Session Information
Contribution
Description: Against the background, in both Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of recent government recommendations and curricular initiatives focused on the global dimension, this paper investigates the pedagogical opportunities in using carefully chosen literary texts to teach selected aspects of global education, including conflict resolution, postcolonialism, and environmental issues. While the immediate target group is senior secondary pupils (that is, key stage 4, and above) in Northern Ireland, the research has implications, it can be argued, for similar groups of pupils in Britain and Europe and (almost by definition because of 'the global dimension') worldwide. The investigation is theorised within a brief critical interrogation of the ways in which schools themselves can militate against equality and fairness in a global context and it is argued that, against that background, the search for suitable literature requires additional urgency. While acknowledging also, however, the necessarily problematic relationship between the study of the arts (including literature) and ethical behaviour, the paper also argues the key significance of using a freirean dialogical model of education, especially when teaching literature.
Methodology: The paper seeks to identify a range of relevant texts within the three categories mentioned above and to provide a detailed critique of a representative selection. While some of the texts chosen for detailed consideration have an immediate Northern Irish or English context, they all have wider resonances and implications and some, such as Coetzee's Disgrace, Longley's 'Ceasefire' and Moore's Blackrobe, have, thematically, a European or globalised context. In investigating and deconstructing these representative texts, a range of appropriate pedagogical approaches and outcomes is suggested.
Conclusions: It is argued that, in identifying and critiquing suitable literature, and suggesting complementary pedagogical approaches towards developing aspects of global education in the secondary classroom, the paper is suggesting a genuinely innovatory development in this area. The theme of conflict resolution, particularly, is of course very significant in the context of Northern Ireland, and the present author has recently published a paper (see 'References') reporting on a small-scale piece of cross-community action research which charted the benefits in using selected 'Troubles' literature to modify pupils' inherited sectarian attitudes. The present paper, from a more theorised perspective, extends and develops that investigation and, arguably, provides a pedagogical model for addressing conflict situations in a European and global context, whether such conflict is based on ethnicity, skin colour or religion. The other key issues addressed in the paper, postcolonialism, and the environment, and the suggested pedagogical approaches, have also, of course, significant European and global implications. Finally, the paper as a whole, with its intercultural focus and its global dimension has, I would argue, appropriate resonances in Geneva specifically, and in the wider European intellectual and educational context generally.
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