This article discusses oral history sources that give insight into how a specific group of teaching sisters (also known as nuns or women religious) reflect on their primary identity as vowed women, and their professional identity as teachers. Their identity was bound up with the fact that they had taken religious vows, and entered a congregation…

From the mid-1960s, the teaching force in Catholic schools in Ireland that for so long had been composed primarily of members of religious orders began to change as a large number returned to the secular world and recruitment levels dropped rapidly. Concurrently there was an outpouring of order-focused hagiographic works. During the 1980s, a range…

This article examines some of the legacy of the Irish education pioneer Nano Nagle, foundress of the Presentation congregation of nuns. The congregation spread rapidly in the nineteenth century, not only in Ireland but also in Newfoundland, India, England, Tasmania, Australia and continental North America. This year, Presentation schools globally…

Irish Catholic teaching sisters were major actors in the development of education systems in New World countries such as the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Immigrants themselves, they faced a number of key challenges as they sought to adapt Old World cultural and educational ideas to the education of the immigrant…

The author explicates the life story of Anne Smyth, a deaf teacher in 19th-century Ireland. The story was written and published in 1858 by another deaf teacher, Charlotte Mary Kelly, who traced Anne Smyth's life trajectory from her birth to the day she began life in a deaf school until her untimely death at the age of 18 years. The study examines…

Over the last three decades, there has been a burgeoning of research on teacher identity. While the various bodies of work produced are very valuable, further lines of enquiry need to be pursued in order to take account of the complexities involved. This paper on the conception, construction, and maintenance of the identity of Roman Catholic…

This article examines the biographies and personal records of nineteenth-century Catholic nuns who worked in education, with a view to determining how they reconciled their individuality with the demands of religious life. Their resistance to rules, and the ways in which they wrestled with the vow of obedience, is examined. The roles of the Novice…

A body of scholarship on the history of the lives of Catholic teaching sisters has thrown up various challenges to educational historians. One challenge can be posed by asking how teaching sisters were able to go on to take up leadership positions. This is prompted by the observation that a particular body of literature for the period 1940-1965…

This paper gives an overview of the educational climate in which schools established by Catholic teaching orders of women were founded, and then moves to a close examination of the unusual position of "convent" schools that applied to join the non-denominational National System. In an attempt to provide a particularly close analysis of…

The Brothers of the Christian Schools, popularly known in the United States as Christian Brothers, have made numerous significant contributions to the development of Catholic education. Building and staffing schools, colleges, and orphanages, producing textbooks and catechetical materials, advocating for the poor, and creating new models of…

In 1802, Edmund Rice directed the laying of the foundation stone for Mount Sion Monastery and School. After several previous attempts of instructing poor boys in Waterford, this was to be the first permanent home for the Congregation of Christian Brothers. Rice's dream of founding a religious community of brothers was becoming a reality with a…

Looking back over the past 5 decades of adult education at University College, Cork, one is struck by the realities of continuity and change as the guiding rationale moved from Roman Catholic reconstructionism to community partnership and empowerment. Structures put in place under President O'Rahilly's sponsorship persisted so robustly they…