ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the ethnicity framework, and addresses issues only touched on by other students of Travellers’ ethnic identity. Junior Post-Primary Education Centre for Travellers (JEC) must become minority interest schools, treating special needs within this framework; and mainstream placement within an intercultural system must become the norm. The chapter demonstrates continuities between Traveller children’s school performances, and historic distortions in Travellers’ management of identity and in their relations with the dominant group. It examines the links between classroom practice and official discourse, proven by the take-up of communication from local to national level. Historically and in the classroom, Travellers’ resistance struggles have been, and are about identity and power/knowledge: how they want to name themselves, to control their lives. Linguistic differences, in length and structure of sentences, in the sequencing of strings of sentences and strings of events, indicated interesting research possibilities in relation to Traveller children’s language use and culture.
