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Irish post-primary students' attitudes towards ethnic minorities AbstractThe changing ethnic make-up of Irish society has impacted upon schools. Existing, largely qualitative studies have highlighted mixed attitudes towards ethnic minorities. Literature has also focussed on the role of the state in articulating a discourse that shapes school-level responses to minorities. This paper critiques the idea of a unitary state discourse and the role of other educational bodies, such as schools, in drawing upon a range of alternate public discourses to shape how they act, is identified. Drawing upon a large quantitative study involving 4,970 post-primary pupil respondents, this paper finds that many Irish post-primary students report low levels of social distance from Black African Immigrants, Muslims, and Eastern Europeans. Negative attitudes are most prevalent with respect to members of the Travelling community. The potential positive impact of school-level programmes -such as those related to global justice and inequalities -is identified through the lower levels of negative attitudes towards ethnic minorities reported by Transition year students who have experienced such programmes.
The growing literature on the gendering of citizenship and citizenship education highlights that western notions of 'citizenship' have often been framed in a way that implicitly excludes women. At the same time, insofar as feminist writers have addressed citizenship, they have tended to see it in largely local and national terms. While feminist literature has laid the groundwork for understanding how schools have shaped and structured a gendered citizenry, there is a lack of large-scale quantitative data which might allow us to explore the intersection between gender and global citizenship education. Drawing on a large-scale quantitative study on development education/ global citizenship education in second-level schools, the data presented here suggests that emergent notions of global citizenship are being gendered in schools. The data suggests that single-sex girls' school are more likely than other types of school to emphasise a sense of responsibility for, and an analysis of, global inequalities, while differences also emerge between boys' schools and co-educational schools.
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