Dr Niamh Burke O’Connell's PhD thesis was a cross-national comparative study exploring formative assessment enactment in Ireland and Scotland and was supported by funding from the Teaching Council and The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment. Niamh was supervised by Dr Delma Byrne, Department of Sociology and Dr Majella Dempsey, Department of Education. Niamh is pictured here with her son Cuán at her graduation.
Dr Sharon Coffey graduated from the Doctor of Education with Specialism programme in March. Her doctoral research was titled "From Initiation to Implementation: A Case Study of Professional Development of Teachers in Ireland". This multi-site case study explored the experiences and perspectives of of fifteen teachers from five schools engaged in a professional development programme.
Dr Giles Barrow's PhD thesis elegantly argues for an alternative vision of education, one that elucidates the existential aspects of education through a notion of ‘encounter’ and employs soil, soul and society as ways of working through what is central to such a vision. The disssertation weaves narrative threads of Barrow’s own educational experience of becoming a farmer, and of being ‘taught’ by another, together with key concepts from educational theory, indigenous scholarship and phenomenology. Providing a unique critique of the discourse and practice of ‘product-orientated’ education which pervades both common sense and philosophical understandings of what schools and teachers do, the thesis moves from seeing education as ‘thing’ or ‘process’ with a defined end toward seeing it as an open-ended encounter that allows for (re)connection. Mobilising notions of natality, liminality and grownup-ness, Barrow speaks to how education can be understood as a place-based existential relationship with the world.