Overview of the Day

A roundtable discussion about the Yellow Flag Programme was held by the Irish Traveller Movement  in the Teachers Club in Dublin on the 2nd December as part of Traveller Focus Week. The event saw almost seventy students, parents, teachers, community and voluntary organisations as well as other relevant stakeholders come together to feed into the ITM?s Yellow Flag Intercultural pilot. The Yellow Flag Programme is an intercultural project that is being piloted in four schools (two primary and two secondary) from Dublin, Limerick and Kerry. ITM have been piloting the education model since the beginning of the school year that will see schools awarded a Yellow Flag in recognition of their commitment to interculturalism. The main aim of the pilot programme is to develop a practical series of steps which brings issues of equality and diversity into the whole school programme so that they become an everyday part of school life.



Personal perspectives

To set the context of the roundtable discussion, parents and students gave an insight into their own experience. Bridget Connors, a young Traveller from Ballyfermot and Annemarie McDonagh, a Traveller parent involved in the Galway Traveller Movement helped to contextualise the event by giving their own personal perspective on why they felt it was important for them as Travellers for interculturalism to be promoted within schools. Bridget (age 15) outlined that if she had to hide who she was in school she would have been long gone; that she knew other Travellers who did hide their identity but felt that was terrible as it meant that they weren?t being themselves

Salma Shaarawy, a Danish Egyptian parent, who has been living in Ireland for the last number of years spoke about her son?s experience in school as a Muslim student. She gave us an insight into the importance of including students, as well as parents, in the development of responses to interculturalism.

Finally, Kiva Kaneswaren,  a young student from Dublin, spoke of witnessing a boy from Nigeria being discriminated against by other students and how her own experience of racism had helped her to understand how this must have impacted on him. She encouraged us all to challenge our own views and attitudes on racism.

Questions

Participants at the roundtable discussion were allocated on arrival a group/coloured table to sit at. This allowed for groups to network as well as ensuring that there was good representation of the different stakeholders at each table. Among the topics discussed were the relevance of interculturalism in a widely changing education landscape, the programme as a whole school approach and the development of the Yellow Flag from the pilot stages to the mainstream.



The event itself generated great energy around the project and the general feeling of the afternoon was that developing a whole school approach to interculturalism was critical and should involve members of all communities in Ireland, including Travellers.