Clare Family Learning Project

Roma Families Learning RoFaL The importance of parental involvement in children’s education ‹ Back to News

Posted Wednesday, 8th Jun 11

 

Comenius Regio Project

Turkish Visit to Ireland  May 9-10^th 2011

We hosted a group of six people from Aydin Provence from Sunday evening 8th May to Tuesday night 10th May 2011. The group shared their work to date with the Irish partners and visited all the partner organisations during a very short stay in Ireland. We had round table discussions on progress to date with each partner, ways to evaluate the work and the project, as well as putting together an action plan for the final year of the project. Some of the work done was on view e.g. results from the parent survey was on display in graph format, while drafts of the booklets both in Turkey and in Ireland were available.
There was a lot of work squeezed into the 2 working days and by the end of Tuesday evening, the Turkish visitors had had a whirlwind tour of County Clare,a visit to the University of Limerick and a good idea of how we work using an interagency approach.
We would like to thank them for their patience as we didn't know any Turkish (except for Marlene who is a research student with Clare Family Learning Project from Germany) and there was a lot of translation into Turkish needed throughout the visit.
There was a lot of sharing of ideas and best practice going on at different levels, in the primary school, at the immigrant support centre, in the youth service, in the adult education centre and in the second level school. Overall the visit was a success and much learned from each other.

 

Round table meetings on both days with all project partners.

 

 

Meeting Roma students in Clare Youth Service

 

Visiting Ennis Educate Together National School on a windy day

 

 

 

Visiting the parents room where parent classes are held a number of days each week.

 

 

Clare Family Learning Project provides Bilingual Storybooks for parents to use with their children at the school. Czech/ English and Slovak English.

 

 

Ennis Educate Together Primary School welcomed the group into the classrooms for presentations, DVD, music, song and dance.

 

 

 

 

The Roma children working on the RoFaL school website explained about the work so far.

Ennis Community College, a second level school welcomed the group with traditional Irish music.  A Turkish parent attended and helped with the translation of the school principals welcome to the group.

 

Some of the group joined in traditional Irish dancing!

 

The school has Turkish, Slovak and Czech students who welcomed the group. The students showed the group around the school.

 

The group had a tour of the classes in the Adult Education Centre where Clare Family Learning Project are based.

 

The University of Limerick hosted the group on Tuesday and gave a presentation about the involvement of the Department of Politics and Social Science in the community in Clare. A researcher in the university has just published a book on Turkeys Accession to the EU and she presented a brief report on the content.

 

We went over the moving bridge to the Clare side of the campus to see the Irish World Academy

 

The Mayor of Clare welcomed the group to Ennis

 

Having food together in local restaurant.

 

The RoFaL cake was produced by a local adult education tutor.

       

Cutting the cake was a big job that required two or three people, including the mayor of Clare!

There were songs in Irish, English, Turkish and German! The Turkish group enjoyed the evening!

 

We managed to get a lot into the two days. A quick trip to see Bunratty Castle and the horse drawn caravans.The group were impressed with The Cliffs of Moher.

    

 

 

By Mary Flanagan, Co-ordinator, Clare Family Learning Project and

lead partner of RoFaL project  in Ireland.

 

Project partners

Clare Family Learning Project, Clare Vocational Education Committee

Ennis Educate Together National School

Ennis Community College

Clare Immigrant Support Centre