Dr. Karl Kitching:

I thank the Chairman for the opportunity to speak today. I am very conscious of the privilege I have as a member of the settled community speaking among members of the Traveller community. I am also conscious of the voices that are not here today. I will speak about one educational proposal that would align with the work of the Traveller culture and history Bill.

Members of the Traveller community in Ireland are routinely presented in statistics on formal education as deficient, underachieving and underparticipating learners. Community-based State support can maintain this deficit representation of Travellers if they seek to fit communities into a school-shaped box instead of examining what and who are valued by schools and education policy and bridging home and school cultures in a meaningful way. Members of settled communities such as me should never allow statistics on Traveller participation and achievement at formal education mask the everyday community learning of which Traveller children, young people and families are part. Furthermore, we must recognise that institutionalised anti-Traveller racism, as a number of people have said today, is the cause of problems in formal education and beyond.

As a society we need to take more account of the fact that, as Professor Sonia Nieto argues, children learn how to learn as defined within their own particular cultural context. It is quite clear that the ways of learning and thinking about the world that are valued in our schools reflect the culture of the majority of the white settled population. We know the community wisdom and cultural literacy that Traveller children and young people have developed to negotiate their world are rarely used in their formal education. This places them at a systemic disadvantage. One simple example of this from my supervision of teaching practice in schools with student teachers is how those teachers when teaching students about the Irish language topic of "sa bhaile" almost always present their learners with vocabulary regarding a two-storey house but never a caravan, a halting site or even a flat. Schools and teachers need to be able to bridge who students are with the economic demands and social expectations that society places on them. In other words, they need to make education relevant to all students and not just those whose received cultural norms and biographies are similar to their own.

Community wisdom and community cultural literacy are described by Professor Luis Moll as funds of knowledge. He states that funds of knowledge are historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being and, of course, community functioning and well-being. Professor Moll and his colleagues developed systematic projects with schools and Latin American families whereby teachers visited and carried out in-depth research in their students' communities, examined classroom practices, held after-school study groups for teachers and brought in community members to speak at schools.

The type of knowledge explored by teachers with communities in funds of knowledge projects include economic and household management, such as making, saving and spending money, childcare budgeting and paying bills, oral traditions and storytelling, play and physical activity, religious practices and moral codes, food and cooking, negotiating institutions such as schools and hospitals, mechanical and technological knowledge, such as repairing engines or using smart devices, animals and the environment and issues with regard to horse care, pollution, safety and protection.

When brought into schools these kinds of knowledge can form the basis of a whole year's worth of literacy work, numeracy activities and historical and human geography lessons. There are practical examples of how community knowledge can be brought into the classroom and how formal school learning can be enhanced by doing so. For example, in the research of Hughes and Greenhough, parents were asked to encourage their child to decorate a shoebox and fill it with items such as photographs, toys, postcards, a book or magazine, some writing or pictures, and anything else special to him or her. This can be used in a simple way to introduce children to their new teacher at the start of the school year, or the teacher can use the contents of shoeboxes across the curriculum. In a maths lesson, for example, the items can be weighed and measured. In a history lesson, children could exchange boxes and ask what could be told about their owners from their contents. A most obvious area is in literacy, whereby a teacher can design weeks of writing around the contents of shoeboxes. Funds of knowledge cannot be reduced to a nice little shoebox that can be put on a shelf, however. Rather, they require ensuring that teachers are active co-researchers with the marginalised communities they teach. I am saying "teachers" assuming most of them are not members of the Traveller community.

The concept of teachers as researchers of their own practice is becoming increasingly common in our schools through the work of the Teaching Council and other forums, yet teachers' engagement with students' communities, such as the Traveller community, is often limited to the work of home-school liaison teachers. This represents a missed opportunity for teachers, who are overwhelmingly white and settled, to understand the lived experience of Traveller children and to move more practically beyond all too common assumptions of Traveller learners as deficient. Failure to systemically use a funds of knowledge approach presents a missed opportunity to have the wealth of Traveller community knowledge take a meaningful place in schools and for more honest classroom and professional conversations about the racism Travellers experience to be held in schools.

National and cultural guidelines for schools, which have never been supported by systemic professional development for teachers, are simply not enough. I propose that we seize the opportunity to establish a funds of knowledge commission, designed in a similar way to the recent schools excellence fund, as a new element of Irish education policy. The purpose of this commission would be to fund teachers but, more important, Traveller communities to co-develop projects on how Travellers' community knowledge and cultural literacy can be brought more effectively and systematically into the classroom and used to inform and reshape formal school learning. I propose that this commission prioritise funding applications from school communities with greater proportions of Traveller communities in the first instance. The notion of a commission indicates this work would be a valued part of systematic education policy to ensure policy discourse on Traveller education outcomes never starts from a negative deficit position and recognises the debt the education system and Irish society owe to Travellers owing to the failure to engage on and challenge institutional racism. Ultimately, the commission would seek to produce a range of materials documenting insights into Traveller culture literacies and community knowledge and ways in which schools need to fundamentally reconsider how formal literacy and a variety of cultural literacies, including those of the Traveller communities, must be aligned.