So much work!

Hey everyone!

It’s been a very busy several days. Work has definitely kicked in and has gotten significantly busier than it was last week.

So Derek and I will be contributing to team efforts, such as helping out with admin things (making phone calls, stuffing folders) and helping out the education team (testing online courses, which go live NEXT MONDAY!!!), but more importantly, we will be conducting our own research and working on our own project. We’re actually working on two separate projects.

One project, which I previously mentioned, will involve helping Dublin City College evaluate the Learn Together curriculum. Essentially, all schools are required to have a half-hour class dedicated to the religion of the patron body’s choice (e.g. Catholic schools will have a half-hour class a day that is dedicated to Catholic religious instruction). In Educate Together schools, they have the Learn Together curriculum instead, which is ethos, rather than religiously based. The Learn Together curriculum involves four strands:

·         Moral and Spiritual (self-development)

·         Equality and Justice (human rights)

·         Belief Systems (religion)

·         Ethics and Environment (environmental issues)

These four strands are integrated across various subjects and truly emphasize the importance of being a global citizen and respecting diversity. Thus far, Derek and I have been transcribing the interviews that have already been done. Afterward, we will look for overarching themes, and eventually, we will conduct our own interviews. Transcribing has been much more difficult and has been taking much longer than we expected (which is why I’ve been updating less; I’ve been trying to get some transcribing done outside of the office so that Derek and I can get to coding and finding themes as soon as possible). The Irish accent is difficult to understand, and it gets even more confusing when the interviewee doesn’t keep a steady train of thought when he/she is talking. And it’s the worst when they’re talking over each other. Just some things for y’all to keep in mind in case you’re recording and transcribing interviews in the future :)

Our second project is entirely our own product. We haven’t 100% decided on a solid topic yet, but we will most likely be looking at divestment. Divestment is the act of reassigning a school to a different patron body; in this case, it would be reassigning a Catholic school or other denominational school to be an Educate Together school. There aren’t very many of these schools that have been established already because the Catholic Church used to be very unwilling to transform their schools, but Derek and I received the opportunity to visit one reassigned school this past Wednesday.

Ranelagh Multidenominational School (RMDS) was established in 1988, making it one of the oldest Educate Together schools and the very first reassigned school. They actually have a whole book on the history of the school and its transformation. Derek and I received the book when we visited the school, and it’ll undoubtedly because a valuable resource for us. We chatted with the principal Padraic Mulholland briefly before he showed us around the school. Padraic was actually a parent at the time of the reassignment and later became the school’s third teacher, eventually working his way up to principal of the school. He explained that the reason why RMDS had such a successful transformation was because the parent body showed a lot of support and because the staff of the school (two teachers and one principal) were open to change. The principal at the time realized that, as a Church of Ireland school in a rapidly shrinking Church of Ireland population, they were not adequately serving the needs of the community. Anyway, it’s a super long but incredible story, so feel free to message me if you want to hear more about this amazing school. The school just had such a warm, welcoming feel and seemed to be a positive environment, perfect for fostering growth and development. I know I say this every time, but I truly feel that way about every Educate Together school I have visited thus far. And Padraic was just an incredibly nice man. Derek and I had light bulbs going off in our heads and ideas running around as soon as we stepped out of the school because he answered all of our questions very thoroughly and gave us a lot of unique insight (seeing as he was the only one left in the school that has been there since the very beginning). But I think what really amazed me was the fact that he knew most of the children by name and seemed to genuinely care about all of them; he stopped to talk to a little girl that felt sick and made sure to say goodbye to all the of the junior and senior infants by name. It was almost as if the disparity between the children and the principal wasn’t large at all.

Anyway, we’re both really excited to be doing research, but it’s also been draining. We’re always tired when we come back home, and for the past couple of nights, we always had events afterward as well.

On Tuesday, we went to watch one of our coworkers, Sarah, play in her band, Bitches with Wolves. She’s the backup singer/guitarist! They were really energetic and fun to watch, so make sure you check out their music!

Wednesday was probably our most exhausting day yet. Derek and I commuted for FIVE HOURS TOTAL. No, that’s not an exaggeration. One hour from the apartment to the office, 1.5 hours from the office to Ranelagh, 1.5 hours from Ranelagh back to the office, and 1 hour from the office back to the apartment. That’s worse than Ashrey’s daily three hour commute to and from school. Later that night, rather than going straight home and sleeping, Bill and Suzanne took us out to a three-hour play called The House in the Abbey Theater. The actors were incredibly talented, but we all agreed that we didn’t understand a lot of the jokes that were cracked because they were very “Irish.” The play was about emigration and harsh economic times in Ireland and offered us insight into why so many people formerly emigrated from Ireland, while the opposite is true now.

Anyway, as our project develops, I’ll definitely keep y’all updated! Hopefully I won’t be too tired to continue updating this blog during the weekdays.

Stay happy! Take care!

Smiles,

Anna (: