Sunny Day

Hi Everyone,

First off, I'm going to apologize for not keeping the promise I made last time about having more pictures to share. I'll try for next time. And, just a warning, this will be a rather long post, as yesterday was very eventful, at least in comparison to all the other days.

Yesterday was a really good day. I got out of the house early (which is key. Otherwise I just lay around like a bumski), because I had an interview with a Professor at Queen's University. I had sort of forgotten who she was since I had made the appointment, but when I was preparing for the interview I remembered that she's really involved in integrated education, which is one of my main interests. Not only that, but she's worked with the foremost expert (that I've been able to find, anyway) on integrated education in Israel, AND I've actually used one of her papers in one of MY papers, so that was very cool. I was very excited to meet her and felt confident about the interview since I had more background on her topic of research than on others.

The interview turned out to be as great as I had expected. Just a bit of background on integrated schools: In Northern Ireland, schools for Catholic kids and Protestant kids are generally seperate, and had been almost entirely so until about 30 years ago, when a bunch of parents got together to create integrated schools for kids of both backgrounds. It took the government a while to back them up, financially, and since then, they've grown. Their integratedness depends solely upon a ratio of students -- the baseline has to be something like 30:70 Catholic:Protestant -- and not on an agreed upon curriculum or set of standards. However, there is an independent organization, the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE), which has a statement of principles that many of the schools have agreed upon, at least on paper.

In Israel, and I'll talk much more about this later, there are currently two seperate types of education (well, more than two, but two main ones), one for Arab Israelis and one for Jewish Israelis. And I'm not just talking seperate and unequal in terms of funding, etc., but they have completely different curricula. I could go on and on about how screwed up I think the system is, and how difficult it is to solve, and all the implications for Israeli identity the system has, etc., but I'll save that for a later post. In any case, there are just a few integrated schools (3 or 4) in the whole country, called the Hand-in-Hand schools. They're incredibly interesting, co-taught by Arabs and Israelis, taught in English and Arabic, etc., but tragically underfunded and, well, scarse. My friend Liz actually just spent much of the summer teaching in one. In any case, it was the comparison between the integrated schools in Northern Ireland and those in Israel that first made me interested in this whole comparison in the first place, so it's something I'm pretty passionate about.

So, this professor said interesting things. I think the thing that struck me most was that she said she thinks the integrated schools in Israel are actually BETTER than the schools in Northern Ireland, but that since they exist in a still conflicted (as opposed to post-conflict) society, they have a hard time making a real impact. But, she said she thinks that their techniques and principles are more effective, or at least more direct. It was really interesting to hear her say that, especially since it made me think about the efficacy of on-the-ground reconcillation period, if the society as a whole is still conflicted.

There are some major problems with the integrated schools in Ireland. For one, the government only evaluates them on that ratio, and not on their efficacy in reconciliation, which she said is entirely unproductive in establishing whether or not they're actaully doing anything. She also reiterated what she had written in her paper that I had used -- that a lot of the times, teachers will try to brush contentious topics and arguments under the rug, instead of talking about them or confronting them head on. She said that she understands why they do that -- these teachers were brought up in Northern Ireland when the society was still conflicted, have political views and baggage of their own, and may not know how to deal with those types of conflcits in their classrooms. She said that special training, and time each week for the teachers to refelect on the curriculum and their job (which the teachers in the Israeli schools have), would be really helpful in changing that practice. Finally, she told me that for various reasons, sometimes the integrated schools are not as strong academically as other secondary schools, and that parents who want integrated eduacation for their kids on ideological grounds might take them out of the school once they remember that school is for math and reading, too.

She also told me about a new project that sounds really interesting, called collaboration, whereby Catholic and Protestant schools in the same area allow their students to attend the other school for classes that they might not offer themselves. For example, if a Protestant kid wants to take German, but it's not offered at his school, he can go to the Catholic school down the street to take it. This not only mixes the kids together on a regular basis, but also emphasizes their differences (if they wear different uniforms, for example), so that topics will come up and will need to be addressed. Sounds great to me, if it works.

In any case. Very successful interview. Afterwards, I found the nice street in my neighborhood -- bookshops, cafes and all -- and then went to the library and worked for a while. Today I'm back at the library, writing to you, and tomorrow, I will take an all-day tour to the Giant's Causeway, one of the main natural attractions up here in the North. Very much looking forward to it.

One of these days when it's not the end of a very long post, I will write to you all about my general impressions of Belfast (just a start: it smells like Holland here, which is very comforting -- damp), and will hopefully accompany it with pictures.

Until then, thanks for reading!

Sarah