Irish educators visit Vanderbilt

topics: Communities, Teaching and Learning, Multicultural Classrooms

Melanie Moran, Vanderbilt News Service

Immigration, English as a second language, pre-K curriculum - the issues sound familiar to Nashvillians but the accent of those discussing them in The Commons this week was decidedly different. A group of 15 Irish teachers, principals, policymakers and social program managers met with Peabody Professor of Education and Psychology Dale Farran and her colleagues to see examples of how the United States is dealing with issues that are just now surfacing in Ireland.

“We are seeing a huge number of immigrants to Ireland now, for the first time in the country’s history,” Joseph Niryenda, a diversity and immigration expert in Roscommon, Ireland, said. “We came to Nashville to see how ethnominorities are being integrated, how English is being taught, and also to get more ideas about how these sorts of issues are handled by a country that has been dealing with them for a long time.”

The group, led by Niamh Lynch from Boston College’s Irish Institute, was impressed by what they saw as an integration of social, health and education resources in Nashville, and by Vanderbilt’s widespread involvement in each of these areas.

“This is a best practices exchange,” Mary Healey, principal of a new school in a Dublin suburb, said. “We are picking out the best of what we see here to apply to the rapid changes we are experiencing at home.”

While at Vanderbilt, the group heard a presentation by Farran on the evolution of U.S. programs for at-risk children and about her current research with Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies Senior Research Fellow Mark Lipsey on pre-k interventions for these groups.

“We are all new to diversity, immigration and special needs,” group member Paul Lindsay said. “If we don’t prepare ourselves and do something now, we’re going to have huge problems in 10 years time. But if we can implement some of the things we are learning on this trip, we will have addressed many of these problems.”

Farran, who participates in an international consortium on these and related issues, believes Vanderbilt benefits as much from such exchanges as the visitors.

“These exchanges help me put the United States and what is happening here into perspective, and reminds us that there are other ways of approaching the same challenges in other countries and cultures,” Farran said. “Having to explain what we do makes me more thoughtful about what we do. We treat this group and other visitors as partners—the sharing goes both ways.”

The Nashville visit was just one example of Boston College’s Irish Institute efforts to support educational, political and corporate exchange programs for leaders from long-separated areas of Ireland.

“This project is sponsored by the U.S. State Department with the goal of furthering the peace process in Ireland by getting people from Northern Ireland and Ireland to know each other, share best practices and spur innovation,” Lynch, who emigrated to the U.S. from Ireland as a teenager, said. “Vanderbilt has been a tremendous partner in supporting this current program, ‘Inclusive Education in a Diverse Society.’ It is exciting to learn about research by Dale Farran and other top academics at Vanderbilt that this group can take home with them. They are in a position to change policy when they go back to Ireland.”

In addition to meeting with Farran, Lispsey and Department of Teaching and Learning Chair David Dickinson, the group spent time on campus with members of Principals Leadership Academy of Nashville, which is sponsored by Vanderbilt’s Peabody College, and visited numerous schools and programs throughout Nashville.