View - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

at what was happening in Belfast and Northern Ireland, there were lots of common
issues drawn out.
The debates went beyond Ireland and provided opportunities to look at a range of issues with
examples drawn from different parts of the world. For example, discussions related to
reconciliation in Northern Ireland also considered issues facing Aborigines in Australia. The
conferences also considered conflict and reconciliation in other contexts such as Rwanda,
Sudan, Mozambique and the Middle East. It remains to be seen how far the teachers who
supported the project related this to their history curriculum but it is worth noting the
qualified comment made by the Project Facilitator:
I have to be honest, in some schools they didn’t particularly relate it to the curriculum,
it was something they saw as being an extra curricular opportunity - it was about
enriching [pupil experiences].
Nevertheless, they felt that the project did have a direct impact on the teachers:
I think it inspired them in terms of what you can do in terms of stimulating debate. Getting
discussion from young people, gave them lots of ideas for approaches, techniques and
methodology for really stimulating discussion.
Perhaps of more significance with respect to an Irish dimension was the fact that some
teachers became involved in a second project from 2000-2005. Their work was to lead to the
publication of a pack call Building New Citizenship: Learning from change in Derry/
Londonderry (TIDE, 2001) to build on their experiences (the reference to Derry and
Londonderry relates to Nationalist and Loyalist definitions of the city). The Project facilitator
explained the importance of being able to build on the teacher involvement in the Let’s Talk
Project:
If we were trying to do the Derry project from cold we would have really struggled to
have got a group together initially and you would have had to do a lot of work with
that cold teacher group to get them from up to speed on some issues about Northern
Ireland. Because of Let’s Talk we had a whole body of teachers who were suddenly