Balbriggan teacher Cecelia wins Our World Irish Aid Award

A TEACHER at a Northside school has been announced as the winner of a national award. 

Cecelia Gavigan of Balbriggan Educate Together National School won Teacher of the Year in the prestigious 2018 Our World Irish Aid Awards. 

Minister for the Diaspora and International Development Ciarán Cannon made the announcement at the national final held at Dublin Castle, much to the delight of Cecelia’s pupils and colleagues.

Cecelia has been teaching at Balbriggan Educate Together National School since graduating from St Patrick’s College (now known as DCU Institute of Education). 

The award is recognition not only of the quality of her class group’s submission this year, but of the effort she has put into teaching her students about the important work of Irish Aid, as well as the energy and creativity that she has invested in the awards over the last four years.

The school’s project, which was entitled ‘Raising Awareness and Taking Action on the Global Goals’, was a comprehensive entry centred on UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) through work on plastic and fast fashion and SDG 13 (Climate Action).   

Cecelia’s class looked at two countries in particular: Uganda and Vietnam. 

They created posters and business cards and undertook peer teaching in their school.   

They also created a video to show their local community, emailed TDs, MEPs and their local county council, wrote a press release and distributed it to local news websites and created posts for their own school website.   

The group also staged a puppet show for the younger classes in their school to highlight how life for children in other countries is very similar to that of Irish children and how, by 2030, life could be even better for us all. 

Finally, the group created a rap and designed numerous posters that displayed their research and the issues affecting Irish Aid’s partner countries. 

Minister Cannon congratulated Ms Gavigan on her award. 

“The judges felt that Cecelia’s class group submitted an excellent project that showed an impressive understanding of a range of global challenges and how these challenges specifically affect developing countries,” he said.   

“They also felt that the pupils came up with a number of ideas for reducing waste and the use of plastic and communicated them well to their community.

“It is clear to me that the learning from the Our World Irish Aid Awards activities this year has had a significant impact on the Balbriggan Educate Together National School and on their wider community.”