This class promoted the use culturally aware literature within the classroom so that children could see themselves represented or become more familiar with other cultures (Moloney & O’Toole, 2018). This aimed for children to see the similarities and differences between one another and develop an understanding of a shared universal human experience. Cummins (1996) argues that schools reproduce society’s values and ideas and therefore, teachers should approach this idea of a shared universal experience critically. This is because without the unpacking of historical imperialism and analysis of complex contexts, colonialism’s influence on the creation and maintenance of unequal power relations between the Global North and South may go ignored (Andreotti, 2006). This can consequently create a paternalistic view of the Global South where the responsibility of ‘civilising’ the Global South lies with the ‘supreme’ West and stems from a sense of morality rather than justice (Andreotti, 2006, p. 45). This can be seen in some school’s soft global development approaches towards funding Trócaire, where minimal critical teaching is provided. For instance, limited discussion surrounding the causes of the issues in that country, whether the money being provided is beneficial and the promotion of the idea that it is our moral responsibility to ‘do-good’ for the ‘inferior Other.’

Andreotti (2006) and Liddy (2013) argue that this perspective can be challenged through critical types of development education and literacy. As a teacher, it is important that I become more reflective and critical of my biases and actions so that I am not inaccurately and superficially teaching about topics related to GDE, therefore reproducing problematic perspectives. 

While Ireland has historically had a somewhat limited experience with diversity, immigration since the Celtic Tiger has massively changed Ireland’s national identity. For instance, nearly 568,000 pupils are enrolled in primary schools in Ireland (DES, 2020), with 10% of those from immigrant backgrounds (Keane & Heinz, 2018). 182 languages are now also spoken in Ireland (CSO, 2017). This diversification requires the education system to adapt. 

Rizvi & Lingard (2009) describes that policies are now “located within a global system” (p. 2) and “framed by broader discourses” (p.8). This is reflected in the Council of Europe’s recommendation for plurilingual education (DES, 2005). However, Ramirez et. al’s (2016, p.3) description of “loose coupling” between global educational policy and practice exists in the Council’s observation that Ireland has been slow to adopt plurilingual approaches compared to other countries (DES, 2005). 

Reasons for this include large influences from historical nationalist ideologies (Wallen & Kelly-Holmes, 2006) and contemporary monolingual perspectives.  Monolingual perspectives are present in some teacher’s deficit views of immigrants’ abilities and home languages as a hindrance to academic achievement, despite contrary research (Skinner & O’Toole, 2018; Cummins, 1996).  This understanding is important as even if excellent educational policy exists, it is “mediated by the leadership practices within the school, as well as by the ways teachers interpret that policy and translate it into practice (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009, p. 5-6). Policy can exacerbate this monolingual view, where one of the Intercultural Guideline’s aims is to “raise awareness within the educational community of issues that arise from increasing linguistic diversity” (NCCA, 2005, p.5). This reflects Rizvi & Lingard’s argument that policy always presents issues from a particular viewpoint. 

Understanding countries historical and contemporary contexts is important as this can influence the level of success of global educational policies. 

The Results. 
These results have been used to rank Ireland within international standards. In 2009, PISA found a large decrease in Irish pupils’ literacy and mathematics skills. Breakspear (2012, p.15) reports PISA’s findings illustrate Ireland’s literacy performance as "average", mathematics performance as "below” average, and science as “above” average. 

Specifically, regarding children from immigrant backgrounds where languages other than English or Irish are spoken at home, PISA finds native English/Irish speakers score 25 points higher on reading scores (Shiel et al, 2016).

Impact. 
These PISA tests resulted in the revision of Ireland's a) curriculum standards, b) the improvement of national assessments, c) the monitoring of students’ academic outcomes (particularly at second level), d) the creation of national educational targets and d) the creation of strategies aimed at improving literacy and mathematics (Breakspear, 2012). 

For instance, in response to the low results achieved in 2009 in literacy and mathematics, National Strategy: Literacy and Numeracy for Learning and Life 2011-2021 was established to develop strategies to improve these results. 

National Assessments of English Reading and Mathematics (NAMER).
In response to this Strategy, national assessments such as the NAMER, were established to monitor Ireland’s progress in English, mathematics and science. the area. This assessment tests children in 2^nd and 6^th class. 

NAMER’s 2014 results also replicate PISA’s findings, showing that children’s countries of birth and their home language have an influence on their academic success. NAMER’s main findings, as shown in the table above, find that:

a)    in general there is no significant difference between schools in reading and maths that a) had no children that speak languages other than English or Irish at home and b) schools that had some level of children that spoke languages other than English and Irish at home.

b)    at 2nd class level pupils that speak languages other than Irish or English at home have significantly lower mean scores in maths than children that speak English.

c)    at 6th class level, pupils who speak English at home have no significant advantage in maths over those that do not.

d)    at 6th Class Level, pupils in schools with more than 10% of students that speak languages other than English or Irish at home have significantly lower reading scores than those that whose students only speak English.

 

The international assessments conducted by PISA have been shown to have a huge effect on Ireland’s educational policies (re-evaluation of curriculum standards and aims), the establishment of initiatives such as the National Strategy: Literacy and Numeracy for Learning and Life 2011-2021 and the creation of additional national assessments, including NAMER. 

To improve the depth in which GCE is taught, several areas could be addressed:

a)   Improving the perception among teachers surrounding GCE.

b)   Increasing the number of quality GCE resources provided to teachers.

c)   Teaching GCE as a “school-wide cross-curricular theme (Goren & Yemen, 2017, p.177).

The Development InterCultural Education (DICE) project provided a compulsory class in my 2^nd and 3^rd year B.Ed. This project stresses the importance of preparing student-teachers for work in multicultural settings and a globalized world (O’Toole, 2006). It provides both elective and compulsory courses on development and interculturalism in education colleges in Ireland. O’Toole (2006) makes several notes about student-teachers attending the course.

First, teachers often focus on local, rather than global development. DICE suggest 10 themes that support the integrated teaching of both local and global development, to combat the over-focus on local issues.

Second, often student-teachers place more importance on learning practical GCE activities they can use in class, rather than theoretical knowledge. Teachers such as this often teach GCE discretely and sporadically. A positive disposition and attitude towards GCE correlates with it being taught in a cross-curricular manner. O’Toole (2006) finds that often this positive disposition is tied to teacher’s past experiences.

Thematic and cross-curricular teaching has many benefits. For instance, Lipson, Valencia, Wixon, & Peters (1993) note that thematic approaches lead to meaningful teaching, where children can make connections between different subjects and see how one relates to the other. They argue that if children cannot see the relevance of what they are learning, they will not be able to apply their skills and knowledge to problem solving related to the area.

Contradictory policy: However, Waldron et. al. (2020) argue that contradictions exit within educational policy on CCE. For instance, they note that conflicting terms such as “economic growth” and “sustainability” can arise within the same document. This highlights Rizvi & Lingard’s (2009) argument that policy is constructed from a particular perspective and that contexts can be presented differently to suit proposed policy. This shows a lack of cohesion, criticality or desire for transformation of the ideological, economic and systemic drivers of climate change. Moreover, it implies poorly developed CCE policies and resources to support teachers.

Limited support against criticism: Additionally, even if critical policies and programmes are designed, there is evidence that if they are criticised, the government may not support teachers in their implementation. For instance, in Case Study 1, a spokesperson from the Department of Education distanced the division from the resource created to support CCE at junior certificate level when it was criticised by the IFA (Waldron, et. al., 2020). This adds to the negative environment within which teachers must teach CCE, adding to their reluctance.

While there are large strides being made to support teachers’ professional development in CCE in Ireland, more needs to be done to create critical policies and support teachers in their implementation.

This raised the question for me, ‘how can countries ignore human rights?’ ‘What are the structures in place, if any that enforce the human rights?' IHREC (2015) highlight some of the main systems in place to promote human rights include the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Human Rights Council, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and European Convention on Human Rights. Human rights are generally represented through regional or international treaties and legislation where they form a legal statement. It is the responsibility of the Governments to fulfil, respect and protect human rights.  

However, this highlights to me the ability of countries to bend human rights to suit them. For instance, more than 150 out of the 193 UN countries engage in torture (Posner, 2014). The US partake in waterboarding and placing prisoners in stress positions but argue that these do not fall under the definition of torture (Waldman, 2014). 

This leads me to question are human rights effective? Women are still in subordinate positions in society, children are still engaging in child labour, people still live without food or shelter. However, Pinker (2018) argues that in general, human rights and equality have been increasing. For example, regarding children, there have been significant declines in sexual abuse, bullying, and corporal punishment. Corporal punishment has been outlawed in more than 50% of countries globally. In 2012, globally, 16.7% of children worked one hour a week or more, 10.6% worked in child labour, and 5.4% worked in hazardous environments. This percentage is still too high; however, it is now half the amount that is was fifteen years ago. This information should provide hope, that the continued effects of human rights efforts can progress to have further positive impacts. 

As a teacher my beliefs and biases, both positive and negative, are overtly and covertly conveyed to the children I teach. These include messages about the child’s identity, culture, languages, place in society etc. It is my responsibility to analyse what societal power relations and norms I am reproducing. This is especially important as teachers can have huge positive or negative effects on students. For instance, some teachers can have deficit perspectives of EAL student’s academic and linguistic abilities (Van Avermaet, 2018). This can result in teachers asking these pupils less questions, generally reducing student participation. This often develops a “futility mindset” in the child, where they believe everything they do is destined to fail, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophesy (Van Avermaet, 2018). 

Both at individual level (teachers for instance) and at governmental and societal level, our values need to be interrogated to identify whose perspectives are being ignored and excluded. This involves the process of “repositioning” where we must consider our world from the perspective of the dispossessed in order to restructure systemic barriers and processes that maintain oppression and inequality (Apple, 2017)

Wealth and income can be either privately or publicly owned. While national wealth has increased, more capital is becoming privatised, which means that governments are becoming poorer. This limits their ability to tackle inequality and fund public services. These trends can be seen in the graph from the World Inequality Database which show that public capital has been decreasing, while there has been huge increases in the privatisation of wealth (Alvaredo, Chancel, Piketty, Saez, & Zuchman, 2018). 

I believe that most teachers have their student’s best interests at heart. However, there is evidence that teachers often revert back to how they were taught as students as they experienced positive learning from these approaches (Oleson & Hora, 2013) or that they “apply what they learn if they are convinced it is a better way to teach students” (Cox, 2014). Schools have the ability to challenge the existing distribution of capital and power, though not enough is being done to do this (Reimer, 2015). I argue that further support needs to be given to teachers in employing more critical pedagogies through continuous professional development. However, this also requires supportive school environments and a restructuring of the education system where programmes and supports are created and provided for teachers. 

However, while the Irish education system theoretically mandates interculturalism (NCCA, 2005), there are still gaps between theory and practice that are supporting the exclusion of diversity (cultural, religious, linguistic) and migrants within the education system. This can be seen in the fact that while the Education Act (1998) promotes the right of parents to choose the type of school in which to send their children, 88.9% of schools in Ireland are under Catholic ethos, where the majority of non-denominational schools are located in Dublin (DES, 2020). In rural areas there is often no choice in the schools available as it is only feasible to provide one school to serve the community, as rural populations often have plateaued or are decreasing. Therefore the “provision of diversity through a choice of school under another patron is not an option” (Coolahan, Hussey, & Kilfeather, 2012, p. 73). This is an instance where theory and practice are not aligned to support the diversity within Ireland. 

Institutional racism is considered as the “application of rules or regulations which do not make allowances for cultural differences” (NCCA, 2005, p. 13). Consequently, Bajaj’s (2019) description of indirect violence which includes “structural and cultural forms of violence” such as “racism, sexism, colonialism” and “culturally-condoned exclusion” applies.

Under these definitions and examples, I argue that the Irish education system, while slowly changing, still requires further work to support diversity from migration e.g. in supporting religious differences, where more effort needs to be placed on enhancing positive social interactions and cultural appreciation.  

The most significant learning about Global Development Education that I have gained is the concept about power and how it shapes our actions, beliefs, values and whose voices are heard. Aspects such as our conceptions of globalisation and migration, how policy is made and whether poverty is being reduced are all influenced by those who have the power to make their knowledge and opinions ‘truth’. For instance, the World Bank has the power and the influence to create their definition of the International Poverty Line, indicating that poverty has hugely decreased. Those who have power can choose what is valued in policy and how resources are shared. Within the Global North, we have the power to view our own immigration as a positive, while constructing negative narratives of immigrants entering “our” country. 

These narratives can also suggest that those in the Global North are powerless, creating a paternalistic relationship where we again place ourselves on a high moral pedestal and pat ourselves on the back for “helping the less fortunate and poor.” This creates hugely uncritical actions, where we don’t question whether what we are doing is actually helping, how systemic structures maintain and reinforce unequal societal power relations and how our thoughts and actions include stereotypes and biases. This learning was hugely impactful as it highlighted the limited range of voices and perspectives that are being heard and used to create our knowledge and societies. 

The aspect of the module that has affected me most is the practice of the skill critical reflection. Before this module, many of the key concepts that were explored I had never deeply considered their multifaceted nature, interpreted them from different perspectives, or challenged the dominant narratives. I realised that most of my opinions were based on Global North perspectives that did nothing to challenge inequalities or injustices. As a teacher this is dangerous for several reasons. The way in which I was teaching was largely from a soft global development education, where I was not challenging children to question the different topics I was teaching them, explore the different causes and influences, or work to identify ways in which I and they could contribute to making meaningful changes in our and other’s lives. 

This module has given me the skills to critically reflect on my own biases and beliefs, and to see the ways in which I am reproducing harmful societal power relations. Throughout my teaching career, I will have been responsible for the education of many children and during that time and after, the skill of critical reflection will be essential. Not only can I evaluate information presented to me, and make connections to different concepts and perspectives, but it will influence how I interact with others, the decisions I make and I can work on sharing this skill with others as I learn more. I don’t believe that I will ever fully master the skill of critical reflection, there are always going to be personal biases and areas that are difficult to face, that is why this is a skill that I must work to continuously improve upon. My learning involving critical education will not end here, but will continue to act as the foundation on which I teach.