Education and the Radio

Author(s):  
Rosie Lavan

Seamus Heaney was, by first profession, a teacher, and education is an abiding preoccupation in his writing. Rooted in the radio work he undertook in the mid-1970s for the BBC Northern Ireland Schools Service, notably Explorations, a series on which he collaborated with his friend David Hammond, Chapter 3 considers the breadth of his thinking on teaching and learning. As a member of one of the first eleven-plus generations in Northern Ireland, his views on education are conditioned by the political reforms of the era, as they were felt by the nationalist community. They are profitably read through Richard Hoggart’s seminal analysis The Uses of Literacy (1957), and his later collaboration with Ted Hughes on The Rattle Bag (1982).

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan José Cogolludo Díaz

Based on Philoctetes, the tragic play by Sophocles, the poet Seamus Heaney creates his own version in The Cure at Troy to present the political and social problems in Northern Ireland during the period that became known euphemistically as ‘the Troubles’. This paper aims to highlight the significance of Heaney’s play in the final years of the conflict. Heaney uses the classical Greek play to bring to light the plight and suffering of the Northern Irish people as a consequence of the atavistic and sectarian violence between the unionist and nationalist communities. Nevertheless, Heaney also provides possible answers that allow readers to harbour a certain degree of hope towards peace and the future in Northern Ireland.


Author(s):  
Philip O’Sullivan ◽  
Gabi Kent

This chapter uses the voices from an Open University oral history project, Time to Think, to tell the extraordinary story of developing teaching and learning in a prison camp outside Belfast. As the political conflict in Northern Ireland gathered pace in the early 1970s, the newly established Open University was drawn into the collateral consequences in ways that were to prove both unpredictably fruitful and historically providential.


Our world of increasing and varied conflicts is confusing and threatening to citizens of all countries, as they try to understand its causes and consequences. However, how and why war occurs, and peace is sustained, cannot be understood without realizing that those who make war and peace must negotiate a complex world political map of sovereign spaces, borders, networks of communication, access to nested geographic scales, and patterns of resource distribution. This book takes advantage of a diversity of geographic perspectives as it analyzes the political processes of war and their spatial expression. Contributors to the volume examine particular manifestations of war in light of nationalism, religion, gender identities, state ideology, border formation, genocide, spatial rhetoric, terrorism, and a variety of resource conflicts. The final section on the geography of peace covers peace movements, diplomacy, the expansion of NATO, and the geography of post-war reconstruction. Case studies of numerous conflicts include Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzogovina, West Africa, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.


2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (824) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
Alexander Clarkson

European integration based on a supranational form of pooled sovereignty has taken on increasingly state-like qualities. With every move toward absorbing additional members, the European Union system has expanded its geographic reach. The state-like power of the EU is apparent in the impact its integration processes have had in societies just outside its borders. Its growing influence is most notable in misfit border territories, from Kaliningrad to Transnistria, and from Cyprus to Northern Ireland, that are tenuously under the political control of neighboring geopolitical powers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 288-298
Author(s):  
Katherine Davies ◽  

Heidegger’s three Country Path Conversations have generated much scholarly interest for their elaboration on Heidegger’s thinking of Gelassenheit, scientific and technological thinking, the work of art, evil, and the political aftermath of World War II. In this paper, I argue that these texts also, upon closer analysis, contain a Heideggerian pedagogical philosophy. In each text, I will show, a dynamic of teaching and learning is at play, most especially when it seems to be absent. Further, I will show how only when these three texts are read together does a fuller account of Heidegger’s pedagogy emerge. In the “Triadic Conversation,” I draw out the affective dimensions according to which the Guide’s teaches the Scientist to contest his own worldview. In the “Tower Conversation,” I show how the Teacher must practice what he himself teaches, choosing to tarry with that which causes him discomfort and anxiety. Finally, I read the “Evening Conversation” as an example of students assuming the teaching role themselves when the teacher is nowhere to be found, fulfilling the hopes any teacher would have for her students.


Author(s):  
Andrew Sanders

After Clinton’s second term in office ended, President George W Bush moved the Special Envoy to Northern Ireland to the State Department, but his Envoys, led by Richard Haass and Mitchell Reiss, were no less engaged in Northern Irish affairs as the political figures there sought to create a functional government at Stormont Parliament Buildings. A series of significant obstacles emerged, but the Northern Ireland Assembly finally formed in 2007 before Bush left office. He was succeeded by President Barack Obama who had little interest in Northern Ireland but Obama’s initial Secretary of State, former Senator Hillary Clinton, was well-versed in Northern Irish issues. This chapter also examines the role of Northern Ireland in the 2008 Democratic Primary contest and, to a lesser extent, the 2008 Presidential Election.


Author(s):  
Fernando Bandeira ◽  
João Casqueira Cardoso

This chapter is an attempt to systematize the available knowledge in quality assurance and assessment in higher education distance learning, taking into consideration that information is consubstantiated mostly in grey literature produced in the past decade. It begins by framing the historical and the political approach to quality and accountability and then opts for an approach the outline the analyses, using the concept of distance learning as a system. This approach, which is a classical theoretical framework, considers the following sub-systems: management and administration; instructional design; teaching, provisions on teaching and learning; the teacher and the tutor; and students. As for the procedural aspects, it looks at the official information issued by specialized agencies that develop standards, benchmarks, audit and accreditations schemes, and to the information of the institutions themselves, in order to identify the most important topics and practices concerning quality assessment development and assurance.


1960 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-68
Author(s):  
W. A. Honohan

1. In the year 1800, when the Parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland were fused by the Act of Union establishing the United Kingdom, the population of Ireland was of the order of 5 millions. By 1821 the figure had risen to 6·8 millions and in 1841 it was 8·2 millions. During the following decade the population fell by 1-6 millions to 6·6 millions. By the year 1861 it was only 5·8 millions and thereafter it continued to decline steadily, though not with such rapidity, until in 1911 a figure of 4·4 millions was reached. Owing to the disturbed state of the country in 1921, the next census was not taken until 1926, after the political change in 1922 when twenty-six of the thirty-two counties into which the country was divided were established as a separate political entity, the Irish Free State (later to become a Republic), while the remaining six were constituted as Northern Ireland and continued to form part of the United Kingdom. The population of the whole island in 1926 and again in 1951 was 4·3 millions, that is to say, it differed only slightly in 1951 from what it was forty years earlier in 1911—see Table 1. The population of Ireland has, therefore, remained virtually stationary at about 4¼ millions for almost half a century. The trend of Irish population since 1841 is in striking contrast with the trend in England and Wales for, whereas in 1841 the population of Ireland was more than one-half of that in England and Wales, today it is less than one-tenth; the Irish population has almost halved while that of England and Wales has almost trebled.


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