Academic Educational - AOLE 2 - 2019 - Niall Sheehan (2.6)

Gypsy Roma Travellers in Primary Education The term Gypsy Roma Traveller (GRT) is not a single homogenous group (Cromarty, 2018), encompassing a variety of groups including: Roma, Irish Traveller, Scottish Gypsies/Travellers, Welsh Gypsies, New Travellers, Showmen and Circus people, Boat people and Romani (English) Gypsies (Allen and Adams, 2011), indicating that there could be a large variety within the education system. The term gypsy has many negative connotations, mainly used negatively by the media, meaning that they are the most excluded ethnic group in British Society (Allen and Adams, 2012; Foster and Walker, 2013). With these shocking indications from other sources, it is no wonder that GRT communities have poor rates of achievement in education and poor levels of participation in education (Richardson and Ryder, 2012). This blog post will explore Gypsy Roma Travellers within an education context, highlighting the issues that they face and how we can possibly ...

The musical ceremonies were part of a project that Cardiff Metropolitan University conducted with multiple primary schools, as part of the iValueU App. My group worked with Deighton Primary School, in order to create a musical ceremony as part of the Spring Equinox. As highlighted by The Weather Channel (2015), the Spring Equinox is when the earth has exactly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night time. The sun is exactly perpendicular to the equator of the Earth. It was explained to us that our ancestors created musical ceremonies to celebrate the Spring Equinox and that we would be creating our own musical ceremony. Creativity can be described as making something new and entrepreneurial with an attitude of independence (Maley and Bolitho, 2015; Franklin, 2016). Sharp (2004, p.5) describes creativity as “imagination, originality, productivity, problem solving, producing an outcome of value or worth”. This supports Nair’s (2014) definition...