Brexit and Peace

I am preparing to go, with my whole family this time, to both the Republic and the North in April. The news on Northern Ireland continues to be troubling, with Brexit looming and threatening to create in the land--as poet Nick Laird points out in the most recent New York Review of Books--a place with two hard borders, a Northern Ireland that is neither connected to the Republic nor to the United Kingdom.

We began teaching the Troubles in our Facing History classes at New Haven Academy because we were intrigued by a place where thirty years of war in the streets seemed to be resolved in a satisfying manner through negotiation, through political means. But history continues to move on, and no peace is ever guaranteed forever. In that same Nick Laird article, the poet sees what defined Northern Ireland in the Troubles (identity politics boiled up to the point of tit for tat violence) as having now infected the entire world that we live in today. How could Northern Ireland possibly escape what has enveloped everywhere else?

In teaching about the Holocaust, about South Africa and about the Troubles, we as teachers were trying to shine a light on warning signs from history. But when the Trump administration came in, with Steve Bannon's and Stephen Miller's Us and Them strategizing, all these frightening signals out of history were suddenly much closer to our door step. 

There is a greater urgency now than at any other point in my lifetime to teach peace. We need to understand how to live together as one human family. In this holiday season full of anti-semitic violence in my own country, and with Brexit facing much less political resistance since Boris Johnson's win, I am wondering how well the Unionists and the Nationalists will hold on to their fragile peace as the UK, led by this upper class Prime Minister who really couldn't care less, separates from Europe.

I enclose a link to a video of a story I tell about our Derry/Londonderry tour guide Gleann (who took the photo of me and Dave Senderoff that you see at the top of this blog post). I think Gleann's story illustrates the feeling of fragile peace that exists in that city: Gleann's Story

The Fund for Teachers Grant, Two Years Later

I have left New Haven Academy, the high school at which I first created this blog in 2017, when I and my colleague David Senderoff received our Fund for Teachers grant to enrich our "Troubles" curriculum through travel. I was a Humanities teacher then, incorporating Northern Ireland for many years into a sophomore Facing History course on Separation, Judgment, Justice and Memory. The course goes on, but I will no longer be one of the four educators teaching it.

I am joining the faculty of the ACES Educational Center for the Arts, as the Director of the Creative Writing department.

Besides my new administrative responsibilities, I will continue to teach, but now my subjects will be screenwriting, playwriting and live storytelling/monologues.

Ireland and Northern Ireland stay with me, and continue to inspire my work and life. The grant continues to be a part of me, and as a member of FFT's new Ramsden Project, I will continue to interact with Fellows and advise them and learn from them on how we keep this work alive in our schools.

My new show, I've Heard Those Drums All My Life, is six monologues about the way Ireland has always been an inspiration and a home-away-from-home for me. Each monologue is named for a person who inspired that story. The video below is the title story, but is named for Gleann in the overall piece. It is, of course, a story that could only have come about with the aid of Fund for Teachers.

The link to Gleann's story is here:

"I've Heard Those Drums All My Life"

Maria McManus and the Poetry Jukebox

Image courtesy of the Irish Times

Poet Maria McManus created the Poetry Jukebox in Northern Ireland. You would see these big thick jukeboxes in parks and on sidewalks and you could listen to the words of Northern Irish poets as they tried to put this particular trauma and history and war and memory and healing into words. 

This article about her project is now almost a year old, but still a tremendously powerful statement on the psyche of a country two decades into an uneasy peace. "It is as if we are the children of warring parents," McManus writes. "lying in bed at night, hearing the row (argument) going on downstairs, all over again. We want it to stop. We want everyone to be happy and just get along. We want love to win instead -- but we have no choice but to lie there, still and quiet, waiting for it all to stop. And tomorrow, we will get up and carry on -- get on with the business of not making things worse, knowing all is not well -- but still feel unable to do anything about it."

McManus then makes a powerful argument for the place of literature in all of this, that really paying attention to poetry can be a way to heal. In this week in which we see still more evidence of the power of angry words--usually absorbed on the internet--to spur violent actions, I offer this article in which Maria McManus reminds us that words can also heal us, if we are willing to be sensitive to them.

McManus's article is linked below:

"In the North, we have started to stop sleeping again": A poetry project in the North is an emotional weather report of where society stands 20 years on from Belfast Agreement

Student Suggestions for Content

Some student responses to a survey about what to add to the class next year.

As always, we didn't have time to cover everything we might want to cover about Northern Ireland this year. Time is limited, and there are always certain things that we most want to hit home. The important thing is to educate students about this particular example of how people behave in groups and to show that peace is possible, but it is something that must constantly be worked at.

In response to a few students feeling they still did not know enough about the conflict, I surveyed them to see what more they felt might be important to know. Given three choices of major events in the struggle, it was the Hunger Strikes of 1981 that seemed to universally peak their interest, so the challenge is to figure out a way to fit that piece in next year.

In my own knowledge of this struggle, the hunger strikes were certainly a point when--as a child--the Troubles really appeared very strongly on my radar and America's radar as the newspapers and television were very taken with them. Whatever one thinks of the hunger strikes, that was undeniably a time when the attention of the whole world was very much riveted to the sectarian struggle in Northern Ireland. 

I think our students were right to request it as a key thing for next year's students in this unit to learn about.

Using the Blog Itself as a Teaching Tool

A student reading the "Derry Walls" blog post.

Every Spring, our students examine what was on the table for the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998 and then--in pairs--make decisions about what they would choose as the most important provisions and which provisions they would be willing to let go (power sharing, an end to parades, stopping punishment beatings, decommissioning of weapons, etc.  -- ten provisions in all). Then they compare their decisions to what was actually accomplished, in the 1998 agreement and in the 2007 additions, and what has still not been accomplished. 

Students are often surprised by what was judged as valuable and what was left out. Their plan for peace can be quite different than the choices made in the actual peace agreement.

This year, we want to look past the agreement a little bit and start to judge how things have worked out. This could involve a look at Brexit and some speculation about the changes it will bring. But all of that is still very uncertain. 

What the blog can provide is a feeling of visitation accompanied by some historical context from our own learning. We can at least fill in some of the gaps by exposing students to what we felt and observed while we were over there. It's imperfect of course (we were only there for a week in the summer), but we can at least give a little more of a sense of the feeling in the streets of Derry and Belfast than we could in prior years. 

For a start, I chose the blog posts "Derry Walls" (https://teachingthetroublesatnha.blogspot.com/2017/08/derry-walls.html) and "Stormont and Other Surprises" (https://teachingthetroublesatnha.blogspot.com/2017/08/stormont-and-other-surprises.html). With the Peace Agreement fresh in their minds, I thought these two posts might have the most ambience in terms of the Unionist-Nationalist divide in its current form. In the space of the second half of a block period lesson, this seemed possible to get through.

It was interesting to see who most engaged with these readings by their teachers and who did not. It did not fall along the same lines as the students who most engaged with the other activities. This felt like a very different mode for learning about the conflict. For this reason, I wonder if this blog might be good to use more often, to differentiate for a sort of learner who doesn't always respond to the other sorts of teaching modalities that we typically use in Facing History classes.

A student makes notes based on the blog posts.

How much do you teach? How much do you let students discover?

The Seven Documents

Previously, we would jump into the Northern Ireland unit with an Inquiry Activity. After practicing questioning technique with a single image and a discussion about what makes a good research question, pairs of students--or groups of three--look through seven compelling documents searching for clues to what was going on, making inferences and bringing up questions to be used for further research.

The lesson is good for building curiosity but is also a balancing act. How much do students need to already know about this conflict to make connections between the things they are seeing? How much preliminary information is too much and limits their curiosity?

This year, the inquiry activity comes after the new flag lesson. The students have read a poem about the symbolism of flag burning in Belfast. They have posed some questions about it and found answers. They have looked at photographs captioned with the stories of the Belfast children and teens who took the images, images describing a struggle. They have looked at the Union Jack and the Irish Tricolor. They have drawn them into their journals. They have discovered the difference between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom.

So, this year, I wondered if they already knew too much. But they didn't. Overall, I think their enthusiasm for the activity only increased. They knew enough. 

And they needed a little more. To know that "Republican" in Northern Ireland means Nationalist and frequently Catholic, and to know that "Ulster" in an organization's name indicates a Loyalist leaning and usually Protestantism helps them to navigate a document that is a timeline of the murdered: "Wait, this guy is Catholic but was killed by a Republican organization!" "Maybe it's like with gangs... like he snitched..."

The students need to know just a little. Then, they need to embrace the search to know more.

Students engaging with the activity

The final page of the capture sheet, filled out.

Another sample of the final page.

Flags

Union Jack flags, Moorgate Street in East Belfast

Irish Tricolor flags in Derry City Cemetery

"There is no action without an equal but opposite reaction... It was early morning on an August Sunday in 2003 and there were bonfires being built to commemorate the republican men who were interned in the 1970s. Internment-remembering bonfires burn the Union Flag in an equal but opposite reaction to the Boyne-remembering bonfires burning the Irish Tricolour. It felt as predictable as the seasons and as dependable. The only motion is on an axis of its own." -- from "Welcome to Belfast," a prose poem by Padraig O Tuama.

Flags weigh heavy on Belfast and Derry. In the summer, particularly in Belfast, you pass through neighborhoods draped in them. They set a tone for pedestrians. You might feel they are beautiful flapping in the breeze, or you may be intimidated. Flags ask you to pick a side. If they are the Irish Tricolor and the Union Jack, they will rarely be seen together, except in some sort of conflict.

At NHA, we are struggling with how to introduce this foreign but meaningful conflict in a way that invites inquiry. How do we reveal just enough to invite questions, without revealing so much that the process of student-led education is stifled? We are thinking maybe the questions should start by looking at the flags themselves, and also looking at Padraig O Tuama's prose poem "Welcome to Belfast," that relates the experience of arrival in Belfast through observation of its young citizens' relationship to those flags. 

Our new first lesson will begin with these details and the questions they raise: What is internment? What is the Boyne? Why are flags being burnt? Why are flags being protected?

We will also use photographic images taken and explained by children (acquired at the Wave Trauma Centre in Belfast) in a gallery walk that we hope will make our students feel the way the symbolism of the conflict makes people feel in the streets of Northern Ireland's cities. This lesson may also include images of everyday objects transformed by the "Troubles" (acquired from Healing Through Remembering, also in Belfast). 

We hope that questions will be raised and feelings will be felt that can be furthered as they learn more in future lessons. But the first step is to feel what the conflict feels like, and to start to question how it came to be so.