Accommodation centres for those seeking asylum present particular contexts in which to facilitate music making. Contextual and systemic difficulties abound. An exploration of a music project within six asylum seeker centres in Ireland is presented with a focus on the experiences of the four facilitators involved. Data are presented from…

This McCloy Lecture sheds light on the "hidden profession" of Physical Education Teacher Educators (PETEs) by sharing my perspectives on the challenges and opportunities faced by PETE scholars and teachers globally. I begin with an overview of my biography and how it has influenced my thinking about PETE. I present some scholarly…

When developing case studies within a longitudinal study of special educational needs provision within the Republic of Ireland, the authors were conscious of the critiques of the use of this approach within educational research. The difficulties associated with generalisation, challenges of ensuring trustworthiness and the possibilities of…

Access to current research materials, pedagogical best practices, and relevant knowledge has become problematic as journal subscription costs have increased. Increasing delays in the traditional publication timeline, coupled with high subscription costs, have resulted in a diminished ability for IS faculty and their students to access the most…

This article is a narrative résumé of a year-long collaborative critical inquiry into teaching methods with teachers of modern languages in Irish secondary schools. Putting myself, a cultural stranger and first-time qualitative researcher, at the core of this self-study, I discuss first the context and methodological framework of the study to…

Peer observation of teaching (POT) has become common practice in many universities. However, it could be argued that existing models often have limited scope for understanding the student experience. This study presents a modified approach to POT in which the researchers adopted the roles of (1) lecturer, (2) peer-participant and (3)…

The research project described in this article began because two early childhood organisations, one in England and the other in Ireland, were interested in sharing their ideas about pedagogy. The proposal was to collect data about pedagogic perspectives and practices from one preschool setting linked to each organisation so that similarities and…

Drawing on a research study of formative assessment practices in Irish schools, this paper traces the design, development and pilot of the Assessment for Learning Audit instrument (AfLAi)--a research tool for measuring teachers' understanding and deployment of formative teaching, learning and assessment practices. Underpinning the paper is an…

The seminar, organised by Joan Cutting and Brona Murphy, aimed: (1) to bring together researchers involved in both emergent and established academic corpora (written and spoken) as well as linguists, lecturers and teachers researching in education, be it language teaching, language-teacher training or continuing professional development in…

This article outlines how I, as a primary teacher engaging with a self-study action research process, have come to a deeper understanding of my practice. It explains how I have also come to an understanding of why I work in the way I do; of how this understanding influences my work, and the significance of this new understanding. My work as a…

This study examines the perspectives of teacher tutors on the value of the online components of PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education) courses at the University of Ulster. The work has been undertaken as part of the ESRC-funded project, "A Values-based Approach to Teacher Education." It is set within the value-laden contexts of…

This paper reports on a model in which graduate students were encouraged to regard their classrooms as laboratories to replicate earlier research on the use of examples in teaching concepts. The De Cecco and Crawford (1974) concept teaching model, which requires teachers to define the attributes and values of concepts and to reduce the number of…

This paper describes the reactions of graduate secondary school student teachers to an experiment which required them to evaluate specified techniques and theories of teaching and learning as part of their classroom practice. The aim of the experiment was to: (1) improve the quality of their judgments about pupils; (2) acquire variety in teaching…

This report describes a course in the Irish student-teacher curriculum that was designed in response to criticisms of post-graduate teacher training that it was too theoretical and insufficiently practical. The design of the Applied Psychology of Instruction course was based on the teacher-as-researcher paradigm of professionalism. Student…

Presents a personal reflection on an ethnographic study of teaching and learning practices in Irish traditional music. Describes the aims and methods of the study and some of the culture of Ireland. Concludes with a rumination on the nature of truth, applicability, consistency and the role of the ethnographic researcher. (MJP)