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Emma, I fully support your idea of growing a local garden. We have a small courtyard garden in my school with raised planters. We have successfully grown potatoes and carrots for a few years. However, fair warning: some of our students were really not keen to eat the veg that came out of these gardens as they were (direct quote) ‘covered in dirt’! It served to have many ongoing conversations about where our food comes from and sustainability. Great ideas.
The area local to the school (Finglas), like much of Dublin, has felt climate change through increased flooding. The students would remember the many times the Tolka River has burst its banks in recent years. They would also be able to recall the more intense storms affecting local housing already vulnerable to damp and disrepair. These climate issues many of our students would recognise directly, since most live in homes affected by flooding or poor insulation.
To engage students with additional needs, I’d avoid abstract global data and start locally: a short walk or photos of the Tolka flooding, or news clips of storm damage in Dublin 11. Sensory, visual tasks such as sorting images of “before/after” flood damage of the River Road, or a simple map activity marking flood-prone streets near the school would make the concept concrete rather than text-heavy.
Three actions I’d encourage and we could do as part of our ‘outdoor classroom’ learning:
1. Litter/drain-clearing walk near the school (e.g. what they refer to as ‘The Stretch’) to reduce local flood risk. This would have an immediate, physical, and visible impact.
2. Energy-saving pledge at home (lights off, shorter showers). Students could apply this as a small and achievable step. It would connect classroom learning to their own lives.
3. Planting trees on our school grounds. This would be a tangible, ongoing project that would build pride and long-term engagement.Peace, I like your ideas on eliciting and gathering student voice. Sometimes we as adults think we have inclusion sorted, but listening to students’ evaluations of their experiences of how welcoming or inclusive the school environment actually is, would offer great insights to the SSE process and school practice.
Long-lasting inclusion of people who come to Ireland for any reason must be the focus. Sometimes once-off Diversity Days can seem tokenistic, when real cultural change occurs when children and their families feel welcomed and included every day in our schools and communities. Building empathy and understanding, through lessons on Development Education as outlined in this module is a great way to start.Our school has strong links with our patron CrossCare and its local Youth Centre. They do great work to engage youths in the community through developmental activities, advocacy, and mental health programmes to name but a few. Staff from ‘The Den’ in Finglas, Dublin come to collect our students on Wednesdays (a half day) and take them to activities both in and outside of the centre. From researching their website, I see that The Den also supports young people living in Direct Provision. I think our students would be well equipped and interested in supporting refugees their age in the community by encouraging them to come to the youth centre. While in school they could design posters to put up in the local shops and GAA clubs. As a school, we could facilitate the students to create a short video to welcome adolescent refugees to the local area. They could then encourage them to come to The Den to make friends and build connections with the local community. This could be posted on both the school’s social media and The Den’s.
Ellen, I think focusing on SDG13: Climate Action is a very relatable topic to focus on given on our most recent wet winter and very hot and dry summer. Children could discuss the impact these changes have had on them locally; and consider the hosepipe ban that was in place for many due to water shortages this summer. At a local level perhaps students could hold a poster drive around the school and community to promote water conservation (e.g. brushing teeth with taps turned off, showering instead of baths, avoiding filling paddling pools etc ).
Working in an alternative education setting for young people in Dublin who are themselves navigating disadvantage, I’d choose SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) as entry points, since these are lived realities for many of our students rather than abstract concepts.
Rather than starting globally, I’d start with what students already know: food insecurity, unstable housing, or unsafe neighbourhoods in their own community. Leading with compassion, we could explore local case studies (food banks, homeless services in Dublin) to validate their experience rather than positioning them as passive recipients of a “development” narrative aimed at distant countries.
From there, we could bridge outward: comparing local food poverty with global hunger causes (conflict, climate shocks, unequal trade), using storytelling and personal testimony rather than statistics-heavy lessons, which can feel abstract or shaming, or difficult to grasp for those with AEN.
For Priority Action Area 5, an action could include a small, achievable local project and link cross curricular with English. Through drafting a formal letter to local representatives, students could voice their concerns of food poverty, giving students genuine agency rather than what they may consider to be distant, unreachable global goals.
This approach could build empathy both ways: recognising their own resilience and connecting it to others facing similar struggles elsewhere. Rather than asking them to empathise abstractly, I’d frame it around recognition first. Students would be taught their own experience is valid and shared by others locally and globally. They would be encouraged to use their own words or drawings rather than mine. This may serve to lower the emotional and literacy barrier.
Mairead, the ‘few strong boys’ comment you mention other staff using affected something deep inside me there! I actively encourage the girls and boys I teach to carry out the same tasks around the school and am quick to react to some staff when these gender stereotypes are attempted to be reinforced. I remind the girls (and the staff!) they are ‘strong, independent women’ and can do physically challenging tasks. I try to model gender equality myself, taking on tasks some of the male staff would generally gravitate towards. One of the best things we have started in the school is hire a local boxing coach. He is great for putting all the (similarly sized) boys and girls together to do their training and even spar with each other. This, and regular discussions of the success of Irish female boxers, challenges the stereotypes around boys are sporty and girls are brainy.
The students in my class are aged 14-16, and we have discussed gender stereotypes before when engaging with StandUp Awareness Week (against LGBTQ+ Bullying). When asked to discuss gender stereotypes they all had strong convictions on what they perceived to be equality between the sexes in Ireland. Due to their maturity, they all believed (with a typical teenage smugness) that girls could do anything boys could do and didn’t buy into the idea of gender stereotypes when it came to children in Irish society. Interestingly these stereotypes did not change when we discussed becoming parents one day: Dads should have equal involvement in child-rearing as the Mams. The male students really surprised me, and I was proud of this generation for their openness to equality when it came to raising the next generation. However, I think they would all be shocked to learn of the level of gender inequality outside of Ireland: access to education, training, employment, and social status.
I would involve Maths topics on statistics and graphs to explore global gender inequality. To assess prior knowledge, I would use DevelopmentEducation.ie 10 Myths About Womens Rights Quiz. From here, students could do independent or paired research to find current statistics on different regions, classes and sectors where gender inequality exists. They could create graphical displays using the statistics they gather, and offer written or verbal feedback using the head, heart, hands approach: what have you learned, how does it make you feel, what are you going to do about it?
A shared drive with resources is a great idea Fiona. As teachers we all have different styles and methods, and allowing teachers to go through the resources themselves and choose what is most age and stage appropriate for their class is an inclusive way of bringing development education and global citizenship in our classrooms. For example, I really liked the DevelopmentEducation.ie resources, as they break it down into Educator Roles or Resource type based on topic, format, SDG, country/region of focus and by intended audience. I would include a list of these resources in a Word document on our shared drive in the school to signpost teachers to the wealth of resources available. This would hopefully give my colleagues confidence in teaching these topics without feeling like they need to re-invent the wheel or come up with their own activities and lesson plans.
Development education is important to share the interconnectedness of humanity and the environment, and encourage young people to become cognisant of ‘the global village that we all have a stake in’ (Ehigie, 2021). Teaching global citizenship then encourages ways of how we can better our world, both locally and globally through our social and civic responsibilities.
Ehigie (2021) touches on the correlation between underprivileged communities and anti-immigrant, racialised rhetoric. In my school setting I see the difficulties social and economic disadvantage places on our students and their families. One of the reasons I wanted to do this course was to learn how to get students in our school interested in the wider world. To date this has proven difficult as they struggle to be concerned of others outside of their communities when they themselves are trying to survive within their own difficulties of poverty, social justice, and agency.
Taking learnings from this first module, I think I need to approach teaching development education from the Irish Aid’s focus ‘reach the furthest behind first’. Our students (aged 10-16 in a school for students with SEMH difficulties) have a strong sense of fairness. I think appealing to this sense could be a strong pathway in to generating empathy and action. I would offer my students statistics, show them videos, and facilitate group discussions about how underdeveloped (unsure if this is the correct language?) some parts of the world are in terms of education, clean water and sanitation. I would encourage the students to compare themselves to people of a similar age in the Global South in line with some of the SDGs. For most, this sense of fairness could transform into a call for justice and may encourage them to take action.