Extract

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Travellers in Time: A Critical Dialogue With the Gypsy Travellers of Lancashire

ALETHEA MELLING AND YASMEEN ALI

Education is an act of love, and thus an act of courage.

(FREIRE, P., EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS, 2007, p. 33).

INTRODUCTION

The Traveller Communities of Lancashire are predominantly Romany and Irish. Their culture and language are oral rather than written. This not only limits the communities’ ability to access services, but also limits their ability to articulate their views and to understand their rights. This chapter seeks to explore how Freire’s pedagogy and the rich and colourful Traveller tradition of storytelling can be used successfully to engage the Traveller community in the production of a creative yet critical monologue that will facilitate not just reading, but reading their own reality and the development of a hopeful praxis. Moreover, it explores how the act of dialogue is an act of sharing a gift, the gift of education. In this chapter, we discuss how a group of undergraduates formed a learning community with the Travellers and how this became a vehicle for a new knowledge, leading to understanding, trust, and respect. ← 211 | 212 →

The Traveller community in the UK is complex and made up of a number of different ethnic and social groups. The generic term is Gypsy Travellers. This group consists of, first, Romany Gypsies, who have been recorded in the UK since the fifteenth century. They...