Session Information
Contribution
Description: Northern Ireland is a society emerging from decades of political conflict, involving those who want Northern Ireland to be united with the Republic of Ireland (of whom the majority were Catholic) and those who wish Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK (of whom the majority were Protestants). Since the Belfast Agreement in 1998, Northern Ireland is sometimes considered as a post-conflict society, with decreasing levels of political violence and a flourishing economy. However, segregation and political polarisation are stark reminders that peace still has not been achieved in people' everyday lives. Recently, media attention has also shifted to report on minority groups in society, including ethnic minorities, homosexual and disabled people. Consequently, concerns have been raised about how to promote peace by simultaneously tackling the broader issues of social inclusion.
Education has long been used in an attempt to promote peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Previous initiatives in the formal education sector have been criticised for focusing exclusively on the Catholic/Protestant divide and for lacking effectiveness due to their models of implementation. More recently, Local and Global Citizenship is being introduced to the Northern Ireland curriculum. Due to the controversial nature of the subject in Northern Ireland, Local and Global Citizenship is conceptualised as an "enquiry-based" programme underpinned by "human rights" (Smith, 2003). In Key Stage 3, the subject incorporates eight key concepts, namely Diversity and Inclusion, Human Rights and Social Responsibility, Equality and Social Justice, and Democracy and Active Participation. The current paper aims to outline pupils' perceptions of citizenship in the context of Northern Ireland.
Methodology: The UNESCO Centre, School of Education, University of Ulster, has been commissioned to undertake an evaluation of Local and Global Citizenship at Key Stage 3 from 2003 to 2008. The evaluation takes a multi-method approach and involves three main levels of analysis, including the impact of citizenship education on pupils and schools, the impact of citizenship training programmes on teachers and the introduction of citizenship education into Initial Teacher Education (Niens & O'Connor, 2005).
In 2004/2005, 511 Year 8 pupils from 33 schools across Northern Ireland completed a pre- and post-test survey about citizenship related issues.
Conclusions: Results indicated that respondents were relatively confident and their engagement in citizenship-related activities was moderate. Pupils showed less interest in politics than in issues such as human rights, which might underline the importance of political issues being discussed in the classroom.
Respondents held relatively positive attitudes towards minority groups, equality, human rights and other citizenship-related issues. As expected, with regard to the conflict in Northern Ireland, pupils' responses reflected existing community divisions.
Over the course of the school year, pupils' confidence in citizenship-related issues increased significantly. Attitudinal and behavioural changes relating to the key concepts in Local and Global Citizenship were limited and the direction of these changes was inconsistent.
Generally, results indicated increased learning about specific citizenship-related topics (e.g. human rights, racism, sectarianism). Pupils most frequently identified racism and the environment as topics that they had learned about in the past year. Sectarianism and conflict resolution were among the least frequently indicated learning areas. If, among other goals, citizenship education aims to address the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland, it is clearly necessary to target the avoidance culture and to motivate teachers to explicitly address these issues in their classrooms.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.