Faculty Directory

Martin Scanlan

Program Director, Educational Leadership and Policy, M.Ed.

Professor

Department

ELHE Educational Leadership & Higher Education

Profile

Martin Scanlan is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Higher Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Before joining the academy, Scanlan spent over ten years as a teacher and administrator. He primarily worked in urban settings in schools serving traditionally marginalized students in Washington, D.C., Berkeley, CA, and Madison, WI. This laid a foundation for his teaching and scholarship interests, which focus on how schools can be organized to more effectively welcome all. Scanlan’s research primarily focuses on the organizational routines and practices of adults in schools, including the policies and procedures that shape these. While attending to multiple dimensions of diversity, his work has looked most carefully at how schools across sectors - including Catholic schools and public schools – can better serve students who have diverse cultural and linguistic heritages, as well as students with special needs. Scanlan has an extensive record of scholarship in academic journals reporting this work.

GLOBAL SPOTLIGHT
  • Editor, Journal of Professional Capital and Community : recruit and publish empirical scholarship with a growing emphasis on perspectives from diverse national contexts globally.
  • Conducting a study of Catholic Schools providing culturally and linguistically responsive education
  • Participant in NetEDU Project, an international network of scholars exploring school/community collaboration

Select Publications

BOOKS: 

  • Scanlan, M. (2023). Navigation social justice: A schema for educational leadership. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. 
  • Theoharis, G., & Scanlan, M. (2020). Leadership for Increasingly Diverse Schools, second edition. New York: Routledge/ Taylor and Francis Group. 
  • Scanlan, M., Hunter, C., & Howard, E. (Eds.). (2019). Culturally and linguistically responsive education: Designing networks that transform schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. 

ARTICLES: 

  • Scanlan, M., (2021). Cultures of Critical Spirituality to Advance Inclusion of Immigrant Students and Families. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2021.1982060 
  • Scanlan, M., & Park, H. (2020). The learning of stakeholders in a community school: A narrative history of Gardner Pilot Academy. Journal of Students Placed at Risk. 
  • Scanlan, M., Kim, M., & Ludlow, L. (2019). Affordances and constraints of communities of practice to promote bilingual schooling. Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 4(2), 82-106.

Select Grants

  • John Templeton Foundation - How Catholic School Networks Foster Innovative and Transformative Pedagogies of Character Formation  ($529,590, 2022 - 2025)
  • Innovations in Graduate Education – Boston College Institute for the Liberal Arts ($30,000, 2022 - 2025)
  • Kern Family Foundation - Expanding the Reach of Formative Leadership Education by Building Communities of Practice  ($1,500,000 2022 - 2025)
  • Boston College Formation - Integration of Formative Education and Social Justice Leadership  ($13,300, 2021 - 2022)

Professional Activities

  • Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Professional Capital and Community