With increased accessibility to digital video equipment, there has been notable interest in exploring how this might support practice and pedagogy across many education sectors. In recent years video has been found to offer many opportunities to study and support teacher professional development. This paper examines the potential for digital…

This paper documents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an online learning community (OLC), within the Republic of Ireland, which set out to support student teachers in a hybrid space during their school placement experience. Guided by qualitative research, data collection methods included interviews and analysis of students' forum…

Class swapping is the process whereby a generalist primary school teacher with a particular subject expertise and interest swaps classes with a teacher colleague and they teach each other's class a specific area of the curriculum. Instances of class swapping for physical education (PE) have been noted in many countries, but there is currently no…

Classroom drama in the Irish primary school context remains a relatively new endeavour and is largely under-researched. The knowledge base for all aspects of teacher education should be informed by rigorous reflection on teachers' experiences in the classroom. This paper reports on a phenomenological study conducted with seven Irish primary school…

Central to successful learning and teaching is assessment. Therefore, this small-scale, Irish, cross-border research project investigates the assessment of and satisfaction with school-based placements as experienced by a sample of primary and post-primary students and their college tutors. The resultant connections between such professional…

This article discusses the findings of a large scale mixed-methods study (2006-2010) conducted on a variety of early professional experiences of beginning primary teachers in the Republic of Ireland.

Bridge21 is an innovative approach to learning for secondary education that was originally conceptualised as part of a social outreach intervention in the authors' third-level institution whereby participants attended workshops at a dedicated learning space on campus focusing on a particular model of technology-mediated group-based learning. This…

In this article, the author describes how to bring Paulo Freire (or his ideas) into a learning group that visits the Botanic Gardens as part of a horticultural course and how her experiences at an art exhibition on two different occasions (both in Ireland and Sweden) impacted on her work as a teacher. As a result of working with students and…