Great Blasket Islands A Microcosm of Irish Culture and Heritage

Description

People Are Culture’s curriculum brings to life the subjects of Geography, History, Social Studies, and World Cultures with engaging, thought-provoking, and inspiring stories of real people around the world. Our interviews and feature profiles reveal the meaning and relevance of traditions and customs, and demonstrate the real-life impact of historical events and social change. Students can see life through the eyes of real people around the world with lessons that are authoritative, first-person accounts of people describing their own cultures.

People Are Culture’s content aligns with all ten of the National Social Studies standards.

NO AI is used in creating our material. Each interview and article was made in collaboration with the individuals featured, who reviewed and approved the piece prior to publication.

Included in this People Are Culture Reading & Reflection Assignment Module are four elements:

• General Overview of Cultural Identity
• Overview of Landscapes & Cultural Identity | Reflection Prompts
• 17-page PDF interview with Irish ethnographer Daithí de Mordha
• Reflection Assignment | Takeaways from Great Blasket Islands A Microcosm of Irish Culture and Heritage
• Each lesson is likely to take a student three hours to do the readings and complete the comprehension/reflection exercises.

In this interview about the Great Blasket Islands, you will hear personal stories and insights from Daithí de Mordha’s life of studying these islands’ history, including:

• An overview of the Great Blasket Islands’ unique position as Europe’s western edge, inhabited for 500 years until government evacuation in 1953, home to a community that peaked at 200 people living without electricity, shops, or resident priests, yet still producing renowned “People’s Literature” in the Irish language during the 1920s-1930s
• A description of traditional Blasket life shaped by the sea and landscape, ranging from a blend of pre-Christian beliefs with Christian practices to fishing customs governed by superstitions about luck
• An explanation of the cultural split between Ireland’s English-speaking urban East and Irish-speaking rural Gaelic West in the 19th-20th centuries, and how the Blasket Islands showed this divide while also serving as a microcosm of Irish rural life
• Personal reflections on emigration as cultural death, with entire generations leaving for the US and never returning home, and both the emotional and economic effects of emigration

Expected Learning Outcome:

This lesson includes clear expected learning outcomes that support students in understanding cultural identity through first-person perspectives, while building intercultural awareness and connections between individual experience and global traditions.

• Students will identify and describe key cultural practices and beliefs from the lesson’s focus community (i.e., Irish culture).
• Students will articulate insights into their own cultural identities and how those identities relate to what they learned.
• Students will analyze how cultural expressions (like landscapes) reflect values, history, and social traditions.
• Students will compare perspectives across cultures while finding similarities and differences through human themes.
• Students will make connections between cultural traditions and broader global contexts (emigration, cultural preservation), showing critical thinking about identity and intercultural understanding.