The Impact of Action Research and Education Reform in Northern Ireland: education in democracy

Abstract

AbstractA recent survey of the impact on graduates of the University of Ulster's MSc programme in education management has identified issues concerning the nature and purpose of education in the current social and political climate of Northern Ireland. The evidence suggests that most of them use some form of action research to accommodate themselves to, and make more efficient, the operations of the organisation in which they work. This means that their work is circumscribed by the market values embedded in the Education Reform Order (Northern Ireland) (1989). When this evidence is placed into the whole of the UK's social, educational and political context and the history of education in Northern Ireland, it becomes clear why educational action research falls outside the concerns of current educational provision at institutional level. Because the Northern Ireland curriculum is a replication of the English National Curriculum, itself a response to the politically defined English economic situation, there is seen to be no need to prepare future citizens of a new Northern Ireland any differently to those in England. Yet the current and most pressing problem in Northern Ireland is the lack of political stability. Whatever the outcome of the current peace negotiations, it is vital that the next generation be helped by their teachers to be able to think for themselves and so be able to evaluate in a rational way the political, economic and historical faces of their social environment. It is argued that there is a need to reappraise current educational purposes and practices based on the dominant political free market ideology.