From rhetoric to reality: advancing literacy by cross-curricular means

Cross-curricularity, literacy and critical literacy are currently promoted as components of a curriculum appropriate for the 21st century. The first two in particular are prescribed elements of classroom experience in Northern Ireland, which is the immediate context of this article, but also more widely in the UK. Teachers are implementing cross-curricular and inter-disciplinary initiatives, but rhetorical imperatives can translate into superficial realities. The reasons for this are explored, as are the reasons why inter-disciplinary studies, literacy across the curriculum and critical literacy are deemed to be of significance for education at the present time. The ‘Making Science: Making News’ project is described, in which Key Stage 3 Science and English classes worked together, with input from a research scientist and a journalist, to produce articles on space science which were published in local newspapers. The outcomes of the project are discussed from the perspectives of both teachers and learners. It is argued that this project is an example of genuine inter-disciplinary activity; that it went beyond literacy skills to a deeper development of scientific discourse; and that, through its media connection, there was potential for building an ongoing awareness in pupils of critical literacy and scientific literacy.

Politics, Patriotism and Women in Ireland, Britain and Colonial America, c.1700-c.1780

The use of the consumer boycott as a political tool is commonly associated with pre-revolutionary colonial America and has been identified by historians as an important means through which American women were politicized. This article argues that from the late seventeenth century, Irish political discourse advocated the non-consumption of imported goods and support for home manufactures by women in ways that were strikingly similar to those used later in North America. In Ireland and, subsequently in the American colonies, the virtuous woman consumer was given an active public role by political and social commentators. Rather than being a “brilliantly original American invention,” as T. H. Breen has argued, the political exploitation of a consumer boycott and the promotion of local industry were among what Bernard Bailyn has described as the “set of ideas, already in scattered ways familiar” to the revolutionary leaders through the Irish experience. The article also argues that a shared colonial environment gave Irish and American women a public patriotic role in the period, c. 1700–1780 that they did not have in the home countries of England and Scotland.