Leaders or led? A qualitative analysis of how young people explore express and experiment via new media in an Irish higher education context

This paper provides a systematic review of students' multimedia projects and reveals how a complex web of institutional, local, global and gender issues influence the process of digital media creation by young adults. The significance of this research for this Special Issue lies in the study's longitudinal nature, which examined students' final-year multimedia productions over a 12-year period (2003–2014) in a university setting. The analysis provides a unique insight into how sociocultural norms, access to technology and institutional forces such as the curriculum and lecturers' subject area of expertise, as well as politics and Ireland's economic recession, have influenced and shaped student voices. It also provides the opportunity to track how the student voice changed and adapted in response to events both inside and outside the university and to identify areas of silence and question what they might mean. The potential for student-produced multimedia to carry gendered qualities, especially regarding audience orientation and media type, is highlighted. Student-produced multimedia artefacts and accompanying written documentation are analysed in terms of genre, media type, audience and purpose, with gender providing a useful overarching framework to further refine the analysis.     

Similarities and differences in collegiality/managerialism in Irish and Australian universities

In the collegial model the basis for appointment to senior management in the collegial model is nomination by a community of scholars, whereas it is by line management in the managerial one. This article focuses on the basis of appointments in universities and the gendering of such structures. Data are drawn from qualitative interviews with both men and women senior manager-academics at Dean level and above in Ireland and Australia (N = 44). In both countries the power of the President/Vice-Chancellor (VC) was very much as a Chief Executive Officer in the managerialist model, rather than the ‘primus inter pares’ of the collegial model. Moreover, Presidents/VCs controlled the appointments of Vice-Presidents/Deputy VCs and Deans and were seen as being able to affect the gender profile of senior management. However, in the Australian system (in contrast to the Irish one) there was no ambivalence about the VC actively rectifying gender inequalities in management. In a context where hybrid forms of management are emerging, this article questions the relevance of collegial/managerialist models in understanding the gendering of universities.     

They came with a purpose: educational journeys of nineteenth-century Irish Dominican Sister Teachers

Irish Catholic teaching sisters were major actors in the development of education systems in New World countries such as the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Immigrants themselves, they faced a number of key challenges as they sought to adapt Old World cultural and educational ideas to the education of the immigrant Irish in a new cultural, religious and educational context. A close examination of the wide range of sources available in private archives and elsewhere offers unique insights into the challenges facing 10 Irish Dominican Sister Teachers as they journeyed from Ireland to Dunedin to found primary and secondary schools in the young colony of New Zealand. This article examines their responses to their early experiences and the part they played in the development of a viable Catholic education system in nineteenth-century New Zealand.     

Selected Representations of Teachers and Teaching in Twentieth-century Anglo-Irish Fiction and Memoir: Some Literary-critical and Pedagogical Explorations

This paper has two complementary objectives. After providing some theoretical perspectives on fiction generally, and on the teaching of fiction more specifically, it firstly evaluates, from a literary-critical perspective, a reasonably representative selection of the portrayal of teachers and teaching in some twentieth-century Anglo-Irish fiction and memoir. That initial, literary-critical evaluation of the texts, while focusing on aspects of both form and theme, seeks also to uncover the fascinating spectrum of models of teaching represented, some benign, but many quite dark and even, to a degree, sinister. The second half of the paper then suggests a range of pedagogical strategies which could be used, in the sixth-form classroom, to explore the richness and complexities of those portraits and of the contexts against which they are written. That in-depth pedagogical exploration is closely informed by the specifications for AS and A-level English teaching provided by two representative Examination Boards – the Council for Curriculum Examinations and Assessment (CCEA), which is based in Northern Ireland, and the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) – and the exploration thus is linked closely to the demands and contexts for sixth-form English teaching both in Northern Ireland and in the UK as a whole.     

Cultural Nationalism,Gaelic Sunday and the Gaelic Athletic Association in Early Twentieth Century Ireland

To date, much of the established historical literature on the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the governing body of Gaelic games in Ireland, has focused on the potential or perceived political agency of the organisation. To this end, great swathes of work that has centred on early twentieth century Ireland has also examined the extent of the relationship the GAA had with other nationalist bodies in the country at that time, such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), or at the very least the role of GAA members who were also part of such groups. However, the GAA failed in fact to adopt any official ‘political’ position during this period, albeit with one notable exception – a mass demonstration that came to be referred to as ‘Gaelic Sunday’. The example of Gaelic Sunday will be used during the course of this article to demonstrate the actual position of the GAA during this time and in so doing temper the pervasive view abroad, one that the GAA is perhaps too willing to acquiesce with, that it somehow played something close to a defining role in the broader political and revolutionary pursuit of partial independence for Ireland. Rather, as this article will confirm, the GAA's role within early twentieth century Irish society, whilst undoubtedly revealing it to be a powerful nationalist body, remained nevertheless much more cultural than political in nature.     

Contested childhoods across borders and boundaries: Insights from curriculum provisions in Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in the 1920s

Conceptualisations and constructs of children and childhood are temporally and contextually grounded. Historical documents are rich sources of insight and understanding regarding how children were understood, valued and treated at various times by particular societies. This article explores the conceptualisation of children and childhood in the 26-county Irish Free State (South) and the 6-county Northern Ireland (North) in the 1920s following the partition of Ireland, through the lens of educational documentation, primarily national primary school curricula. The focus on both jurisdictions is interesting in the context of partition, exploring the sometimes divergent and often convergent ways in which children were conceptualised across borders and boundaries. This article reveals, using Sorin and Galloway’s framework as a conceptual and analytical tool, that conceptualisations of children were broadly similar in the North and South but differed in their focus and enactment in both fledgling states. These disparities are largely attributable to the very different political, social and religious orientations of both jurisdictions and the use of education as a vehicle for nation-building, as well as identity and gender formation. The article also explores alternative conceptualisations of children in education policy in the North and South by presenting case study ‘outliers’ of educational provision. A century since partition, conclusions and implications are noted that resonate with contemporary elements of convergence and divergence on educational policy and the conceptualisation of children across the island of Ireland.