having the freedom to be innovative and not be restricted to the services you know, on a document saying, Here's the services that we provide, but really thinking about what does this specific individual and their family need to have a quality of life. And when we talk about quality of life it doesn't end at high school, right? Quality of life requires working a job with meaningful wages and often that involves pursuing education beyond high school. And so I think, setting that expectation and providing the support to which those dreams were quite impactful for me.
Mark Tucker
I think for me, I'm going to talk also about those same projects at maybe more at a kind of a systems level. They were designed intentionally to kind of force different entities that, you know, had maybe minimal collaboration in the past to kind of ramp up that collaboration a little bit. So, in post-secondary institutions like SDSU, we were involved. Local education authorities, several of them, a bunch of them actually throughout the State, over 20 of them throughout the State were involved. Family resource centers, which is kind of a network of I think they're mostly nonprofits that support the families where somebody in the family has a disability. Independent living centers, which is another sort of statewide network actually more national, but there is a statewide network of centers that that help individuals with disabilities to participate more fully in their communities. All of these were partners in the project, and so it sort of reinforced bringing all those group folks together and collaborating to kind of advance the education and employment outcomes of youth with disabilities.
As that was all going on historically when the project started, State Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies and California has one, and every State or Territory has one or 2. So, there's over 80 of these agencies in the US. Typically, they didn't really want to start working with individuals with disabilities until they were kind of out of high school, right, or just about ready to exit high school, so they might get involved when they were like 17 or 18. Our project wasn't solely responsible for this. There were some other factors as well, that were that were kind of going on nationally. There was an increased emphasis on serving younger folks, kind of getting them involved in planning for their futures. Whether that's education, training, both employment, all of that at an earlier age, to start that kind of planning. And so, during the life of that particular project, we saw a change in the California Vocational Rehabilitation or Counseling Agency Department of Rehabilitation, where they became much more open to having folks 14 years old, 15 years old get in and start getting accustomed getting services. And I think we feel like the earlier that that transition planning starts, planning for what's going to happen after high school after all those mandated services have to be provided, and somebody turns into an adult and all of a sudden everything is opt-in right.
That planning started began to start a lot earlier, and I'm not necessarily saying that our project would take the credit for that change. But we were a part of that process, and I think we had the opportunity to kind of push for that a little bit as the process as the project was in process. And so it's kind of been very rewarding to see much more openness to serving youth with disabilities in what was formerly pretty much an adult-focused State agency.
Rachel Haine-Schlagel
You both, your responses are so complimentary of each other, and Mari's focus on what it was like to ask an individual student or an individual caregiver like, what are your hopes and dreams. What do you wanna do after high school? And to see the impact just that question can have all the way up to actually getting all these different agencies to talk with each other, which is so critical, to providing the tailored services that you all are talking about that are individualized for each person, and just streamlining and efficiency and everything. So those that was really neat to see the range of your impacts that your work has had. Now, I want to ask you, what do you struggle with the most in focusing in your area?
Mark Tucker
I'm probably gonna talk about this from a systems perspective. Again, I would say, I kind of have a laundry list of things that are all sort of interrelated here. But I think one of the things that comes up over and over again in related to these projects and other projects is just that the rate of change is slow. The rate at which we see the playing field getting leveled for people with disabilities is not nearly as fast as any of us, I think wants you know. Often we're dealing with large bureaucracies and systems, and they don't change quickly, they don't change easily. Societal attitudes, probably the same, you know. It takes a while for societal attitudes about people with disabilities to evolve right and to be seen in a different light. So for me, I think that's kind of one frustrating aspect of it, and in part that relates to like just not seeing change happen fast. Also, when we think about the kinds of things that we're set out to accomplish. It takes a long time to figure out if anything that we're doing is having any type of an effect. So I think it requires maybe a lot of faith that we're doing the right thing. And then we'll find out later on. But for me, that kind of waiting and having to exercise some patience, I think is kind of challenging.
Mari Guillermo
Yeah, yeah, we have a colleague who talks about you know we have all these great goals, and where we wanna be right in the perfect world. And within a certain timeframe you know, you can hopefully look at moving the needle, and I wish we could do more than move the needle. We can like move on to the next chapter, and, like Mark, was saying, you know, it is really frustratingly slow sometime. And for me what what I struggle with is sustaining a person-centric approach in the way we provide services. And in the way we build systems, often we operate from a system-centric approach. We have limited resources, we have limited dollars, there's all these vacancies at the agency, so we can't serve everybody who walks through the door. And really rooting ourselves in the individual, the person, and what they need, because ultimately, that's what our ideal world right?
That's what our systems and our programs are built for, it's built for the individual, and that needs to drive the services. But often that person-centric approach gets left behind, and that's one of the struggles we have with many of our grants, you know. Someone asked at one of the trainings, and this is from the project staff. You know, what do you hope to do? And initially, our response was; well, we wanna challenge you to think outside the box. And eventually, that response came to, we want you all to throw away the box. Let's just, you know, start all over. With that person-centric approach.
Rachel Haine-Schlagel
I love that. Throw away the box, not even have there be a box that exists, that's cool. It is somewhat antithetical to the bureaucracies and systems that you've both talked about and probably also really antithetical to the it explains the pace of change, being so slow is because it's really hard to throw out the box. But well, you guys, already both kind of touched on this. But I'm going to go ahead and ask my last question and see how you might want to expand upon it. So, this comes out of my background as a clinical psychologist, and if I could wave a magic wand and level the playing field for people with disabilities, what would that look like?
Mari Guillermo
So this goes back, I think, to one of my earlier responses. That the dreams and expectations will start at birth, and everybody who comes in contact with that person and would that family be that your neighbors, your community, that you live in the teachers, the providers that you access, whether it be disability-related or not, that they choose, have that expectation for you, and can support you in realizing those expectations.
Mark Tucker
You know, I think what I would say probably relates somewhat to what Mari talked about. I think magic wand, I think everybody would see disability as kind of a natural and expected part of the human experience, not something different, or that happens to somebody else necessarily, and that when somebody who has a disability experiences a disadvantage that we wouldn't look first to say like okay, what can we fix about this person? Or what does this person have to overcome to have to go to extraordinary measures to kind of achieve the same kind of a life that everybody else expects right, that we look in and we say our first response instead would be like, okay, what is it about the way that we've constructed our society, the world that we live in, that that puts this person at a disadvantage. So can we address this from kind of a societal perspective first, and then we're building a society that's more accessible to everybody? Right? So that would be the first response, if I saw something like that, then, like Mari and I would be out of a job right? We could do something else.
Rachel Haine-Schlagel
Oh, that would be so wonderful and so terrible at the same time cause you wouldn't want to have to look for a new job.
Mark Tucker
I’d be happy to look for a new job if we could get there.
Rachel Haine-Schlagel
Well, thank you guys both so much for taking time to talk with me, It was wonderful to hear about your work and hear about the impact that you and your projects have had on local and national communities and movements and I wish you all the best of luck as you move forward with your work and moving that needle.
Mark Tucker
Thanks, it was a lot of fun talking with you about this.
Mari Guillermo
Thanks, Rachel. Appreciate your interest.
