The long-taught history of social work may be missing an important part of its root system. Groups of religious sisters were doing work similar to early English settlement houses years before Toynbee Hall, yet were left out of the history possibly due to their gender, religion, and ethnicity. Using original historic writings and illustrations,…

In 2007, a new model of state-run primary schools was established in Ireland in response to growing pluralism in this country. These are publicly-managed, multidenominational schools with the Irish state, through the Education and Training Boards (ETB) as their patron. School ethos is inclusive, striving to ensure that beliefs of all children are…

This article gives voice to students of minority faith and worldview regarding their lived experiences of attending Irish post-primary schools with a Catholic ethos. The importance of listening to students' voice is supported by Article 12 of the United Nations Charter on the Rights of the Child (1992). The research methodology was qualitative,…

Childhood studies place emphasis on children's agency, their ability to understand their own world and act upon it. Children actively participate in meaningful social interactions in both formal and informal settings. Considering recent large-scale migration in Ireland, it is vital to understand how children interact in an increasingly diverse…

This article is a contribution to the discussion of learning processes in religious education (RE) classrooms. Sociocultural theories of learning, understood here as tool-mediated processes, are used in an analysis of three RE classroom conversations. The analysis focuses on the language tools that are used in conversations; how the tools mediate;…