John Lalor

Revisiting subject knowledge in citizenship education: Understanding power and agency

Citizenship educators have not yet developed a satisfactory framework for describing the conceptual knowledge at the heart of their subject and the complex ways in which students develop understanding. By focusing on how young people (10–18 years of age) use the core citizenship concepts of power and agency, this research provides an insight into how students learn. Our analysis of young people’s work reveals that many of them are operating with a pre-political or politically naïve understanding of the world which limits their ability to understand power and agency. Some students have gone on to develop a greater sense of their own agency within complex chains of influence, which demonstrates a more nuanced understanding of power and agency, rooted in a more political reading of world. We conclude that our findings may help citizenship teachers to plan more consciously to tackle this area of conceptual understanding.

New languages of possibility: early experiments in education as dissent

This paper reviews the work of four early radical educators: the cultural nationalist Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Asia’s first Nobel Laureate; Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Cambridge mathematician and philosopher; the Irish educationalist and insurgent Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) and Leonard Elmhirst (1893–1975), co-founder of Dartington Hall school in England. Each represents a type of radicalism that is particular to his own era but resonates in twentieth-century educational provision and policy. Each articulated his political vision through the establishment of a school and all contributed to modern pedagogical practice. The paper argues that ideological and methodological similarities not only compel us to consider them as radical founders, whose ideas are in many ways identical, but to identify them as pivotal theorists in early conceptualisations of education as dissent and disengagement, as a means of decoupling thought and habit from the mainstream of educational practice, colonial imposition or curricular conservatism. In particular, the paper concentrates upon the work of the Irish educationalist and political radical Patrick Pearse and, employing his educational writings and practice as a template for dissension, demonstrates that it was both typical of and reflected the wider tone of early formulations of education as dissent.

Curriculum Developments in Diverse Educational Contexts: An Irish Perspective

Throughout history Ireland and its people have undergone changes as a result of invasion, famine, emigration and also a movement away from our rural roots to a more urbanised way of living. The Famine of 1847 led to one of the biggest changes in Irish society and the fallout from the Famine can still be seen in the depopulation of sections of the Irish countryside but more clearly in the Irish Diaspora, which former Irish President Mary Robinson, in her address to the Joint Houses of the Oireachtas in 1994, estimated at 70 million people. This figure may be disputed (MacEnrai: Irish Times: May 23rd 2006) but it is generally used to represent those who self-identify as Irish. The figures demonstrate that a large number of people with very tenuous links to Ireland are proud to claim an Irish identity, despite generations of absence from Ireland.