Accountability in Partnership or Partnership in Accountability: Initial teacher education in Northern Ireland

This paper analyses accountability and partnership in Initial Teacher Education for the primary school sector in Northern Ireland. In considering teacher education, the paper focuses on three higher education institutions: Stranmillis University College, St Mary's University College and the University of Ulster. Of the three institutions, the Roman Catholic Church maintains St Mary's University College while the other institutions have no religious affiliations. The paper focuses on the reform of teacher education within the British Isles and sets Northern Ireland into a context of a system of teacher education which has developed new patterns of accountability. Three sources of evidence are used to analyse accountability; firstly the perception of schools that are partners in Initial Teacher Education; secondly, the views of the Education and Training Inspectorate who are responsible for accrediting teacher education in Northern Ireland; and thirdly, the views of the three university schools of education. The paper will demonstrate how teacher education in Northern Ireland is simultaneously similar to, and different from, teacher education in the rest of the developed world. It will illuminate the dimensions of accountability in the primary school sector and show how in Northern Ireland this is heavily segregated by religious denomination.     

Education and the social order: re‐visioning the legacy of Brian Simon

The movement for the higher education of women in Ireland in the nineteenth century has traditionally been viewed as a Protestant initiative. Scholarship suggests that the Irish campaign developed along the same lines as the English movement, gaining from and growing out of the English advances. Leading Protestant schools for girls have been viewed as the driving force behind the concessions afforded Irish women. This paper challenges this assumption, suggesting that contemporaneous developments in Ireland were driven not by neighbouring reforms but by denominational tensions. The role played by the Catholic teaching orders during the nineteenth century cannot be overlooked. Although initially conservative in their approach to educational provision for girls, the Catholic teaching orders – the Dominican, Loreto and Ursuline orders in particular – were key players and stakeholders in women’s higher education in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This paper explores the objectives of the pioneers of Protestant and Catholic female education, examining the relative influence of the Church of Ireland and the Catholic Church. It explores the possibility that the movement for the higher education of Irish women found its impetus not in gender equality, but in denominational rivalry.     

Beyond Plumbing and Prevention: feminist approaches to sex education

This article offers a feminist critique of existing sex education policies and programmes in Canada, as well as examining common right‐wing arguments against more progressive approaches. Two major forces shaping adolescent girls’ developing sexuality—male sexual violence and compulsory heterosexuality—are discussed, and recent initiatives in Ontario to introduce these issues into sex education programmes evaluated. Toronto Board of Education's new policy on sexual orientation and the Ontario Ministry of Education AIDS Education Curriculum are assessed and strategies for anti‐sexist, anti‐heterosexist sex education developed.     

Religious Segregation and the Emergence of Integrated Schools in Northern Ireland

A distinctive characteristic of the education system in Northern Ireland is that most Protestant and Catholic children attend separate schools. Following the partition of Ireland the Protestant Churches transferred their schools to the new state in return for full funding and representation in the management of state controlled schools and non-denominational religious instruction was given a statutory place within such schools. The Catholic Church retained control over its own system of voluntary maintained schools, initially receiving only 65% of capital funding; however all grant-aided schools in Northern Ireland are now eligible for full funding of running costs and capital development. This paper highlights the emergence of a small number of integrated schools since the 1980s. Catholic and Protestant parents have come together as the impetus for these schools and this presents an implicit challenge to the status quo of church involvement in the management and control of schools. In practical terms the integrated schools have had to develop more inclusive arrangements for religious education, and legislation that permits existing schools to 'transform' into integrated schools also presents new challenges for the society as a whole.     

Chastity for democracy: Surplus repression and the rhetoric of sex education

Moving from opposition to participation, the Adolescent Family Life Act (1981) and the development of abstinence education marks the conservative movement's pivot to a rhetorical strategy of tolerance that enabled it to coopt the public culture of sex discourse. Working from Herbert Marcuse's theory of “surplus repression,” I argue that the New Right seized the liberationist argument for open public discourse about sexuality to sublimate libidinal desires into a national project of familial (re)productivity. The AFLA is significant in the rhetorical history of sex education because it demarcates the transition to a productive form of biopolitics that sought to manage sexuality by instrumentalizing rather than censuring bodily desire. Conservative sex talk illustrates how Eros—transgressive, creative, and erotic desires—is channeled into the discursive production of hyper-functional subjects invested in their own subjugation.     

‘Say everything’: exploring young people's suggestions for improving sexuality education

This paper examines the recent controversies surrounding the decision to introduce sex education in secondary schools in India to combat the rapid spread of HIV and AIDS in the country. While 11 Indian states have banned it, the Left-ruled state of West Bengal has designed a teachers' manual to impart sex education. However, a close analysis of this material shows that it suffers from the same anxieties about ‘western licentiousness’ that will affect ‘pure’ Indian youth and delivers the same message of sexual abstinence that characterizes the arguments deployed against the teaching of sex education. Both the proponents and opponents of sex education see sex education as a part of a larger programme of globalization that is threatening Indian culture and needs to be resisted either by rejecting the programme or by using it to construct a sexually abstinent nationalist youth force.     

Return to the crossroads: Maritain fifty years on

Abstract:

Writing a little over a decade ago of developments in educational philosophy, R. F. Dearden remarked on the dearth of alternative approaches to that of conceptual analysis which predominated, at least in Anglophone cultures, at that time. One possible avenue of enquiry which he identified as conspicuously absent in this respect was the development of a distinctively Catholic approach to problems of educational philosophy, observing that a work of the mid‐war years, Maritain's Education at the Crossroads (1943), appeared to be well nigh the only modem effort in this direction. More than a decade on from this, in a climate no longer exclusively dominated by conceptual analysis – indeed, in which there is unprecedented interest in a wealth of different schools, traditions and approaches to philosophy of education – Dearden's remarks about the absence of a distinctively Catholic perspective still apply. In the following essay, therefore, the authors have undertaken, via a critical analysis of Maritain's educational speculations of half a century ago, to try to discern some of the principal issues and considerations which would need to be addressed in the interests of identifying a distinctively Catholic educational philosophy.     

It must be true – I read it in Seventeen magazine: US popular culture and sexual messages in an era of abstinence-only education

As discourse in sexual education classes across the USA in 1996 began to change, media outlets became important sources of education for teenage girls. Unaffected directly by government policy, one of the most popular teenage girls' magazines, Seventeen, provided a plethora of information on sex. Several scholars have examined teenage magazines' sexual discourse, yet few have assessed the accuracy of sexual health information during a time period when the US Federal Government instituted an abstinence-only curriculum policy for public schools. In addition, there is a gap in the literature regarding magazines' attitudes about teenage abstinence, or lack thereof, especially in a time when politics had taken a very conservative stance on the issue. This paper examines Seventeen magazine between 1996 and 1998 to explore the magazine's attitude towards teen sex and abstinence and to analyse the accuracy of sexual health messages surrounding topics such as abortion, contraception and STDs.     

Shared education in Northern Ireland: school collaboration in divided societies

Abstract

During the years of political violence in Northern Ireland many looked to schools to contribute to reconciliation. A variety of interventions were attempted throughout those years, but there was little evidence that any had produced systemic change. The peace process provided an opportunity for renewed efforts. This paper outlines the experience of a series of projects on 'shared education', or the establishment of collaborative networks of Protestant, Catholic and integrated schools in which teachers and pupils moved between schools to take classes and share experiences. The paper outlines the genesis of the idea and the research which helped inform the shape of the shared education project. The paper also outlines the corpus of research which has examined various aspects of shared education practice and lays out the emergent model which is helping to inform current government practice in Northern Ireland, and is being adopted in other jurisdictions. The paper concludes by looking at the prospects for real transformation of education in Northern Ireland.     

School-based Sex Education in Russia: The current reality and prospects

The last decade has been characterised in Russia by a sharp increase in the number of cases of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), especially in teenagers, as well as by a high level of unwanted pregnancies, sexual violence and other phenomena relevant to the issues of reproductive and sexual health and behaviour. Though the overwhelming majority of Russian teenagers, their parents and teachers favour the introduction of sex education in schools, there is no national programme of school-based sex education in Russia at the moment. Currently, some conservative forces and the Russian Orthodox Church are actively opposing school sex education and family planning. Opponents of sex education have mounted an aggressive campaign against the implementation of sex education in schools. The attempt of the Russian Ministry of Education, in cooperation with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and UNESCO, to implement in-school sex education has practically failed. At present, direct instruction of schoolchildren in these matters is in fact forbidden. So in the near future, it is only really feasible to promote direct educational work with youngsters on a local basis and in cooperation with some foreign experts within the framework of separate, fairly small-scale projects.     

Education on sexually transmitted infections: finding common ground among youth,parents, providers and policy advocates

Outcomes from sex education are shaped not only by the knowledge and attitudes of youth but also by groups influential in young people's lives. American youth bear one of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the industrialized world. Four constituencies with important roles in communicating about STIs are youth, parents, healthcare providers and policy advocates of sex education. This paper aims to understand the attitudes held by these key groups and to ascertain common ground. Eight focus groups were conducted with: youth 15–23 years old (n = 20), parents of youth 10–19 years old (n = 18), healthcare providers (n = 17), and advocates working with national policymakers (n = 6). Participants discussed the issue of STIs in youth within both individual and societal contexts: the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of individual youth – Ignorance, Exploration, Peer Pressure, Denial, and Indifference; and the influence of segments of society that could affect decisions by youth – Sex is a taboo topic, Reluctant communication by parents, Restricted school education, Limited communication by doctors, Poor role models, and Missing information in media. Understanding the groups' common ground of individual and societal contexts may provide a foundation for more effective sex education.     

The Chilver Report: unity and diversity

This is a study of the abortive attempt by the direct rule Conservative government in the early 1980s to impose unity on the diversity of initial teacher education (ITE) provision in Northern Ireland (NI) through the work of the NI Higher Education Review Group, chaired by Sir Henry Chilver. Harnessing hitherto untapped archives, it shows how government was forced to bow to the divergent views and religious interests of Northern Ireland the society. This realpolitik was to produce a much less radical shake-up of ITE activity while leaving the Catholic sector essentially intact. The paper demonstrates the relevance of historical factors, the risks inherent in the failure to establish representative review bodies and the power and political adroitness of the Catholic Church at a critical juncture. The authors conclude that, in the political and social context of the 1980s, Chilver represented ‘a bridge too far’.     

ESL: In Search of an Identity

Abstract

This paper discusses students' perspectives of their experience of a competence based teacher training programme in Further Education. The students were Further Education lecturers who had to undergo a mandatory one year day release teacher training course if they did not satisfy certain criteria according to rules governing the Further Education sector in Northern Ireland. For the academic year beginning 1989, the University of Ulster introduced a competence based programme, bearing in mind the transformation taking place in Further Education as a result of the proposals of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications. This paper examines the experiences of the first cohort of student to undertake the competence based programme.

Qualitative methodology was used to collect the ‘data’ for this research. The research was carried out over one academic year. Analysis revealed four themes which became significant in developing an understanding of the students' experiences of the programme. The themes are discussed under the headings: i)'This was not what we expected'; ii) Experiencing a new role withing a new course, iii) Time management; and iv) Group relations. Examination of the themes highlights how the students' experiences on the programme changed as the year progressed. The findings of this research may provide some useful insights to those people who wish to develop other competence based programmes, as well as educators in general.     

Attitudes of parents of young men towards the inclusion of sexual orientation and homophobia on the Irish post‐primary curriculum

The ‘Exploring Masculinities’ (EM) programme was piloted in 22 Irish single‐sex boys’ post‐primary schools during the late 1990s. Following objections from some influential journalists and an organisation representing parents whose sons attended Catholic secondary schools, the Minister for Education and Science put the planned dissemination of the programme on hold. The concerns of the objectors included the proposed treatment of sexual orientation and homophobia in the context of the school curriculum. The authors researched the views of a national sample of the parents of young men regarding the inclusion of social and personal education issues on the school curriculum. The vast majority of parents would welcome the inclusion of all EM topics including sexual orientation and homophobia, the focus of the current paper, on the school curriculum. However, parents did express concerns in relation to the adequacy of teacher development for dealing with such sensitive topics and possible conflict between school and parental values.     

Students and sex work in the UK: providers and purchasers

Available evidence suggests that changes in the funding of UK higher education in recent years have been accompanied by an increased student presence in the sex industry, ostensibly for financial reasons and to make ends meet. The current study comprises a sample of students (N = 200) drawn from several universities in the UK. Data were gathered on financial and employment circumstances, a range of measures of psychological well-being, attitudes to sex work, whether respondents were currently engaged in different types of sex work and whether they had participated in utilising a range of sexual services or forms of adult entertainment. Results indicated that around 6% (2.7%–9.3%) of the sample was currently working in the sex industry – in erotic dancing, stripping or escorting, with significant numbers of both male and female students also involved in purchasing and using sexual services. Little evidence was found to link these activities to prior experiences of psychological adversity. The implications of the results are discussed.     

Comparative education in primary teacher education in Ireland and South Africa

Comparative Education as a subject or course on teacher education curricula mainly continues to be taught in Ireland, some African and East European countries and a few colleges in Ireland, the UK and several universities in the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Latin America and Australia. This research compares Irish and South African students' experiences of their Comparative Education courses. The article commences with a survey of literature on the position of Comparative Education in teacher education, a portrayal of the contextual background of South Africa and of Ireland, and a brief synopsis of the pre-course survey of students' expectations, upon which this study builds. Subsequently the research method is explained and the results presented. Three findings emerged from this study. The first is the valuable role of Comparative Education in teacher education. The second is the role of contextual factors in determining the significance of Comparative Education in teacher education. Thirdly, the centrality of clients (i.e. students) is critical to the future of Comparative Education in teacher education.     

Assessing school effectiveness: Evidence from the Irish context

Abstract

This paper considers the theories of language educaation and infant pedagogy of Professor Timothy Corcoran, Professor of Education in University College, Dublin. He played a pivotal role in the debates on education at the 1920s. These opinions were to become decisive in the formation of the New Free State's education programmes and policies. He held that infant classes ought to be the prime agents in the revival of the Irish Language. As a result the National Programme of Primary Instruction (1922) required that all the work in the infant classes should be conducted through Irish. He castigated the enlightened principles of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel and Montessori arguing that Irish education should not give up its sane traditions for doctrines derived from ‘poisoned sources’. His antagonism towards the thinking of the progressive educational theorists meant that the infants of Ireland had to wait until 1948 for a revised programme that would be more in line with the thinking of the day.     

Shared Education in contested spaces: How collaborative networks improve communities and schools

Societies which suffer from ethnic and political divisions are often characterised by patterns of social and institutional separation, and sometimes these divisions remain even after political conflict has ended. This has occurred in Northern Ireland where there is, and remains, a long-standing pattern of parallel institutions and services for the different communities. A socially significant example lies in the education system where a parallel system of Catholic and Protestant schools has been in place since the establishment of a national school system in the 1830s. During the years of political violence in Northern Ireland a variety of educational interventions were implemented to promote reconciliation, but most of them failed to create any systemic change. This paper describes a post-conflict educational initiative known as Shared Education which aims to promote social cohesion and school improvement by encouraging sustained and regular shared learning between students and broader collaboration between teachers and school leaders from different schools. The paper examines the background to work on Shared Education, describes a ‘sharing continuum’ which emerged as an evaluation and policy tool from this work and considers evidence from a case study of a Shared Education school partnership in a divided city in Northern Ireland. The paper will conclude by highlighting some of the significant social and policy impact of the Shared Education work.     

The Role of External Professionals in Education about Sexual Orientation−towards good practice

Throughout England, young people in schools are entitled to a comprehensive programme of sex education as part of Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE). Current debate about the content of such a programme is informed by new government guidance on sex and relationship education as well as pre-existing concerns about homophobic bullying, sexual health and mental health. In an English local authority, an externally funded Young Gay and Bisexual Men's Development Worker provided educational activities to address sexual orientation and identity issues to four schools. An evaluation sought to identify whether successes had been achieved and why. A further aim was to identify useful learning about the role of external professionals in carrying out effective education about sexual orientation with young people in schools. The evaluation was developed within the context of a number of 'real-world' limitations. Nevertheless, a significant number of project successes (and areas for development) were documented. Successes included raising awareness of key issues among pupils and supporting teachers engaged in PSHE. Key factors contributing to success included: adequate preparation of teachers and pupils in schools; an appropriately skilled and experienced project worker; and a considered approach to building partnerships with schools and working with young people.