Community and identity in rural stand-alone schools: teachers’ and principals’ perspectives ...

In the past two decades Ireland has become increasingly diverse in a myriad of ways; religious, cultural and ethnic change have become significant features of Irish society (Darmody, Smyth & McCoy, 2012; CSO, 2016). Parekh (2005) notes the problems posed by multicultural societies are without parallel in history. Schools are right at the coalface, where changes in communities and shifting identities are experienced as part of the day-to-day practice. This thesis sets outs to explore how teachers and principals in rural stand-alone schools experience the shifting and increasing plurality of identities within their communities. Stand-alone schools were identified by the Report on the Forum for Patronage and Pluralism (Coolahan, Hussey and Kilfeather, 2012) as schools where choice was considered neither an option nor desirable and which it identified as having potentially unique challenges. Given the largely denominational composition of the primary school sector it is inevitable that diverse religious and belief identities, in particular, should come to the fore in public discourse. Irwin (2009) has identified how non-recognition or misrecognition may be experienced by children with diverse religious identities. However, questions of gender, sexual and cultural identity also increasingly emerge as issues with which primary schools grapple and where questions of recognition may emerge as challenging. In exploring questions of identity and recognition, the study views identity as a complex process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction in which individuals may move between different identities, or draw on different components of their identity (religious, ethnic, cultural, gender), depending on context and role. In particular, the thesis draws on concepts of boundary, periphery and community as significant to the processes of identification being explored (Jenkins, 2014; Barth, 2000; Cohen, 1982). Taking a phenomenological approach that focused on the lived experience of participants and the ways in which they constructed meaning from this experience, the study explored how 10 participants (5 teachers and 5 principals) in rural stand-alone schools in Galway, Roscommon and Mayo negotiated the plurality of identities that form part of their school community