Inspired by experience to make the connection

Lunchtime is winding down at Intermediate School 292, in the notorious neighbourhood of East New York, in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City. A few kids are hanging out in Adeola Tella's classroom - because, I'm told, they prefer to avoid the noise and anarchic mess-making that prevails in the school cafeteria.

They dribble out as the bell rings. Very slowly, the 13- and 14-year-olds who are supposed to be there for social studies begin to dribble in: by the time the bell rings again to signal the start of class, the seats are less than half filled. As the late-coming majority straggles through the door, they're clued-in by their classmates: "Miss Tella says to get out our notes on the Irish Famine." One boy does an exaggerated blank stare.

"You know," says Levar Cooper, a bright-eyed boy who came to Brooklyn from Jamaica eight years ago. And he starts to rap from memory: "In 18 hundred and 41, my corduroy britches I put on . . ."

I've seen my last blank stare of the day, as the kids - just back from the Easter break, unaware until now that they're getting a visitor from Ireland - launch into a witty, wide-ranging and well informed discussion that spans the centuries and the planet. When, 40 minutes later, they get around to asking me questions, they're sensible ones about leprechauns and Orangemen.

I'm not sure what I was expecting. When I told one savvy New Yorker that I was heading to this locale to see how they teach the Great Irish Famine Curriculum, his response was along the lines of: "how they what the what what?" Schools like IS 292, he intimated, struggle to achieve their basic babysitting remit; but as for teaching . . .

My expectations weren't heightened either by Dr Alan J Singer, from the Hofstra University team that devised the curriculum with the help of piloting teachers like Adeola Tella. Tella told me that this relatively advanced group of her students were the ones who could read at something approaching their appropriate age level - they'd struggle, Singer said, to cope with a tabloid newspaper.

Clearly, neither Tella nor Singer were prepared to let these children's literacy limitations stand in the way. Within a broad social studies course that roams across US history, "they could focus on Ireland and the Famine because the curriculum gives them more hands-on things to do," Tella explains.

The activities have made some impression: not only can they sing about Poor Paddy's railway labours, but their pictures of an imagined Irish homestead line the walls and they're especially alert to ideas about migration - the pushes and the pulls.

That, anyway, is hardly surprising. Probably half of these children have immediate-family experience of immigrating to the US, and they're well-equipped to comment on how it works and how it compares to the Irish experience 150 years ago.

"It's easier now to get a better job, but the process of getting in is harder," says Tope Olajde from Nigeria. A classmate whose mother came from Ecuador is not so sure about the work: "My mother can't stand her job, but the only reason she can't leave it is because she can't talk English."

Immigrants in the US still face a lot of trouble, most agree, but Honduran Gloria Padilla sums up the rationale for migration, then and now: "If you've got money it's better over there. If you don't it's better over here."

Adeola Tella herself grew up in Nigeria, so she can relate to these East New York stories.

Not far away, at IS 119 in Glendale, Queens, is the workplace of teacher Rachel Gaglione, a New Yorker whose parents, both police officers, are of Italian and Panamanian extraction. Her fourth-floor classroom overlooks a tidy working-class neighbourhood where there are few faces with skin darker than her own; the vast cemetery in the middle distance helps create this white enclave. On this hazy day the Manhattan skyline on the horizon looks as real, and as relevant, as Oz.

But here, too, some of the students have direct experience of that journey over the rainbow, and can tell their classmates what it was like to be new in New York. Five of this group of 30 eighth-graders even have Irish roots. They're all studying immigration, and while the Famine material that was piloted here comes in handy, Gaglione makes sure the class gets beyond Ireland.

"The Irish material gives a good overview," she says. Poverty, travelling in steerage, facing discrimination on arrival here - these are common to many immigrant groups. The class divvies up to probe the more specific histories of other nationalities: "I get kids to do groups they're not a part of - this isn't a unit for them to learn about their own cultures."

Other issues, too, including the responsibilities of governments to suffering people (they avoid "British-bashing", she says), are covered.

"I showed them a very interesting article comparing the situation of Irish and Italians 100 years ago to the position of blacks and Latinos today," Gaglione says. She sent her students off to the school's English as a Second Language (ESL) class to interview kids there about their experiences.

The presentations about Ireland wrap up, and the class moves on to a discussion of slavery.

At the back of the class, Alan Singer is whispering to me: "There is loads of curriculum material on the Holocaust. Now there's this Irish Famine curriculum. But there's really nothing on slavery."

As one girl describes her planned project - to design a relevant monument for the slave-trading town of Savannah, Georgia - Singer explains: "The same network of teachers who worked with us on the Famine are now working on slavery." With dedicated teachers like Adeola Tella and Rachel Gaglione, some students are obviously in for a fascinating time.