In this article, Audrey Bryan presents a selection of ongoing research that seeks to analyse how development education curricular content is communicated in recently produced textbooks designed for lower secondary students in the Republic of Ireland. Using specific examples extracted from selected texts, she demonstrates how development issues are often represented in contradictory ways. In response to these contradictions, she argues that in order to more critically engage with students in a formal educational setting, a post-colonial framework is necessary to better understand development issues and problems in a broader political economic context.

Introduction

This article seeks to enhance our understanding of some of the curricular resources that educators utilise in teaching global citizenship in formal education settings. More specifically, it provides a critical (albeit necessarily selective) analysis of some of the ways in which development education curricular content is communicated in recently produced geography and civic, social and political education (CSPE) textbooks designed for use with lower secondary students in the Republic of Ireland. This study is part of a much larger ongoing research project, funded by Irish Aid, which seeks to provide a representative critique of recently produced and currently used textbooks and curricular resources concerned with international development themes and issues. It draws on existing research conducted by the author into representations of diversity and interculturalism in Irish schools and society (Bryan, 2008; Bryan, forthcoming). Combining ethnographic and critical discourse analytic techniques, it focuses on the forms of development engagement these ideas or images are likely to produce. 

            The article will first provide a brief overview of the rationale and methodology informing the study. It will then seek to demonstrate some of the core, often contradictory ways in which development is represented in schools, drawing on examples from two of the subjects that have a strong development focus: geography and CSPE. It concludes by advocating a post-colonial framework as one means through which more critical engagement with development-related content can be fostered in formal educational settings.   

Study rationale and methodology

Development education has evolved considerably as a field over the last six decades. Mesa (n.d.), for example, identifies five generations, or periods, in the evolution of development education from its origins as a ‘charitable and assistance-based approach’ in the 1940s and 1950s to its present focus on a ‘global citizenship education’ approach, which stresses the effects of globalisation and the need for a global consciousness in the face of an escalating range of issues which transcend national borders, such as poverty, climate change, HIV, etc. Within this current focus on global citizenship, development education can be further categorised according to soft and critical versions of global citizenship education. Soft global citizenship education stresses poverty and underdevelopment as resulting from a lack of resources, skills, technology and education. This is distinct from more critical approaches which seek to redress unequal power relations and stress the structures, systems and assumptions that produce and maintain social and economic inequalities in the first instance (Andreotti, 2006). 

            Post-colonial theory is an example of a critical approach to global citizenship education, through which development issues and problems can be examined in their broader political economic context. Broadly speaking, post-colonialism is a theoretical framework which makes visible the history and legacy of European colonialism, including the ways in which the wealth of the global North has been acquired and maintained through a history of exploitation, and examines how it continues to shape contemporary discourses and institutions (Rizvi, Lingard & Lavia, 2006). It is closely aligned with the philosophy and aims of development education itself. As Young explains: ‘Post-colonialism claims the right of all people on this earth to the same material and cultural well-being; it seeks to change the way people think, the way they behave, to produce a more just and equitable relation between different peoples of the world’ (Young, 2003:7, cited in Rizvi, Lingard & Lavia, 2006). 

            Development educators who adopt a post-colonial framework seek to critically engage students with, and challenge, common assumptions and dominant theoretical frameworks of international development (such as modernisation theory) that are often engrained in mainstream development discourses, such as school texts. Post-colonial and other critical approaches to development education encourage us to consider the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of internationally derived development policies and practices, to engage deeply with the structural dimensions of poverty, injustice and oppression, and to consider alternative progressive political, economic, and social arrangements. From this critical vantage point, the purpose of development education is to ensure that ‘injustices are addressed, more equal grounds for dialogue are created, and people can have more autonomy to define their own development’ (Andreotti, 2006:6). This article will consider the extent to which these critical approaches to development are evident in a selection of contemporary school texts designed for use in the Republic of Ireland.

            While recent research carried out in the Republic offers insights into the nature and extent of development education provision in Irish post-primary schools, to date there has been little systematic research into how notions of development are actually constructed in curriculum resources and mediated in Irish schools. The significance of examining textbooks and related teaching materials is highlighted by recent research on the profile and methods of development education teaching at post-primary level carried out by the Shannon Curriculum Development Centre and University of Limerick (Gleeson, King, O’Driscoll & Tormey, 2007). Despite development education’s emphasis on active learning, this survey of post-primary teachers indicated that textbooks are the most frequently used methodology for teaching development issues, with over 70 per cent indicating that this was the medium they used most often for delivering ‘Third World/Developing World’ topics in the classroom (Gleeson, King, O’Driscoll & Tormey, 2007).   While there are a range of instructional resources besides textbooks that are available to educators who teach about development issues, the reliance on textbooks as an authoritative source of knowledge in the classroom suggests that an analysis of textbooks is warranted. 

            Furthermore, the study by Gleeson et al. (2007) revealed that school is the second most important source of information for students on the developing world, after the media. This underscores the need to critically engage with the nature and implications of the messages conveyed in formal education settings. The practical value of such research lies in its capacity to explore the relationship between how development is portrayed and the nature and level of engagement that these representations are likely to evoke. For example, do they change consumer habits, increase charitable giving, enhance protest and political activism or engagement in other forms of broad-based collective action (Smith, 2004a; 2004b).

            The following section provides a snapshot of some of the dominant understandings of development portrayed in school texts, using a number of examples drawn from recently produced geography and CSPE texts designed for lower secondary or ‘junior cycle’ students in the Republic of Ireland. Similar to recent ethnographic work carried out in the United Kingdom (Smith, 2004a; 2004b), findings suggest that the formal educational domain is not dominated by a uniform understanding of development. On the contrary, students in the Republic are presented with a range of competing and contradictory narratives. On the one hand, some of these narratives and images continue to perpetuate traditional understandings of development, based on development-as-charity motifs and modernisationist assumptions. On the other hand, some narratives offer a more contextualised analysis, focused on the structural features of global inequality, often within the confines of a single text. The aim of this analysis is not to criticise specific texts, but rather to highlight tensions that exist, and to highlight educative opportunities or moments that arise from these tensions (Smith, 2004a; 2004b). 

            Given that the study outlined in this article is part of a much larger ongoing research project, it should be viewed as a work-in-progress which builds upon and extends the scope of previous research examining curricular representations of cultural diversity, racism and interculturalism in an Irish context. The findings presented here illustrate some of the ways in which international development is represented in some of the core subject areas and texts, but do not constitute a comprehensive or exhaustive analysis of the second-level curriculum in the Republic of Ireland. As a necessarily selective analysis of textbooks representing only two subjects, it is likely that there are other development ‘storylines’ presented in school texts and curriculum resources that are not reflected here.  

Methodologically, the study is informed by a critical discourse analysis of a selection of CSPE and geography texts, and to a lesser extent on interviews conducted with students from majority world countries that attend a large, ethnically diverse secondary school in the greater Dublin area, which is referred to here as Blossom Hill College (BHC). The discourse analysis involved a multilayered process of repeatedly reading, writing and interpreting each of the texts to derive recurring patterns and themes. A general method employed was to examine the prevalence or absence in the texts of such features as foreground information (those ideas that are present and emphasised), background information (those ideas that are explicitly mentioned but de-emphasised), presupposed information (that information which is present at the level of implied or suggested meaning) and absent information (Fairclough, 1995). 

            The analysis was also informed by focus groups, and one-on-one and small-group interviews involving 30 students, including some from developing countries, conducted at BHC. The study was conducted over the period September 2004 to December 2005. 

Key findings

‘Developing countries…still have some way to go’: Modernisation theories and the curriculum

 The following definitions of development and underdevelopment, which appear in the CSPE text Make a Difference!, are reflective of the extent to which a modernisation framework undergirds how global inequalities are understood in some accounts of development in junior cycle textbooks:

“Some countries are at different stages on the road to development. While some are very advanced, others are underdeveloped. These countries are known as developing countries, because they still have some way to go” (Harrison & Wilson, 2001:91; emphasis in original). (A revised version of this publication was published in 2007; the present analysis is based on the 2001 edition).

Modernisation theories are based on a crude dichotomy between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies, and seek to explain how societies move from traditional to modern stages of development. They maintain that traditional societies can eventually catch up with their more advanced (capitalist) counterparts provided they adopt a series of global North-style economic, financial, social, cultural, political and psychological interventions. Modernisation theories, therefore, are based on a linear view of history, that promote a stage-like trajectory of economic growth which maintain that Northern countries are further along the path of modern development than developing countries. In describing countries from the global South as ‘developing’, a crude distinction is drawn between us (developed, modern, advanced) and them (underdeveloped, traditional, backward).