This article argues that making dance performance is a resourceful means of self-production that is an aspect of resilience, through interrelationship, and that making dance is an act of resilience in the context of the social, cultural, and historical struggle that continues in the lives of people with learning disabilities. The argument is made…

In recent years, and particularly with the emergence of cultural history,historians of education have begun to adopt a wide variety of theoretical approaches to their scholarship. Notwithstanding this, cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) remains underutilised in the field of history of education, despite being employed widely in other…

In the current study, we investigated the developmental dynamics between positive youth development, being bullied in adolescence, gender, and sociocultural risk factors. Participants were 3,509 males (49%) and 3,656 females (51%) studied longitudinally across the ages of 9, 13, and 17 years in the Growing Up in Ireland study. Using structural…

As legal structures for same-sex relationships are introduced in many contexts, the politics of sexuality are negotiated along religious/secular lines. Religious and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBT-Q) rights are pitted against one another such that LGBT-Q lives often assumed to be secular. Schools are crucibles of intermingling…

Drawing on teaching manuals, government reports and school inspectors' reports from the 1830s up to the early twentieth century, this paper traces the changing conceptual and social distance between childhood and adulthood in Ireland. Using Norbert Elias's figurational approach, it is argued that children became increasingly involved in both…

This paper presents an analysis of primary schoolchildren's attitudes to the Irish language, Gaeilge, in the context of national policy in the Republic of Ireland. In particular, the study examines the factors (social, cultural, cognitive and organisational) that may be related to a pronounced excess in disengagement with Irish over and above…

Countries with similar levels of economic development often implement different education ICT policies. Much of the existing research attributes such differences to economic and political factors. In this paper, we examine the development of ICT policy and implementation in the two parts of Ireland and in two Canadian provinces and find that…

Existing knowledge of supplementary education, that is education organised and run by political, faith or ethnic groups outside of formal schooling, is patchy. This article is an exploration of the histories of supplementary education in the twentieth century. It is organised into three sections. The article begins by reviewing some existing…

In Ireland and the UK it is accepted practice that agencies with formal responsibility for delivering school examinations allow examination candidates, and in many cases their teachers, to see their examination papers once they have been marked. Returned papers can carry various pieces of information; as well as the total score given for a…

Until relatively recently, the focus of research, policy and intervention responses to abuse and violence within families has been almost exclusively on the behaviour of adults rather than on the violence within families carried out by children and adolescents. As a consequence, the aggressive and violent behaviour of children and adolescents at…

The purpose of this article is to explore children's perceptions and experiences of safety and risk in one highly contested interface area in Belfast. Interface areas are landscapes divided by physical and symbolic boundaries on the basis of religious/ethno-national identification. The research draws on maps and focus group discussions with young…

This paper strives to provide an insight into the multifaceted relationships that young people have, examining the social, cultural and institutional discourses, which shape their lives. We set out to discuss, from an empirical poststructuralist perspective, the way in which Irish adolescents write about the reality of their lives and privilege…

Ideas relating to identity and belonging are central to the public discourse around citizenship that has emerged in Ireland and internationally in recent years. One thread of that discourse relates to the role of national identity in societies that are increasingly diverse and multicultural. In view of the growing importance of citizenship…

This volume contains papers submitted to the 12th Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES), held in Sofia and Nessebar, Bulgaria, in June 2014, and papers submitted to the 2nd International Partner Conference, organized by the International Research Centre 'Scientific Cooperation,' Rostov-on-Don,…