Robb Scott is the editor of Multilingual Adaptive Systems, a newsletter devoted to themes associated with education, cross-cultural understanding, social justice, and other relevant topics from an open systems theoretical outlook.

Bio-statement using Balabolka text-to-speech (male voice)

Bio-statement using Balabolka text-to-speech (female voice)

Scott began his lifelong dedication to cross-cultural learning in high school when he visited a Spanish-speaking penpal in Quito, Ecuador, South America, and they shook hands across the equator at a monument called "Mitad del Mundo," with Scott standing in the southern hemisphere and his friend, Fabian Sancho Lobato, in the northern. "Something shifted in my mind at that moment," says Scott, "and it has influenced nearly everything I have done in my life since then."

Today Fabian Sancho Lobato is an attorney and a judge in Quito, and Dr. Robert Bruce Scott is a scholar with expertise in bilingual special education, teaching English as a second language, and negotiating across cultures. They are still in touch and their friendship has lasted nearly 50 years so far.

Robb Scott has experienced loss in his lifetime, as happens to most human beings. His mother and father died when he was a senior in high school, in an airplane crash. He went through family court and divorce in his mid- to late-thirties, leaving indelible emotional scars on his three children from that marriage. In his mid-fifties, he successfully battled cancer, but also lost a close friend to suicide. Through all these experiences, Robb Scott has been able to depend on emotional support from a network of family and friends, as well as his own developing sense of faith and awareness of the miraculous beauty of the gift of life. Much of his personal strength and sense of optimism has been a direct result of the loving relationship he has found in his second marriage, still going strong after 20 years.

Another key to overcoming setbacks in life has been having engaging projects to work on while the passage of time manages the healing process. Four days after losing his parents, Robb Scott was back at school, taking the helm as editor of a 200-plus page yearbook, which won national recognition and a commendation from the United States Bicentennial Commission in Washington, D.C. Scott was a commencement speaker at his high school graduation, dedicating his talk to the importance of the relationships between graduates and their parents.

At the University of Kansas, he was largely self-advised until he needed a signature in his fourth year confirming he had met graduation requirements for a degree in English literature. He also finished the entire pre-med curriculum except for a second semester of organic chemistry, which he thought of as something he could take care of in case he ever decided to apply to medical school and follow his father's career path. While going through college, Robb Scott also took a number of Spanish conversation and Hispanic literature courses, and was inducted into the National Spanish Honors Society. He remained in touch with his penpal and his penpal's family, and visited Ecuador regularly while studying at K.U.

In his last semester, he took as an elective a linguistics course in teaching English as a second language, from Prof. Michael M.T. Henderson, whose stories from his own experience teaching in Afghanistan stimulated Robb Scott's interest and planted a seed that eventually grew into the first phase of a career in TESOL, carrying him and his young family through a quick two-year masters degree and overseas to teaching jobs in Ecuador (three years) and Japan (four years). By that time, the family had grown to include three wonderful children, and when he enrolled the oldest two for their first English-language primary school experiences, at Ralph Bunche Elementary School in New York City, they were given a "multicultural survey" and raised some eyebrows with their answers to the first three questions. What language do you speak with your mother? Spanish. What language do you speak with your father? English. What language do you speak with each other? Japanese.

Six years later, the oldest, Robert Bryan, graduated from Stuyvesant High School, and moved to Ann Arbor to study at the University of Michigan. Two years after that, Stephanie Faith graduated from the Brearley School and moved to Washington, D.C., to study at Georgetown University.

Robb Scott's third child, his daughter Heather Giselle, began kindergarten at P.S. 036-Margaret Douglas just around the corner from Ralph Bunche. At mid-year, she transferred to P.S. 199-Maurice A. Fitzgerald to accompany her mother in a move to Sunnyside, Queens. Giselle made good friends at that school and they have been very good at staying in touch over the years. She recently was able to meet her fourth-grade teacher from P.S. 199, Daniel Dromm, who went on to become active in New York City politics, and served as the NYC Council Member for the 25th District.

Heather Giselle attended Brooklyn Technical High School until her senior year, when she and her mother moved to Brewster, NY, where she graduated at the local high school. She was in the very first cohort of students at the new Stonybrook-Southhampton campus, and transferred to the main campus for her junior and senior years. She spent a semester in Madagascar and graduated from Stonybrook with a degree in anthropology.

Robb Scott lived and worked in New York City for ten years and moved back to Kansas with his wife, in the aftermath of 9/11. They relocated in Hays, KS, about an hour's drive northwest from his hometown of Great Bend. Their son, William John, was born in Hays at the end of Robb Scott's first year teaching at the local college.

During the next ten years back in his home state, Robb Scott had the privilege of serving terms as president of Kansas TESOL and president of Kansas CEC, as well as fulfilling webmaster duties for both of those organizations. In 2003, he presented an invited workshop, "Encouraging Civil Discourse with Logical Conversation Activities," at the TESOL Forum on Teachers Building a Culture of Peace: Classroom Responses to War and Terrorism, at American University in Washington, D.C. In 2004, he chaired and wrote the program book for a KATESOL Conference that brought 300 attendees to Hays and that marked Stephen Krashen's first visit ever to Kansas. As a result of his success increasing membership numbers and conference attendance from 2002 to 2004, Robb Scott presented a workshop at San Antonio TESOL 2005, on how web-technology was used to revitalize and grow the Kansas TESOL organization.

In February of 2005, the ESOL endorsement program and the entire College of Education and Technology unit (32 programs) at Fort Hays State University was reviewed and fully accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). As part of this successful process, Dr. Robert Bruce Scott designed an outcomes-assessment system for the ESOL program and served on the unit-wide Standard 1 (Candidate Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions) and Standard 4 (Diversity) committees.

After three years in Hays, the Scott family moved to Manhattan, KS, so that Robb Scott could complete a doctorate in special education at Kansas State University. During their time there, his wife also earned a degree in modern languages and their son, Bill, attended pre-school through fifth grade. Much of their life revolved around the local public library and a vibrant multicultural campus community, including two of Bill's close friends, from Lithuania.

In 2006, he coordinated a KATESOL Conference that brought 500 attendees to the campus of Kansas State University, with his responsibilities including set-up of technology for 15 session spaces. The publisher's representative from Oxford University Press said it was the best organized conference she had ever attended. Robb Scott also wrote the program book for KATESOL 2006. In 2007, he attended Seattle TESOL to receive a 25-year plaque on behalf of Kansas TESOL. In 2008, he co-chaired a joint KASP/CEC conference in Junction City, attended by 343 special educators, school psychologists, general educators, administrators, paraeducators, teacher candidates, and teacher educators from across the state. The conference focused on data-coaching, response to intervention (RTI), multicultural learners, and new roles for special educators and school psychologists in today's schools, and Robb Scott wrote the program book for the KASP/CEC event and coordinated a special thread of sessions on multicultural aspects of RTI/MTSS implementation. In the summer of 2008, he attended the annual CEC leadership institute in Arlington, VA. During those years, while studying for his doctorate, he also served on state accreditation teams for ESOL and special education.

For 10 months in the year 2010, Robb Scott relocated to Lamar, CO, while his wife and son continued their activities in Manhattan, KS. The purpose of this move was to work at Lamar Community College, where he served as director of the Adult Transition Services department. He also served on the board of directors for the Colorado Adult Education Professional Association (CAEPA) and led his department at LCC to a successful program review by the Colorado Department of Education's Adult Education and Family Literacy (AEFLA) office in September 2010. Scott served as a team member in the College's successful AQIP quality review later that same month. In the summer of 2010, he designed and taught an online course on teaching ESL to adults, by invitation from the AEFLA office at the Colorado Department of Education, as part of their Licensure for Instruction of Adults (LIA). He was budget manager for a federal grant (AEFLA) while at Lamar Community College and prepared two annual performance reports and one successful request for continuation.

During his time at Lamar, Robb Scott expanded the weekly hours of instruction in adult basic education and adult secondary education (GED-prep) courses, and developed manuals for special needs, student orientation, and teacher orientation, as well as revising the ESL curriculum. He received CDE/AEFL Program Director's Training in October, 2010, administered by Margaret Kirkpatrick, State Director of Adult Education and Family Literacy, Colorado Department of Education. In addition, Robb Scott restructured the career development curriculum at Lamar Community College, converting it from life skills to a full Career Pathways curriculum built around technology skills, SCANS research, personal empowerment, WIN-based Work Keys exercises, and individual and group projects.

Scott was with his family in Manhattan on as many weekends as possible during his time at Lamar, and he rejoined them at the end of October that year, sad to leave great friends and colleagues at LCC, but having gotten a number of important things done there and now ready to make his final push to complete his dissertation at K-State. He developed his survey, defended his proposal, and administered the state-wide survey to resource-room teachers in Kansas high schools in the spring semester. Then he collected and analyzed the results from the survey, and wrote chapters four and five, before finally defending his dissertation, "Do Kansas Schools Address Multicultural Needs of Exceptional Students in Transition Practices? A Survey of Special Educators in Grades 9-12 with Direct Experience in Transition Planning for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students," in August, 2011. His first professional presentation on his doctoral thesis was scheduled soon after, at the October meeting of the Council for Exceptional Children's Division of Career Development and Transition national conference in Kansas City. Dr. Robert Bruce Scott, Ed.D., graduated in December, 2011, achieving a goal that took him three tries and nearly 25 years to fulfill.

Dr. Scott soon was invited to apply for a new position at FHSU in Hays, KS, and started duties in August, 2012, as assistant professor of special education and coordinator of the undergraduate special education minor program. His first two years in Hays, he commuted from Manhattan, where his wife was completing her degree in modern languages and their son was attending elementary school. But in 2014, she graduated and the three of them moved together to a home near the Fort Hays campus. Bill entered sixth grade at the middle school and started playing organized football in the fall of 2014. Meribel found a job as the migrant family liaison for the local school system and brought a great deal of energy and innovation to that activity for the next three years. Dr. Scott was presented with the Outstanding Teaching award for the College of Education in the fall semester of 2014. That was also his second year of what turned out to be two terms for a total of six years service on the state-wide Special Education Advisory Council, appointed by the Kansas State Board of Education to represent the interests of agencies and organizations related to vocational and transition services on that council.

As that fall 2014 semester drew to an end, Robb Scott began to sense changes in his chest and throat, causing him discomfort when swallowing and a persistent cough that made him feel dizzy and see stars. The word "cancer" kept coming to his mind, but he dismissed it as an irrelevant thought. He did feel, however, that he might be struggling with a flu, so, on the very last day that campus was open that December, with all of the students gone for the holiday, and just a few faculty and staff still there, he made his first ever visit to the student health clinic in the basement of Memorial Union. It was not busy, so he was immediately given an appointment with a nurse practitioner, who found his blood pressure too high and who seemed to have an intuition that something serious might be wrong, although she was probably not thinking cancer. The nurse practitioner called a local doctor affiliated with the clinic and he suggested that, it being a Friday afternoon in the small town of Hays, there was really nowhere to go except the emergency room. She insisted Dr. Scott promise he would drive himself to the ER and he said he would, after getting his son home from school.

When Robb Scott presented himself at the ER, he was questioned closely as to why he was there, and the only reason he could give was that a nurse practitioner at the college had made him promise to go. The attending physician was a semi-retired doctor from Nebraska who drove down on occasion when Hays Medical Center was short-staffed. He asked a number of questions and, given Scott's history of atrial fibrillation, he ordered an x-ray to see if there was anything heart-related. A shadow on the right lung caught the doctor's attention, and he ordered a CT-scan, which had to be transmitted to another site because they were short-staffed. A message came back about 25 minutes later, reporting a possible carcinoma in the right lung and, as it turned out, a bulging lymph node that was pushing against the esophagus, explaining the difficulty eating.

The doctor from Nebraska suggested seeing an internist there at the hospital first thing Monday and said he would call the internist and make the appointment. However, when Robb Scott got to the internist's office that morning, they did not seem to be in any hurry to see him and said it would be just as well to make the appointment for the next day instead. When you think you've got cancer, your next thought is usually not "oh, I'll take care of this tomorrow." Dr. Scott got on the phone and started making calls to the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, KS, and after a few tries, he got through to a pulmonology office that agreed to see him on the morning of Wednesday, December 24th, the day before Christmas. He also had to arrange for the electronic data from his lung scans to be transmitted to that office.

The family drove up to Kansas City the night before and stayed in a hotel across the street from KU Medical Center. His brother John from New York was visiting in-laws in Lee's Summit for the holidays, and came over to accompany Robb and Meribel at their appointment with a nurse practitioner (who turned out to be from Great Bend herself). The nurse practitioner showed them 3-D images from the scan, including the very suspicious bulging lymph node in the center of his chest, and told them that it was almost certainly cancer. She set up an appointment for a bronchoscopy to be done by Dr. Kyle Brownback on December 31st, so that they could obtain biopsy to make a diagnosis.

On January 6th, the nurse practitioner from KU Med contacted Robb Scott by phone and informed him that the biopsy had come back positive for adenocarcinoma. Hays Med has a highly respected oncology center called "Dreiling-Schmidt," and at that time it was being run by Dr. Anne O'Dea, who had been a colleague or an instructor of the Dr. Brownback who performed Robb Scott's bronchoscopy. He continued handling the entire referral process himself by slipping an envelope under the door of the Breast Care Center at Hays Med, where Dr. O'Dea's main office was located. A day later, a nurse from Dr. O'Dea's office called him to set up an appointment time.

Robb Scott by now had had a few days to dwell on the news that he had cancer. At his first appointment with Dr. Anne O'Dea, he waxed philosophical and spoke of having lived a good life and being ready to face the end. Dr. O'Dea responded: "You had better get used to the idea of continuing to live," and she expressed assurance that given his relatively young age and relatively good overall health, he would likely be able to survive whatever the recommended treatment was going to be. She referred him to a colleague of hers at KU Hospital, Dr. Nirmal Veeramachaneni (everybody there calls him "Dr. V"), and on January 16th, Dr. V, after studying data from an MRI brain scan, an exercise test, and a PET scan, plus the original CT scan, told Robb Scott the cancer was "Stage IIIA" and said there was not any relevant role for surgery. Instead, he explained, based on algorithms that he and his colleagues at KU Medical Center had developed, the best prognosis would be achieved with full-scale radiation treatments in conjunction with full-scale chemotherapy.

As it turned out, the Dreiling-Schmidt Cancer Center at HaysMed was undergoing a restructuring, namely, updating their radiation therapy equipment, and this would be a six-week project. As a result, it was determined that Dr. Scott would travel to Kansas City and stay there to receive radiation therapy and chemotherapy during a six-week period. These therapies would involve several different offices in different buildings, and much of the coordinating activity to set things in motion was handled by a wonderful nurse navigator, who also put him in touch with Hope Lodge in Kansas City, MO, where he ended up being able to stay for the entire period of his treatments. Dr. Wong at KU supervised the radiation therapy and Dr. Hwang supervised the chemotherapy. Once the radiation treatments were completed (30 treatments) and the chemotherapy ceased (due to dehydration), Robb Scott's wife and son drove him back to Hays so that further chemotherapy could be administered at HaysMed.

Intensive chemotherapy continued throughout the rest of the year 2015, with a pause of one month in June for Dr. Scott to receive supplemental oxygen and steroids to get his lungs functioning as well as possible. Fibrosis in the lining of the lungs was caused by the radiation treatments, but otherwise the end result has been very good. For the next year and a half, until the late fall of 2017, he continued to receive a light dose of chemotherapy, but, when it started upsetting his stomach, and upon his request, the chemotherapy was stopped at the end of 2017. It has now been nearly six years since the cancer was diagnosed, and nearly three years since his last dose of chemotherapy. There has been no recurrence or growth of the cancer. He is referred to simply as a cancer survivor.

During all of this time, Robb Scott has continued teaching a full load (and in recent semesters an overload) at Fort Hays State University. From 2016 to 2018, he served two years in the Faculty Senate as an elected representative from his department. From 2017 to 2019, he served on the Steering Committee of the FHSU Strategic Planning initiative. In the spring of 2019, the university funded his trip to Japan to give a presentation on reading theory at the JALT PanSIG Conference (Japanese Association of Language Teachers - All Special Interest Groups).

From 2016 to 2017, Dr. Scott advocated for changes in a new unified K-6 teacher licensure to make certain that teacher preparation for this unified K-6 license would include skills for making adaptations and supporting progress for all students, not leaving out those with significant or severe disabilities. He appealed directly to the state commissioner of education and worked together on this initiative with devoted special education professionals across the state, as well as participating in relevant policy discussions on the Special Education Advisory Council, ultimately persuading the Kansas State Board of Education to adopt the fully inclusive unified K-6 licensure.

When he returned to Fort Hays State University in 2012, and took over coordination of the undergraduate special education minor program, Robb Scott had found a dysfunctional working dynamic to be present between undergraduate and graduate level special education faculty, to such an extent that the graduate faculty was advocating for discontinuation of the undergraduate special education minor program, arguing that special education teaching skills could only be acquired in a masters level program. There was a "crisis of confidence" in December of 2012, when undergraduate leadership was blindsided by a letter from the regional special education directors insisting that the dean close down the undergraduate special education minor. Over the next five months, Dr. Scott attended every meeting of the regional directors -- in Larned, at Concordia, in Phillipsburg, and at Great Bend -- getting to know the directors, finding out what their main concerns were, and re-establishing the rapport that had been missing. At the Great Bend meeting, in April of 2013, he was on the agenda to present a response to the concerns the directors had expressed in their letter to the dean. The meeting was a success and a new era of collaboration and mutual support was established. A "crisis" was averted. Recently, the special education minor program was recognized nationally for its quality.

The argument against the special education minor was that not everything needed by a special educator could be included in a minor, with just 18 or 21 credits of special education coursework. This is similar to the argument against the K-6 unified licensure -- which is a four-year program to prepare teachers for general education as well as high and low incidence special education. At one university, the discussion about developing a K-6 unified program was so divisive that the dean set it aside as something presently untenable due to the potential for feelings of animosity between those on either side of the issue.

Nevertheless, at four or five universities, new K-6 unified teacher preparation programs have been developed and approved, and teacher candidates are completing these programs. The leading institution -- University of Kansas -- has used the K-6 unified challenge as a cutting edge to initiate a process of restructuring their entire teacher preparation system to reconceptualize teaching without silos or segregated thinking which, in essence, has always left someone out.

Robb Scott has stood his ground with added firmness due to his own experience of disability and the segregation that can occur based on prejudice, discrimination, or elitism. "Inclusive thinking and willingness to adapt to a diverse array of needs are tough goals compared to maintaining the status quo and exclusionary policies," says Scott: "This distinction defines the difference between striving for excellence and preserving mediocrity."

Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it. - Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)