Peace & Reconciliation in the Classromm

16 November 2006

Education for Reconciliation (Phase II) is a curriculum development project, funded by the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation and managed by the Curriculum Development Unit (CDU) of the City of Dublin VocationalEducation Committee.

In the three years of its existence, this project has opened doors into young minds and asked questions about what it means to be a citizen of Ireland in the 21st century. Since March it has been moving into a new phase of activity: 12 schools have so far received workshops and the project is keen to sign up more schools from the southern border counties and Northern Ireland.

Aidan Clifford, director of CDU, explains that citizenship teachers are at the heart of the project: “We started out with a strong mainstream idea - in order to bring peace and reconciliation into the classroom and embed them within the educational structure, we must first engage with teachers. They need to become familiar with difficult, controversial issues and learn how to handle them with care, sensitivity and skill.” Over the years, considerable educational work has been done in the area of social justice - looking at and addressing the causes of disadvantage.

This project aims to assist in moving forward new approaches to the subject, by using ideas that teachers have acquired from their experiences in the classroom. “At the start, some teachers can be reluctant to engage with the subject,” says Aidan. “They may have their own personal issues, too. But over the past three years we have exceeded our original targets and work closely with secondary schools on a crosscommunity, cross border basis, looking at areas where there is common ground. In the North, the general study heading is local and global citizenship; in the South, it is civic society and political education.”

Additional project activities have included the development and dissemination of resources and methodologies. One teacher summed up the project’s wider implications: “Citizenship and Education for Reconciliation could be cross-curricular. Any enthusiastic teacher can do (the lessons) in their own way. When they truly believe in it, they can take the children along with them.”

For information contact Edel Murray: murrrayedel@eircom.net