Learning Schools: Northern Ireland
This is Bushmills Primary School on the coast of Northern Ireland; it has 170 pupils.
The teachers in the school are all participating in a UK-wide training programme, The Learning Schools Programme. It is introducing teachers to how ICT can enhance teaching and learning. This is not about basic skills but how things can improve in the classroom. The staff are developing their expertise through a planned collaborative, cross-curricular seashore project, which involves fieldwork with digital cameras, analyses of data and a host of other activities.
What this programme illustrates is just how we can think about teacher education support that goes well beyond that which can be offered in the 'bricks and mortar' institutions we referred to earlier.
Between 1999 and 2001, 166,000 teachers participated in this programme across the UK. Over 40,000 actively participated in hundreds of electronic conferences that were established through the teachers' concerns and interests. These are the sorts of environments we can look to in the future, but our understanding of how they can be built and sustained is still in its infancy.
The distinctive thing about the Bushmill project is that teachers and children from the normally separate Catholic and Protestant communities are reaching out to each other through this new form of communication. As in Paraguay, divided communities sharing common territory can be brought together.
