CLOSING REMARKS

BY HOLLY COWMAN Director of International Engagement, MIC

I write these remarks some time after the dust has settled on the first Africa Day at MIC to be organised by students from Africa. My heart was full after the event – full of awe and delight, having witnessed a celebration and recognition of the determination required to overcome the significant challenges involved in leaving Africa to come and live in Ireland.

It is very clear from events like Africa Day how much we all stand to learn by giving space to stories like those beautiful, moving accounts that were shared by Linda Kirwisa and Princess Odunola Ayedemi, to new research such as Florence Ajala’s on the lived experiences of Nigerian immigrant mothers, and to robust discussions such as those that were so skilfully facilitated on the day by our postgraduate students, Edith Ike-Eboh and Austine Umele as well as by Trish Rainsford, of the Irish Bahá’l Office of Public Affairs.

I reflected afterwards on just how much Limerick has transformed and how much Mary Immaculate College has grown, in every sense, in recent years. When I joined the staff at MIC in 2007, we had an Africa Day celebration each year, organised through the President’s Office, where I worked. Our President at the time, the late Prof. Peadar Cremin, was a thought leader in Development Education in Ireland and internationally and he hosted this event to give a platform to MIC’s students who had engaged in an Additional Educational Experience (AEE) in Zambia and the Gambia to speak about their experiences. Pretty much without exception, all of our students were white, Irish students at that time. I couldn’t help but reflect on how happy Prof. Cremin would have been to have witnessed Africa Day 2022, which had as a backdrop a new, richer, more diverse Ireland, while foregrounding the experiences of our keynote speakers about themes central to those who left Africa to come here. Dr John Lannon, CEO of Doras, eloquently captured some of the changes in this country and how policies, supports and attitudes, in some cases, need to catch up with the changes and how we need to remember the message ‘Diversity = Strength.’

While the demographics related to nationality and race of Bachelor of Education programmes in Ireland still remain relatively homogenous due to the Irish language requirement, our other undergraduate and particularly our postgraduate programmes at MIC benefit from the contributions of a great many international perspectives from around the world and our student body includes students from many African countries, including Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria and Tanzania and we have had, or will soon have, staff and student exchanges with universities in Algeria, Lesotho, Morocco and Tanzania. We are working to expand this list further in the coming years. We hope that this first Africa Day to be organised by our students from Africa will be one of many and that it will become a chance to showcase the research of many more of our students over the years to come.

Something else that Africa Day highlighted was what very talented, well-spoken, highly-organised students we have at MIC, as exemplified by Lylian Fotabong and Florence Ajala. Along with their fellow-organiser, Linda Kirwisa, they worked so hard to ensure that everything ran smoothly but they also created such a sense of joy and fun around the event that it all seemed effortless.

Thank you again to all of our colleagues, students and friends who made the day such a success and congratulations, in particular, to Lylian, Florence and Linda.

A word frequency list was drawn from the report of Africa Day 2022 conference in MIC as shown in Figure 2 below (one out of 50 pages highlighting the most frequent words used at the conference). From this word list, a word cloud analysis was performed using TagCrowd app as illustrated below in Figure 1. This helped to summarise the views and understanding of the conference attendees, detect new areas to target, discover important issues, while also visualising their feelings about the topics that were presented and providing feedback on Africa Day.

Some of the top views are represented below in this word cloud: