THE growth in Irish medium education in recent years has been matched only by the wealth of books and online resources now available to the classroom.
Long gone are the days of black and white photocopied pages. Now children sit down to colourful well-designed books and education packs, thanks to An tÁisaonad, which is based in St Mary’s University College on the Falls Road. Their large office space at the college is an Aladdin’s Cave filled with shelves of brightly animated publications for primary school children.
Started in 1998 and part-funded by Foras na Gaeilge, An tÁisaonad is today managed by Ciarán Ó Pronntaigh. He leads a small team who work closely with teachers from Irish medium schools to produce the full curriculum from early years reading material to books on History, Geography and Science. An tÁisaonad has been so successful in recent years that they now sell as many books in the Republic as they do in the North.
“Everything that a child sees today is in English,” says Ciarán. “So we try and provide as much as we can in Irish, to show them that there is an alternative. If everything they see is in English they can become dazzled by this, so we try to do some dazzling ourselves in Irish.”
Aingeal Nic an tSábhaisigh is a former teacher and principal and now works as the Education Advisor at An tÁisaonad.
“When I started teaching 20 years ago, teachers were making their own resources, making photocopies of books,” she said. “I remember having 13 children in my class and 11 different reading books and I didn’t have more than two copies of any book and they were random things that I got out of the library or people had donated. They weren’t particularly appropriate sometimes for the level of the children that I was teaching, but it was a book that was in Irish.
“Now we have these beautiful, colourful books that kids want to hold and want to engage with and you want them to have an equally fulfilling experience in a Gaelscoil as they would have in an English medium school anywhere in the world.”
Aingeal says that while An tÁisaonad’s work began with books, it has now broadened out to board games and digital content.
“We have several websites that we run which provide a wealth of materials,” said Aingeal. “We also provide apps for C2K – the computer system for all the schools – which is very interactive, and we want our content to be as good or better than what’s available for English medium primary schools. Education has developed so much over the last ten years and in the last five or six years there’s a real speed of change which has really increased and we’ve got to take that on board too and we’ve got to make our education provision relevant to the children and stay ahead of the curve.”
LE CHÉILE: Aingeal Nic an tSábhaisigh, Ciarán Ó Pronntaigh agus Gabhán Ó Dochartaigh
Ciarán added: “One of the things that we do on C2K, is produce a daily news resource, which is a news story. So, if there is an earthquake, we will bring in the geography element and the scientific element explaining how earthquakes work, so we will tie it into the children’s learning.
“It helps them gather new vocabulary which is relevant, and they can listen back to it, even if they maybe found the text difficult to read. This helps reinforce that new vocabulary. Children will hear it quite often on the news in English and the first time they will not know what an earthquake is, for example, but the second time they will. It is the same in Irish. You’ve got to give them chances to repeat that experience.”
Last week An tÁisaonad held a very successful conference in St Mary’s University College on IT in primary schools, with the event conducted entirely through Irish.
“That was the first Irish medium conference on all things ICT for the primary school sector conducted through Irish,” said Aingeal. “For years I’ve been going to Google conferences and Microsoft and all these training sessions and everything has been in English, but then you go home and try and figure out how much you can do in Irish with your class and how you can work round this.
“We were really happy with last week’s conference and had a really big uptake from teachers, but I think it is because Irish medium teachers were realising that we have all this ICT stuff available in Irish and we were bringing all the bodies that were working on that together and getting the message out.”
With the number of pupils going through the doors of Irish medium schools continuing to rise year on year, it looks certain that the team at An tÁisaonad will be busy for the foreseeable future, adding to their rich catalogue of reading material and inspiring young minds in the process.
And it surely won’t be long before they run out of shelf space at their burgeoning St Mary’s facility.
