Audrey Bryan

Corporate multiculturalism, diversity management, and positive interculturalism in Irish schools and society

This article offers an empirical critique of recent social and educational policy responses to cultural diversity in an Irish context, with a particular focus on anti-racism, integration and intercultural education policies developed during the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ era. Combining ethnographic and discourse analytic techniques, I highlight the centrality of the Celtic Tiger economy and corporate interests in influencing the particular version of interculturalism promulgated by the Irish state. I argue that broader macro processes and discourses operating at the level of Irish state policy can impact the local school level, resulting in negative consequences for ethnic minority students, particularly those who are least endowed with the cultural and linguistic capital valued by the school and wider society.

Climate Change Education in the Context of Education for Sustainable Development: Rationale and Principles

Although the role of education in addressing the challenges of climate change is increasingly recognized, the education sector remains underutilized as a strategic resource to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Education stakeholders in many countries have yet to develop a coherent framework for climate change education (CCE). This article underscores the critical role that education can and should play in addressing and responding to climate change in all of its complexity. It provides rationales as to why CCE should be addressed in the context of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Advancing CCE in the context of ESD, or Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development (CCESD), requires enhancement of learners’ understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change and their readiness to take actions to address it. The article presents key organizing principles of CCESD and outlines key knowledge, skills, attitudes, dispositions and competences to be fostered through it.

They Think the Book is Right and I am Wrong

The trend of immigration that accompanied the Celtic Tiger economy resulted in a newfound emphasis on issues related to cultural diversity, interculturalism and ‘integration’ in an Irish context, as well as rising levels of public concern about, and negative sentiment towards, migrants in Ireland (Devereux & Breen, 2004; Garner, 2004; Hughes, McGinnity, O’ Connell & Quinn, 2007). Against a backdrop of increased immigration and growing evidence of hostility towards minorities, the education system, and intercultural education in particular, has come to be viewed as ‘one of the key responses to the changing shape of Irish society and to the existence of racism and discriminatory attitudes in Ireland’ (NCCA, 2005, p. 17). Intercultural educational guidelines produced by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) - a statutory body with responsibility for advising the Minister for Education and Skills on curriculum and assessment issues—define intercultural education as a ‘synthesis of the learning from multicultural and anti-racist education approaches…used internationally in the 1960s to the 1990s’ (NCCA, 2005, p. 6).

Supporting LGBT Lives? Complicating the suicide consensus in LGBT mental health research

This article locates itself within an emergent, counter-discursive body of scholarship that is critical of universalizing depictions portraying queer-identified or LGBT youth as vulnerable and ‘at-risk’ of a range of negative mental health outcomes, including self-harm and suicidality. Drawing on key findings from a large-scale, mixed-methods study exploring the mental health and well-being of LGBT people, we seek to contribute to the development of a more expansive understanding of LGBT lives by demonstrating the diverse ways people engage with their sexuality and gender identity and illuminating the complex meanings that those LGBT people who have experienced psychological and suicidal distress ascribe to their feelings, thoughts and actions.

Queer youth and mental health: What do educators need to know?

This paper considers the educational implications of the recent emphasis on the mental health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer (LGBTQ) people in Ireland. Operating from the perspective that discourses constitute rather than merely reflect material reality, thereby shaping or ‘structuring’ how we think about, and act, in relation to queer experience, the paper critically engages with discourses which position LGBTQ youth as universally at risk of mental health difficulties, including self-harm and suicidality. It also challenges the corresponding preoccupation with homophobic bullying as the primary lens through which queer experience is understood and addressed in schools, arguing that more space needs to be devoted to other, less harrowing narratives of LGBTQ experience and identity. It highlights some of the more problematic effects of LGBTQ mental health research which frame LGBTQ experience primarily in terms of vulnerability and victimhood and makes the case for a more expansive engagement with LGBTQ identities. The article illuminates the potential that after-queer scholarship holds for a re-imagining of queer youth, sexuality and gender within educational and social research, curriculum materials and educational institutions more generally and concludes with a consideration of specific knowledge and skills that educators should be equipped with in order to disrupt normative understandings of gender and sexuality.

The sociology classroom as a pedagogical site of discomfort: Difficult knowledge and the emotional dynamics of teaching and learning

While recent years have witnessed a growing recognition of the importance of attending to the complex affective dimensions of teaching and learning, emotion remains under-researched and under-theorised as an aspect of education. This paper explores what it means to engage with emotionality in the classroom, particularly in terms of how difficult (sociological) knowledge is experienced, felt and understood by learners, i.e. how they are affected by knowledge that is historically or socially traumatic and hence difficult to bear. Drawing on qualitative data gathered as part of an action research project undertaken during a postgraduate course on globalisation, it offers insights into how course participants felt, experienced and engaged with difficult knowledge about their participation in harmful global economic institutions and practices. The paper concludes by considering some of the theoretical considerations and pedagogical conditions that are necessary if we are to engage learners with difficult (sociological) knowledge which asks them to contemplate how they are implicated in their learning.

Education, conflict and development

Education, conflict and development brings together a number of important contributions focused on a range of different geographical contexts and circumstances to inform the debate about the complex interrelationships between education, international development and conflict. Collectively, the volume offers valuable insights into different dimensions of the education development conflict nexus, drawing upon contexts as varied as Nepal, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, China, Japan, South Korea and Uganda. Paulson’s introductory chapter serves as a useful contextual backdrop to the book as a whole, synthesising broader debates about the role that education might play in ‘affect[ing] and transform[ing] conflict and postconflict situations’ (p. 8), as well as how education itself can be implicated in the dynamic and perpetuation of conflict. While most of the chapters address conflict (and the role of education in fuelling and/or alleviating it) as defined and understood by large international development agencies who seek to support education in ‘emergency’ or ‘post-conflict’ situations, others seek to illuminate the multidirectionality, multi-facetedness and/or what Brock, in his chapter, refers to as the ‘fundamental nature’ of the relationship between education and conflict. Similarly, while some chapters are concerned with more conventional questions about the potential of education to transform societies experiencing or emerging from conflict, others challenge comfortable assumptions and widely held optimistic beliefs about the capacity of education to promote peace and foster development. Importantly, some of the chapters illuminate the conditions and contexts within which education itself can serve as a catalyst for conflict, offering important counter-currents to mainstream discourses which posit education as a panacea to a whole host of development problems (Bryan and Vavrus 2005; Vavrus 2003). Indeed, the chapters that make the biggest contribution to the volume and to the broader literature about the education conflict development nexus are those which seek to unravel and complicate the presumed relationship between education and development, and the accompanying discourse about education and its ability to facilitate post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. Rappleye’s chapter in particular is likely to ruffle a few development feathers, as it addresses the hithertofore largely neglected role of the ‘development’ project itself in the education conflict development causality chain. The book is divided into three discrete thematic sections. As a collective, the chapters contained within the first section, labelled ‘concepts, relationships and assumptions’, enable the reader to gain the required ‘critical distance’ to interrogate relationships and concepts that are often taken at face value (Rappleye 2011, p. 90). Brock’s chapter addresses the multifariousness of conflict, including forms of conflict not often addressed within more conventional paradigms, such as socio-economic conflict and environmental conflict. Expanding our gaze beyond an exclusive consideration of Irish Educational Studies Vol. 31, No. 4, December 2012, 487 491