Entries tagged as ‘Diversity’
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.
Categories: Education · Uncategorized
Tagged: Diversity, Education, Intercultural Education, Ireland, Traveller Education
The decision by one of the fringe parties in the upcoming European parliament elections to engage in ‘anti-immigrant’ propaganda highlights some of the challenges for those of us engaged in education.
It shows again that racism enters into public life from many sources: political, economic, cultural and interpersonal. Since racist messages come from so many different sources in our society, we cannot expect schools to simply ‘teach racism out of existence’. We all know that schools are often asked to deal with every social issue that arises as if that gives the state the right to opt out of all other responsibility for the problem in question. Unfortunately, such a strategy will never succeed.
At the same time, schools are not powerless.
Part of the ‘anti-immigrant’ propaganda being put forward at the moment rests upon the manipulation of figures for PPS numbers being issued each year. The use of such statistics and figures is intended to give veneer of objectivity to such positions. Although such statistics can easily be questioned and analysed and the prejudice that underpins them can be exposed, this often does not happen in media commentary. It is left to the listener or reader to decode the statistics and identify the ideology that they conceal.
The capacities to read, decode, and understand the ideological position that is hidden behind statistics is a key part of intercultural competence. This means we need to link student’s mathematical studies to the politics of real life, and to enable them to see that things that are often presented as matters of ‘fact’ can be used to justify dangerous prejudices. The same goes, of course, for ’statements of fact’ that are not presented in the form of numbers, but students of post-primary English generally do get the opportunity to learn the skills of critical reading of the media. Can the same be said for students of Mathematics?
Do we make ‘equals’ a central concept in our school mathematics?
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Critical Thinking, Diversity, Intercultural Education, Maths
In 2003 the New Zealand government published a synthesis of research on ‘Quality Teaching for Diverse Students’. Like many other such ‘evidence-based’ syntheses it was largely quantitative and focused mainly on research that showed large, measurable increases in learning. The study identified ten features of classrooms which were found to have a large, positive impact upon student learning in diverse settings. One of these features was that student learning is considerably enhanced when ‘pedagogical practices enable classes and other learning groupings to work as caring, inclusive, and cohesive learning communities’.
The report goes on to highlight the role which teachers can play in:
- modelling a sense of inclusion and care in classrooms
- structuring learning opportunities to maximise inclusion and cohesion
- teaching students the skills of interacting positively with each other.
These findings are not new and they echo earlier research findings , but they are gaining increasing relevance in Ireland both as a result of our growing awareness of diversity in schools and as a result of the changes to the Irish Leaving Certificate envisaged by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA). The NCCA’s framework of ‘key skills’ identifies skills that are to be learned by Leaving Certificate students across all of the subjects being revised or introduced as part of the developments of senior cycle education. Among the skill sets included is ‘working with others’.
Whether or not our teachers are ready, across all subjects, to teach young people the skills of working effectively with other people is an open question. Indeed, it is worth asking whether we, as educators, are even sure as to what those skills are.
PS: In addition to ‘working with others’ the key skill areas are ‘being personally effective’, ‘communicating’, ‘critical and creative thinking’ and ‘information processing’.
Categories: Education
Tagged: Diversity, Education, Emotions, Inclusive Education
