The PEACE Programmes Learning Platform Level 1

Schools Faith and Culture proposal. As a Community Relations Youth Work charity, our hearts are still engaged in the hugely splintered Protestant and Catholic communities that co-exist side by side here and rarely get a chance to engage with each other or dialogue about the very subjects that divide us i.e. our faiths and our cultures. To this end we propose to work with a group of students from two post primary schools, on an interfaith, intercultural programme for one academic year. We will work in an informal education way both through the experiential work and group work. The participants will have the facility of recording each activity and their own reactions to it in a video diary format which will form the basis of debrief sessions after each event. Each participant will also be given a journal to keep of their journey through faith and culture. This will be a used to write their feelings or reactions to certain events. It will be used to write questions or observations in. They can also use it keep souvenirs in of each activity they attend e.g. football tickets, souvenirs from St Patricks Day parade, Souvenirs from band parade. Staff will collate these stories and publish this book as a living testament to what has been achieved. We are currently working with the Northern Ireland Open College Network to accredit this programme, so that the participants have a qualification to testify to their personal investment. For the Faith element of the programme we hope that the schools will point us in the direction of a local church that has strong links to each school, whom we can approach to set up some informal discussion sessions. These partners will help us engage with the participants in deeper level of interfaith dialogue, bringing the church perspective clearly into the equation. In our experience young people have huge suspicions and myths about each other’s churches. This programme will clearly demonstrate the thinking, vision and actual reality of each of the churches in this deeply segregated part of Belfast. In terms of the cultural part of this programme we have developed a deep and far reaching experiential element for the participants. This will clearly bring them out of their single identity comfort zones and face them with another lived reality in Northern Ireland. We are partnering with Antrim Gaelic Athletic Association, the Irish Football Association, the Orange Order, an Irish Medium school and Down District Band Association to help fulfil the objectives of this part of the programme. Over the course of the academic year the participants will have been supported, taught and mentored by each other’s churches, and will have experienced first-hand each other’s culture through the medium of sport, language and parades. The participants then will be given the opportunity to lead a session in their own school on the theme of contested faith and culture. Thus spreading their learning and hopefully causing a ripple effect in the school and with their peers.