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In this book the terms ‘clean language’ and ‘clean language interviewing’ are written using lower case, according to the convention of the American Psychological Association (sixth edition). ‘Clean language interviewing’ is sometimes abbreviated to CLI.

The first part of this chapter addresses the history and development of the International Study Association of Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) and its engagement with the global educational community. We provide an account of the context and background against which ISATT developed as well as information about the founders’ orientations and the actions that led to ISATT’s birth. The second part of the chapter uses patterns of topic focus as graphic indicators of the evolution of ISATT’s research interests expressed through publication titles.

This chapter explores the parallels between the recruitment and retention of students from marginalized backgrounds, and efforts with similarly identifying faculty and student affairs administrators. Higher education institutions target specific student populations to increase access, thus leading to an increase of students of color, low-income students, and first-generation students on college campuses (Chen & Nunnery, 2019). This welcome development proves inadequate on its own, as the critical support structures necessary for student success are not in place. Students' lived experiences are not attended to in a manner that fosters thriving (Jack, 2019; Nunn, 2021).

Research underscores the significant positive impact on marginalized students of having faculty and student-facing administrators from similar backgrounds on their campus (Braxton et al., 2014; Kuh, Kinzie, Buckley, Bridges, & Hayek, 2007). The intentional recruiting of these college personnel provides a vital means of attending to the needs of underrepresented students. Yet, the student experience is not instructive for the work with underrepresented college employees. The lived experiences of the faculty and administrators from marginalized identities are not being addressed either, similar to that of underrepresented students (Orelus, 2020). When these college personnel leave institutions unexpectedly or stay but are not thriving, this impacts students, colleagues and the college as a whole. In many respects, institutions are replicating inequities they commit to substantively dismantle, limiting the racial justice work they promised, and effectively thwarting their own Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts.

Using an autoethnographic approach, this chapter will explore these parallel issues, and propose recommendations for future research and institutional policy and practice for retention of underrepresented faculty and student-facing administrators.

To conclude this book, we take stock of the state of the field of clean language interviewing (CLI). The field has matured considerably in 20 years and yet is still young and emergent. Through articulating the principles of CLI and exploring its application in many fields of practice, we hope this book might come to be seen as a milestone on its path. From its informal beginnings and earliest applications, we believe we can claim with justification that clean language interviewing has developed into a well-specified, well-tested and well-appreciated method that can be used to access both explicitly- and tacitly-held knowledge in a wide range of research projects.

As editors of this volume, we have been gratified and humbled by the ways in which CLI has been used by the contributors. Part II has demonstrated the value of clean language interviewing in both academic and applied research. The applications presented illustrate that CLI has breadth – given the diverse fields in which it has been applied – as well as depth, due to the various levels at which it can be used.

Our aim in this chapter is to reflect on themes that have emerged from the contributions in Part II and the experience of compiling the book as a whole. We begin by reviewing the frameworks that we regard as essential to CLI, then discuss three issues of practice and theory that have emerged from Part II. We sum up the key benefits and limitations of CLI for interviewers and interviewees before indicating some possible directions for future research.