EUROPEAN CULTURAL FOUNDATION

MOSAIC OR MELTING POT?
- LIVING WITH DIVERSITY

PROCEEDINGS OF A CONFERENCE ON CULTURAL DIVERSITY, DUBLIN 2003

Irish National Committee

ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY Acadamh Rfoga na hEireann

First published 2003 by
Irish National Committee
The European Cultural Foundation 32 Nassau Street
Dublin 2
Royal Irish Academy/Acadamh Rioga na f&ireann 19 Dawson Street
Dublin 2
www. ria.ie
Irish National Committee, The European Cultural Foundation, 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover by Creative Inputs, Dublin
Origination by Carole Lynch, Dublin Printed by ColourBooks Limited, Dublin

Contents
FOREWORD	7
Mary McAleese, President of Ireland
INTRODUCTION	9
Mary Daly
1.	CITIZENSHIP AND DIVERSITY	14
Attracta Ingram
2.	CULTURAL DYNAMICS: TRANSITION AND	31
IDENTITY IN MODERN IRELAND
Malcolm MacLachlan
3.	THE IMPLICATIONS OF CHANGING	54
DEMOGRAPHICS FOR THE HEALTH SERVICES
Peter McKenna
4.	ROOTS AND WINGS: TEACHER EDUCATION	63
FOR DIVERSITY IN A CHANGING IRELAND
James G. Deegan
5.	WORK AND ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE:	73
A BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE
Brendan Butler
6.	CULTURAL ADJUSTMENT TO IRISH SOCIETY	82
Shalini Sinha
7.	THE ORIGINS OF IRISH MONOCULTURALISM AND	94
THE LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY EMERGENCE
OF MULTICULTURALISM
Garret FitzGerald
8.	ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION	101
Chairman: Peter CasselIs

INDEX	113

FOUR
Roots and Wings: Teacher Education for Diversity in a Changing Ireland
JAMES G. DEEGAN
Dr James G. Deegan, FRSA, is Head of Education at the Department of Education, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, where he pro-vides (Academic Lind udininisirative leadership for one of the biggest teacher education programmes in the EU. He wets Associate Professor of Education in the College of Education at the University of Georgia, Athens, USA, from 1990 to 1997 and a Sarah H. Moss Research Fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge in 1991. Among his publications are: Children's Friendships in Culturally Diverse Classrooms (Falmer Press 1996) and with Anne Lodge and Dympna Devine, Equality Diversity and Childhood (Institute of Public Administration, forthcoming). His teaching and research interests include children's peer cultures, diversity in young children's lives, and teacher education. He will serve as Mary Immaculate College Research Fellow for the academic year 2003-04, when he will direct a research study of how, and in what ways, diversity plays a part in young children's lives.
Aspect
T- HE LINKAGES BETWEEN DIVERSITY AND EDUCATION ARE DIFFUSRT and generative in contemporary societies. The choices that we make now and how, and in what ways we meet the future, will be our legacy for rising generations of young children
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MOSAIC OR MELTING POT? -- LIVING	Di v

living in Ireland. And while there has been a recent outgrowth of statutory and policy discourses on diversity and education, paradoxically we know little about the tacit and taken-for-granted everyday realities of race, ethnicity, gender, class, beliefs, ability, and community, among other sociocultural phenomena, in children's lives across classrooms, schools, families and communities.
If we take the following four indices used internationally to establish the status of education and diversity — participation levels, programmatic provision, pedagogical processes, and human and material resources — we can readily see that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the educational landscape on this matter. Notable emergent research on diversity and education includes, for example, Haran and Tormey's (2002) Celebrating Difference, Promoting Equality. These authors present groundbreaking research on how a group of college lecturers and classroom teachers worked collaboratively to make sense of diversity and embed these meanings in their 'own' workplaces.
Mindful of the old saying that the only bequests that we can leave our children are 'roots and wings' (cited in York, 1991, p. 9), we need to wholeheartedly seize the hidden potential of diversity and education at first, second, third, and further levels. Specifically, we need to systematically take stock of existing participation, provision, processes and resource levels, and consider new ways of responding to diversity in culturally relevant and meaningful ways.
In this paper, I will focus on a particular 'place' on the educational landscape as a way of establishing the frontiers and potentials of diversity and education — primary teacher education. There are currently more than 3,000 student teachers progressing through five primary teacher education programmes in this country. In the first year of their professional lives alone, these
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ROOTS AND WINGS: TEACHER EDUCATION FOR DIVERSITY IN A CHANGING IRELAND
prospective teachers could potentially touch the hearts and minds of close on 20,000 children throughout the country
Into the future it is impossible to say where the separate and collective influences of teachers will end for children of particular races, ethnicities, genders, classes, faiths, abilities, and communities, and a host of other sociocultural phenomena. The imperative for teacher education is clear and present. Quite simply, we need to prepare tomorrow's teachers to meet the challenges of an increasingly culturally diverse society and help raise diversity arid education to the top of the educational agenda. Meaningful and useful teacher education will not be possible without a commitment to a sustained and significant exchequer budgetary allocation over the coming years. Those countries that lrive (.1,Pflent,-1 and deferred from significant investment in diversity and education in the past have later paid dearly in terms of negative social, cultural and academic outcomes.
There is a maxim attributed to the Muslim leader and social activist, Malcolm X, that 'You cannot teach what you don't know and you can't lead where you won't go'. Herein lies the kernel of the challenge facing all those engaged in diversity and education — making connections between the twin and irreducible themes of knowledge and leadership in any deliberative and democratic context. The fundamental question becomes: 'no* and in what ways, can we develop new knowledge and kindle visionary leadership in teachers?
The ideas presented in this paper owe much to the following clutch of writers on education and diversity: Cochran-Smith (1995), Ladson-Billings (1991) and Larkin and Sleeter (1995). The remainder of the paper provides an annotated oculinc of the following sailer) t themes in quality teacher education programmes for diversity: 1) programme ideology and orientation,

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MOSAIC OR MELTING POT? - LIVING WITH DIVERS'
2) dispositions towards diversity learning and teaching, and 3) cultural knowledge.
Programme ideology and orientation
The first theme in the relevant literature is rooted in the conviction that diversity and teacher education is an interrelated and irreducible educational agenda.
Diversity should be
•	woven throughout all the components of teacher education programmes, rather than treated only in an isolated course or as bits and pieces of courses strewn across a particular programme — what has been described as the 'inoculation approach' where a student receives a sharp jab of diversity early in his or her programme of study which is intended to last for the remainder of the programme
•	understood as an alternative way of conducting teacher education — rooted in paradigmatic convictions, for example a constructivist approach to the theories, principles and practices of teaching and learning — rather than as a `tack-on' or additive extra to an already overloaded and 'choking' teacher education programme.
Teacher educators should
•	operationally define their programmatic ideology and orientation to diversity in teacher education — the themes and strands of the work for which they will attempt to prepare their students and the world in which their students will find themselves
•	avoid the invidious trap of soft and safe themes and strands, for example; variants of the 4Fs curriculum (food, festivals,
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The second theme in the relevant literature is rooted in the conviction that learning is a prerequisite for teaching and that there can be no teaching without prior learning.
Most teacher education theorists agree that
•	at a minimum, teacher education students and college/university
faculty need to understand and personally value the goals and philosophies of cultural pluralism as a basic tenet of diversity learning and teaching
•	teacher education students and college/university faculty need to understand and reject the manifestations and consequences of prejudice, racism, sexism, classism, and all other sociocultural- debilitating forces (Gollinick, 1992)
•	teacher education students and college/university faculty need to develop a willingness to engage in dialogical encounters with each other about their own feelings, values, and attitudes to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other difficult dimensions of diversity teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1991).
Cultural knowledge

The third theme in the relevant literature is rooted in the conviction that 'good teaching requires knowledge of both subject-matter and

ROOTS AND WINGS: TEACHER EDUCATION FOR DIVERSITY IN A CHANGING IRELAND

families, and friends), that invariably induce benign support but fall acutely short on programmatic ideologies and orientation
•	simultaneously create programmes that realistically relate, on the one hand, to the backgrounds of all teacher education students in a programme, and to the nature of the schools and communities into which they will be going, on the other.

Dispositions toward diversity learning and teaching

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ROOTS AND WINGS: TEACHER EDUCATION FOR DIVERSITY IN A CHANGING IRELAND
practice placements; designing teaching practice experiences; and appointing faculty (Larkin and Sleeter, 1995).
•	Developing a meaningful and relevant disposition to diversity and teacher education programmes needs to be rooted in the concept of teacher education students, college/university faculty, and classroom teachers 'struggling together' to make sense of diversity and mutually planning appropriate actions (Cochran-Smith and Little, 1992).
•	Teacher education programmes need to provide students with early, frequent, and carefully supervised direct experiences with members of other cultures in an attempt to prepare teachers who will be critical and inquiring agents for diversity teaching and lea--"-g in all ccbc,,olc throughout the country (Doherty et al, 2002).
Concluding remarks
And this brings me to the net point that I would like to make in this paper — education for diversity is a choice. A central question underpinning the choice facing all of us is how, and in what ways, we confront ingrained approaches for doing things — what we might describe as the comfortable and safe practices of 'businessas-usual' that typically lie deep in institutional structures. There is always the latent threat of the overweening influence of 'the silent negative' in traditionally conservative and hidebound institutional contexts. In this regard, investing time, space, and resources in helping university/college lecturers, classroom teachers, and student teachers to make choices for diversity is not only a different kind of educational investment but a prerequisite for helping to secure culturally relevant teaching and learning in an ever-changing society.

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References
Cochran-Smith, M. (1995), 'Color Blindness and Basket Making
ar..= not the Answers: Confronting the Dilemmas of Race,
Culture, and Language Diversity in Teacher Education',
American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 32, pp. 493-522.
Cochran-Smith, M. and Little, S. (1992) (Eds.), 'Communities for
Teacher Research: Fringe or Forefront?', American Journal of
Education, Vol. 100, pp. 298-324.
Deegan, J. and Allexsaht-Snider, M. (1999), 'Becoming Culturally Responsive: Self-Critical Inquiry in Preservice Teacher Education', Irish Educational Studies, Vol. 18, pp. 155-164.
Doherty, D. et al (2002), Celebrating Difference, Promoting Equality: Intercultural Education in the Irish Primary Classroom, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick: Centre for Educational Disadvantage Research and Curriculum Development Unit.
Epstein, D., O'Flynn, S. and Telford, D. (2001), "Othering" Education: Sexuality Silences and Schooling', Review of Research in Education, Vol. 25, pp. 127-180.
Gollinick, D. (1992), 'Understanding the Dynamics ot Race, Class, and Gender', in Dilworth, M (Ed.), Diversity in Teacher Education, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Haran, N. and Tormey, R. (2002), Celebrating Difference, Promoting Equality: Towards a Framework for Intercultural Education in Irish Classrooms, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick: Centre for Educational Disadvantage Research and Curriculum Development Unit,
Ladson-Billings, G. (1991), 'Coping with Multicultural Illiteracy: A Teacher Education Response', Social Education, Vol. 55, pp. 186-194.
Larkin, J. and Sleeter, C. (Eds.) (1995), Developing Multicultural
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ROOTS AND WINGS: TEACHER EDUCATION FOR DIVERSITY IN A CHANGING IRELAND

Teacher Education Curricu/a, New York: SUNY.
York, S. (1991), Roots and Wings: Affirming Culture in Early
Childhood Programmes, Mt. Rainier, Maryland: Redleaf Press.

Questions to James Deegan
What is known of the experience of student teachers and youngish teachers who are now facing the situation in schools where perhaps 20 % of the students are immigrants, including refugees, and what are the skills that they most need to learn at this time?

JAMES DEEGAN: It has been estimated that there are something in the order of three hundred to five hundred schools nationally that would have a significant proportion of recently arrived immigrants in their classrooms. Our students report that, while they have some of the skills and some of the experiences that I alluded to in the presentation, the infrastructure in the schools in terms of support is not present. They do report, however, on a positive note, that some senior teachers are now engaged in the work as special teachers of foreign nationals for example, or are dealing with issues of cultural and linguistic identity, and that the students are learning from them. So there is a very positive and optimistic, if I can say that, infrastructure in the schools, because ultimately teachers are eminently practical people and in terms of the practicalities of the situation they are doing well, but in terms of material resources and time-out to further their study in all of this there is very little of that.

ADEKUNLE GOMEZ, AFRICAN CULTURAL PROJECT: We have heard for quite a
good while that Ireland has been a country of emigration, and the one

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MOSAIC OR MELTING POT? - LIVING WITH DIVERSITY
country that is nearest to us here is England. My question is; have you had instances where your students have found themselves in England and happened to be teaching in schools, like for example Tower Hamlets, with a large immigrant population. If so, do you hear back from these students, and what sort of feedback do they bring to you?
JAMES DEEGAN: I am somewhat reluctant to get into some of the details here, but we provide our students with 'an Alternative Educational Experience' as part of the field experience cycle. Fifty of our students go to three or four African countries, and pursue their field experiences in these countries. We also have a number of students who are in a project called 'Developing Links with the Third World', which is an interesting dimension that has not been mentioned heretofore today. In this way we can go to the Third World and continue to learn from it. We also have a number of students who are working, as part of their experience, in the prison service, in the library boards in Northern Ireland, in the print and broadcast media, so our training is not restricted to the classroom experience alone. I would have to say to you quite honestly that, other than their reports to us during their college years, they have not yet given us a long-term perspective. They are saying that we are equipping them with the skills to deal with the situation, but that every day presents its own different challenge.

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