A Foundation of Inclusivity

Dr. Amy Maharaj Madeo’s childhood in Fiji coincided with a military coup so cataclysmic, hospitals and schools were shut down, and her family was “basically quarantined in our home just to stay safe,” she said. 

She was six years old when they moved to Canada, so she started public school as a first-grader. 

“The first time I walked into a classroom, I was so scared,” Madeo said. “But my teacher, Mrs. Warren, was the sweetest, most accepting, warm person ever. She made sure that I had that sense of belonging. She went out of her way to make sure I was included and that I was heard and finding my own voice. And that always stuck with me. I knew that I wanted to grow up and work in education.”

Madeo has found her voice there, too. Even before graduating from the doctoral program in Educational Leadership (Ed.D.) from the University of Washington Tacoma in June 2023 — as part of the university’s first Muckleshoot Cohort, which she helped launch — Madeo began her career, perhaps not surprisingly, in elementary education, eventually teaching third grade, fifth grade, kindergarten and special ed. 

She also taught educational psychology at UWT, and this year — the same year she’s being honored with the Distinguished Alumni Award — she started a new position in a new realm, as assistant director for educational programs for a private university. 

Madeo has kept her ties to UWT, serving on the School of Education’s Advisory Board since 2020. Also that year, she launched the Colloquium Series and was the inaugural featured speaker for the Educate, Empower & Excel speaker series. In 2024, she received the Dean of Education’s Distinguished Service Award for “her exceptional service to the community and UWT.” 

For this year’s campuswide honor, School of Education Dean Rachel Endo wrote in her nomination, “[Madeo] has made a substantial impact in community service, advancing the lives of BIPOC communities and individuals. As an elementary classroom teacher across four public school districts in our state who has been a key leader in supporting learners with special needs, she has also served as a key role model in advocating for BIPOC communities, families and learners through her leadership and teaching.”

Throughout her already impactful career, and her life (Madeo and her husband now have a kindergartener of their own), she has carried Mrs. Warren’s lessons of inclusivity and belonging in her heart — and built on them.

“That was my number one goal whenever students walked into my classroom: I wanted them to know that they belonged and that they felt safe and they could trust me,” Madeo said. “And that, of course, this was a place of learning, but it's also a place of belonging. So that was a huge motivation for me.”

That approach also applied when she was researching doctoral programs.

As the career and technical education manager of Muckleshoot Tribal College in 2019, Madeo emailed Dr. Robin Starr Zape-tah-hol-ah Minthorn, then director of UW Tacoma’s Ed.D. program. 

“The Muckleshoot Cohort was kind of a dream of mine,” Madeo said — a Native-based doctoral program with an Indigenous-based curriculum. “We just started talking, and we pulled in other people, too, from Muckleshoot Tribal College and UW Tacoma [including Endo, whom she credits as “super-supportive”]. And it happened really fast. It was less than a year, and we began that doctoral program. It was the first that we know of where the classes took place on tribal lands.”

The collaborative spirit of that first cohort (which was all women, after one man left the program) “was like a real, true sisterhood,” Madeo said. “We really, really honored each other. That was really inspirational to me — to be surrounded by these intelligent, wonderful women and learning from them; that was just such a great experience.”

That’s the kind of supportive experience Madeo walked into as a scared 6-year-old, and the kind she continues to create as an inspirational professional educator. 

It all comes back to inclusivity —especially, she said, in a time when, “Everything is moving so fast, and a lot of our demographics and populations are ever-changing.”

For Madeo, it’s been a lifelong grounding force. 

“[Inclusivity] is like the foundation of education, I believe, for every educator,” Madeo said. “It's just so important, because if a child isn't included, it doesn't just affect them academically — it's going to affect them socially; it’s going to affect them emotionally. And it will be more difficult for them to develop that self-concept, which becomes like a domino effect of everything in their life, and a domino effect on our communities. We want every community member to be included when it comes to education. That's what I would refer to as foundation: making sure that there's inclusivity and that diversity is celebrated.”