Voices of Change: Ireland and the Wider World · 6th Year

Active learning ideas

Pre-Famine Ireland: Society & Economy

Active learning works for this topic because students need to confront the human stories behind the statistics of the Famine. Through mapping and debate, they move from abstract facts to lived experiences, making the economic and social structures concrete and memorable. Role-play and collaboration help them grasp how policies and systems functioned in real lives, not just as textbook concepts.

• NCCA Curriculum Specifications
• NCCA: Primary - Social, cultural and aspects of everyday life
• NCCA: Primary - Continuity and change over time

• 45–60 min
• Pairs → Whole Class
• 3 activities

Activity 01

• Role Play
• 60 min · Small Groups

Role Play: A Pre-Famine Village Council

Assign students roles such as tenant farmer, landlord's agent, shopkeeper, and landless laborer. Present a scenario, like a poor harvest, and have them debate solutions and their impacts from their assigned perspectives.

Analyze the factors that made Ireland vulnerable to a potato crop failure.

Facilitation Tip

In the Coffin Ships Think-Pair-Share, assign pairs deliberately to mix students who processed the statistics quickly with those who need more time to reflect on human stories.

• Apply
• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Social Awareness
• Self-Awareness

Activity 02

• Concept Mapping
• 45 min · Pairs

Primary Source Analysis: Cottier Diaries

Provide excerpts from diaries or accounts of cottier families. Students work in pairs to identify daily struggles, diet, and economic pressures, then share their findings with the class.

Compare the daily life of a tenant farmer to that of a landlord in pre-Famine Ireland.

• Understand
• Analyze
• Create
• Self-Awareness
• Self-Management

Activity 03

• Concept Mapping
• 50 min · Individual

Mapping Land Ownership

Using historical maps of Irish counties, students color-code land ownership to visualize the concentration of land in the hands of a few, contrasting it with the small plots farmed by tenants.

Explain how the 'cottier' system contributed to widespread poverty.

• Understand
• Analyze
• Create
• Self-Awareness
• Self-Management

A few notes on teaching this unit

Experienced teachers approach this topic by grounding abstract economic policies in personal narratives. Avoid presenting the Famine as inevitable, as this can oversimplify the human choices that worsened the crisis. Research suggests that role-play and debate build critical thinking, while mapping exercises help students visualize spatial inequalities. Always connect classroom discussions to the present by asking how systems of power and inequality persist today.

By the end of these activities, students will explain the systemic causes of the Famine’s devastation, not just the crop failure. They will connect economic policies to human outcomes and critique historical decisions using evidence from primary and secondary sources. Collaborative tasks should show improved ability to debate nuanced historical arguments and analyze primary documents.

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Watch Out for These Misconceptions

• During the gallery walk of local records in the Blight Map activity, watch for students assuming the Famine only affected rural western counties.

  Have students track the number and types of records from each county on a class chart, then discuss why urban areas like Dublin also show high numbers of deaths and emigration records.

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Methods used in this brief

• Role Play
• Concept Mapping