Shared education in Northern Ireland: school collaboration in divided societies

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.

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.

Addressing conflict and tolerance through the curriculum

Political, religious and national divisions in Northern Ireland go back many hundreds of years so it is not surprising that the lack of a common national narrative has made the teaching of history in schools difficult. The fact that schools have largely been organized on a denominational basis has added to the challenge. When political violence broke out in the late 1960s many looked to schools to contribute to the promotion of reconciliation and the way history had been taught received significant critical attention. This chapter will outline the evolving nature of the history curriculum and review evidence on the impact of this curriculum on the historical understanding of students and young people. In addition, the chapter will briefly consider other ways in which students engage with historical issues through the teaching of citizenship, and wider family and community influences. Whereas the teaching of history in the past either was largely absent or often took on a partisan character, the development of a statutory curriculum in the 1990s helped promote a more dispassionate, skills-based approach which emphasized critical engagement with evidence and a multiperspectivity. While this represented a significant improvement on what had gone before, evaluation of the impact of this approach has highlighted the need for a consideration of the emotional impact of historical understanding and the need better to connect the lessons of history to contemporary society.

Hate crime legislation and violence against sex workers in Ireland: Lessons in Policy and Practice

Drawing on data from UglyMugs.ie (a reporting mechanism for sex workers) this paper considers whether crimes against sex workers should be considered as hate crimes. In many ways, the debates around hate crime in the UK are more developed than in Ireland. As yet the Irish State has yet to criminalise the ‘hate’ element of crime and has been severely criticised for its relatively lacklustre approach to recording incidents of bias or hate crimes against certain social groups. The paper adopts the structural understanding of hate crime espoused by Barbara Perry (2001) who frames the dynamics of hate crime within a complex interplay of political, social and cultural factors. In our analysis we consider what is termed ‘whorephobia’ through the ambit of criminalisation and stigmatisation, gender and heteronormativity in Irish society, and the gendered nature of policing in both parts of Ireland.

Domestic Violence Perpetrators - Evidence informed responses

Domestic violence is a serious, widespread public, social and health problem that affects the lives of many women, children and men. There is also evidence to suggest it has one of the highest rates of recidivism. This comprehensive book provides an overview of what the research tells us about the perpetrators of domestic violence and what works, and what doesn’t, in promoting positive change.

Collecting together the most up-to-date evidence from the international literature and bringing psychological, sociological, gendered and socio-political theoretical perspectives to bear on the issue, the book explores:
- what domestic violence is, why it happens and how it can be measured
- who the perpetrators of domestic violence are, including discussion of non-stereotypical patterns such as male victims, female perpetrators, couples where the abuse is mutual, and couples with abusive relationships who want the abuse to end but the relationship to be sustained
- strategies for engaging perpetrators in interventions and for promoting behaviour change
- evidence-informed interventions, programmes and policies for working with perpetrators
- where robust evidence is lacking and more research needs to be undertaken.

Shared Photography: (Photo)journalism and political mobilisation in Rio de Janeiro's favelas

One of the most important civic phenomena emerging from favelas in Rio de Janeiro today is “community (photo)journalism”, which is practised by favela residents who are trained in journalistic and artistic techniques to raise critical awareness and promote political mobilisation in- and outside favelas. This paper looks at some of the work produced at one training place for community photographers, the agency-school Imagens do Povo (“Images of the People”) in Nova Holanda, a favela located in Rio’s North Zone. Using an ethnographic approach, this article first provides an account of the working practices of the School and its photographers. This is followed by a discussion of a small sample of their photographic work, for which we employ a social semiotic paradigm of image analysis. This methodological synergy provides insights into how these journalists document long-term structural as well as “spectacular” violence in favelas, while at the same time striving to capture some of the “beauty” of these communities. The paper concludes that this form of photographic work constitutes an important step towards a more analytical brand of journalism with different news values that encourage a more context-sensitive approach to covering urban violence and favela life.

KEYWORDS: alternative media, Imagens do Povo, multimodality, news values, photojournalism.