Bracey, P. (2011) Shaping the Future curriculum project resources: opportunity or surplus to requirements? Workshop presented to: Irish Association for Social, Scientific and Environmental Education (IASSEE) 10th Annual Conference: Learning for the Twenty-First Century: From Research to Practice, St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin, 04 – 05 February 2011.
This paper examines a Heritage Lottery funded project designed to promote ethnic and cultural diversity, specifically teaching black history in schools in a predominantly mixed rural and urban context which has a predominantly white population. The study will involve considering the project’s rationale, the resources produced and the nature of its impact on teacher perceptions. The project involved producing packs related to five themes –of which one theme was distributed freely to all schools in the county, two were freely available online. Use will be made of relevant documents, questionnaires and interviews drawn from teachers in a single county using a grounded theory approach Evaluating the impact of the project will consist of following research questions – How far has it been adopted? How far does this reflect teacher perceptions of diversity? This necessarily involves going beyond whether teachers have adopted the project (or not) to considering how this relates to their perceptions of other aspects of diversity, together with factors supporting or inhibiting its development. Teacher perceptions are central to the study, on the premise that they are critical agents of curriculum change