Available onlineSowing seeds of peace
(page 2 of 4)Online exhibition theme created by Gabi Kent, a member of the OU Time to Think Project Team
| Rosie McCorley clip: | It helped our political education |
|---|---|
| Duration: | 00:02:08 |
| Date: |
Over the years people spent in prison, education opened up new possibilities for personal, social and political change. As Student B, a Loyalist imprisoned in the UVF Compounds in the 1970s explains, education taught him how to be free:
...when I went into my OU material I could be somewhere else and I could be free in my mind. And it taught me that it is not about buildings, it is not about place and community or anything like that, it is about the value of yourself, and that how much freedom education could give me.
Student B
Studying with The Open University provided students with the skills to challenge their thinking and to explore different ideas. The course 'Crime, Justice and Society' (D310) for example, as former OU tutor Mike Tomlinson explains, allowed students to make connections between individual experiences and wider social and political processes.
Some students even found themselves studying their own political leaders, through courses such as D100 'Understanding Society: a foundation course'. The course material for this course featured interviews with John Hume, a member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the Reverend Ian Paisley, a member of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Watch one of the programmes for this course D100/02 'Men and Government' on the OU Digital Archive.
Many Republican women in Maghaberry Prison in the 1990s used Open University study to support their political development, as Rosie McCorley explains in the audio clip on this page.
