Our society is changing faster than our education system

About eight years ago, some colleagues and I noted that the growing numbers of children from ethnic minority backgrounds was not being matched by changes in the textbooks and resource materials available to teachers. School can be a bewildering experience for children at the best of times, but a school environment that has no links at all to the culture of your home is likely to be even more so.

We decided to develop a book of children’s stories that reflected the diversity of Irish classrooms, and so we met with groups of women from ethnic minority groups, collected the stories they told us and had them illustrated by a gifted teenage artist. The result was Stories from Eiriu’s Island, which was published by the CDU in Mary Immaculate College.

Looking back on Eiriu’s Island one of the things that is striking is that the stories in it came from Irish mythology, France, the Traveller community, the Philippines and Nigeria: none of the stories in it were collected from Eastern European ethnic minority groups. The reason is obvious: the stories were collected before the accession of Eastern European countries into the EU.  In the few years since accession, the landscape of diversity in Irish schools has changed dramatically, meaning that even our reasonably recent attempt to provide up-to-date resources has quickly been overtaken by events.

This raises questions about the dominance of unchanging textbooks in the Irish education system, but also about how teachers and schools can work to keep resources up to date. One of the points that we made in Eiriu’s Island was how enjoyable and easy it was to collect stories from parents. Perhaps such school-parent links will provide one of the ways of ensuring our schools reflect our changing society.