Different school of thought for Tulla pupils with Living Scenes

Transition-year pupils at St Joseph’s Secondary School in Tulla have recently been introduced to their new adult classmates as they embark on the collaborative Living Scenes programme of learning.
Living Scenes offers a different school of thought from the exam-based curriculum to pupils and adults by bringing the two groups together in a reciprocal learning session each week.
The project, which was designed by Clarinbridge resident Dr Mary Surlis of NUI Galway, is 12 years in existence, with two schools in Clare, St Flannan’s and St Joseph’s in Tulla, offering the module to transition-year pupils for the past five years.
In Tulla, Siobhán O’Sullivan acts as the project co-ordinator, facilitating the group meeting each Thursday from 11am to 1pm at the school, where the two groups come together for a collaborative activity.
The Clare Champion paid a visit to St Joseph’s recently, where the group were carrying out an art project.
The session began over a cup of tea prepared by the pupils and Moira Hannon, one of the adults, read out a quirky poem to the class, providing plenty of laughs and encouraging more storytelling.
Transition-year pupil Keith Maxwell from Sixmilebridge said of the project, “I like it. I thought I’d be very nervous going in trying to talk to new people, especially when they are not really our generation. I thought it was going to be a bit boring but it turned out that it wasn’t boring at all.”
Meanwhile, his classmate Brian Lenihan from Quin said, “It’s very good, you learn something new every time. We’ve only had two sessions and already we’ve learned a lot. There’s usually some bit of craic out of it so you’d talk about it afterwards.”
The two transition years were carrying out an art project with Moira Hannon where they were each painting a scene or an object that represented who they are.
Moira, who lives in Bodyke but who is from Corofin originally, said she really enjoys being involved.
“This is my third year coming and every week you’d find yourself saying ‘now have I any yarn that I can tell the young ones’. One good thing I find is, that the interaction between old and young is marvellous, you just have to ask any of them here now and they’ll help you straight away,” she said.
Margaret Moroney from Kilbane has been attending the project for five years. “It’s brilliant to be able to meet all the young people and have a nice time with them and get to share stories about our time going to school and what it was like in comparison to what it is now,” she said.
The educational programme is funded by NUI Galway’s Adult and Continuing Education Office and has been the pioneering programme of its kind in Ireland and Europe. It was the brainchild of Dr Surlis, who was drawn to this new approach to learning during her own teaching career in Clifden Community College in Galway, where huge emphasis was given to the arts.
“I could open my classroom door and find Seamus Heaney reading to the children. It was a whole new way of thinking. This is how I was introduced to teaching. When I left teaching I took up a post with the university [NUIG],” she explained. Dr Surlis pursued a masters in curriculum to try this concept of bringing older people and younger people together in the classroom. She believed that at that time, the divide between young and old seemed to be getting wider and wider and this wasn’t helped by the emergence of the Celtic Tiger.
“It was 1998 and the Celtic Tiger was beginning to unfurl and the nursing home phenomena had started and parents were both in the workplace. When I would go out to schools, I noticed that out of a class of 22 transition years, only two would be living with their grandparents or near them. The rest of them had ha d no role in their grandparents’ lives. Out of 22 girls, only two of them came home to a home where there were two parents, the rest were latch-key kids. This was a phenomenon starting at that time,” Dr Surlis outlined.
Aiming to try to bridge the divide, Dr Surlis began the programme to see if the two groups would firstly get along and, when they did, her next port of call was to write a curriculum around that interaction that she could bring to principals that would fit right into the transition-year model.
The project initially started in one school, the Presentation in Galway City, but now extends to six schools nationwide. The concept was developed by looking at whether this type of learning viable, if learning was occurring, how best to transmit this type of learning and how to create a situation where this interaction between two different generations could occur.
“When I met the older adults first, they really felt they were generations from the younger group and the teenagers felt the same. Living Scenes doesn’t have a text book, it’s a process concept, where all of the learning and what is going to be learned is developed within the group. To my mind, that is why it has been so successful. Tulla is completely different to Calasanctious College in Oranmore, which is completely different to Millstreet in Cork. It is very much focused on the locality and about experiential learning, for example in Tulla music is very important to them, so is their topography, their lie of the land,” Dr Surlis said.
“The setting is circular and everyone’s opinion matters so there is no right or wrong. That instils confidence and children get this natural spurt of growth. It’s almost like they’re taken into an adults’ world but they are taken in there very carefully. It’s about empowerment, it’s about self-confidence, it’s about building self-esteem, it’s about everything except measurement, in other words, there is no exam at the end of it. I deliberately wanted that. It’s all about thinking differently, the teachers don’t use their titles, they have to be part of the group and become the learner with the learners,” she continued.
In her findings, Dr Surlis noted that the adults spoke about being respected and feeling a great sense of rejuvenation, worth and belonging. The pupils spoke about being listened to, about making new friends, about age not making a different and about being part of someone else’s world that they were totally alien to before then.
“What I saw in the likes of Tulla was that it has rejuvenated society there. The older people are befriending the young people, they’re stopping on the street for a chat, helping them with groceries. In the schools, the adults are included in the end-of-year performance, in the TY cert nights, in school masses, in coffee mornings. They have become part of the school fabric.
“What’s really worthwhile about this is that there are no teachers telling the pupils they have to do this. They like doing it and want to be part of it. The principals have all alluded to the fact that the level of maturity among the pupils who do Living Scenes is hugely noticeable in fifth year versus those who haven’t participated,” Dr Surlis concluded.
Dr Surlis has also looked at a second area of research as part of a PhD, where she disseminated the programme looking at the effect it has on the school and conversely the effect of the school on the programme.