 Educational Initiatives
Education for Mutual Understanding (EMU)
The remit of the Working Group on Education for Mutual Understanding stated the
EMU should enable children to:
- Learn to respect and value themselves and others;
- Appreciate the interdependence of people within society;
- Know about and understand what is shared as well as what is different about their cultural traditions;
- Appreciate the benefits of resolving conflict by non-violent means.
EMU allows teachers a degree of flexibility. The Education and Library Boards
have employed field officers to help with advice, funding and to generally
co-ordinate resources and information. There are criteria, however, which insist
on a degree of control over proposed projects that parents are aware of any
projects and the project must be educational.
In its guide to teachers DENI set out stages by age and cite what a pupil should
be able to comprehend at a given stage.Cultural Tradition
The remit of the Working Group on the cross curriculum theme of cultural
heritage stated the aim of cultural heritage should enable school children:
- To know about, understand and evaluate the common experience of their cultural heritage;
- To know about, understand and evaluate the diverse and distinctive aspects of their cultural heritage;
- To know about, understand and evaluate the interdependence of cultures.
Cultural Tradition
The Working Group also stated that cultural heritage should not focus on 'high
culture' such as the arts but should also focus on what it called 'learned
behaviour'.
Cultural heritage does not deal solely with Northern Ireland. It suggests,
however, that it should deal with local projects at first and then extend the
scope of the study to include all of Ireland, Britain, Europe and the rest of
the world.
Inter-School Links
Between 1986-90 DENI founded an inter-schools links project. The project focused
its experiment initially in one distinct area of Northern Ireland. It sought to
establish structural links that would go beyond activities such as carol
services.
It concluded that a properly structured system would allow some 44 hours of the
school year for activities which would involve inter-school links. The authors
estimated that to transmit this to a province-wide initiative would cost £1.39
million or 0.25% of the annual education budget. Inter-School Links
Inter-school contact had some considerable effect on pupils' perceptions.
Results were gathered from the following groups of Protestant and Catholic
pupils before and after inter-school contact.
The following screens show the questions and results of the survey.Inter-School Links
Q1. What identity label do you use for your country?
Q2. Who are the native people of Ireland?
Inter-School Links
The study also looks at parental opinions on the inter-school link project.
According to DENI in 1992 its Cross Community Scheme attracted applications from
one third of all schools in Northern Ireland, some 450 to 500. Funding was
approximately £850 000.
 Return to N.
Ireland Education Section
|