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…

The Irish religious landscape is changing. Census data reveal that the percentage of those who identify as Catholic is in steady decline, while the proportion of those with no religion continues to rise. Christian religious practice in Ireland is also decreasing, especially among young people. Catholic schools, once the dominant provider of second…

This article overviews the contemporary context for teaching Religious Education (RE) in Ireland and profiles changing religious demographics in an increasingly secular context. It presents the findings of a two-year mixed-methods study undertaken in two third-level Catholic colleges in Ireland, investigating four hundred third-level Initial…

There has been extensive research internationally describing teachers' homogenous socio-demographic backgrounds and critiquing the associated equity and diversity issues, most especially with regard to ethnicity and gender, and to a lesser extent, social class and disability. Yet, teachers' religious affiliations and/or convictions have rarely…