The study applies the lens of the ethics of care to understanding pedagogical practice in higher education. It addresses the dilemmas of building and maintaining caring relationships between academic staff and mature students transitioning from further education to a university programme delivered online. Teacher care is considered an important…

This article undertakes a critical appraisal of learning design and its relation to ethical ideas of care. We give an account of three personae of near future learning designers, developed using speculative methods, seeded with real-world data comprising job advertisements and validated with learning designers. The personae illustrate conflicts…

Set against a context where care for the person, others, and the world in which we live receives increasing attention in the policy and practice nexus, this paper sets out to explore how "care" is understood and reflected in Irish educational legislation, policies, circulars and curricula. The importance of focusing on care has been…

All schools possess a duty of care towards their students. However, this duty of care falls unevenly across schools, with those serving low-income communities often responding to the material and psychological effects of poverty as a priority. This duty of care for such schools was placed into stark relief during the period of COVID-19 school…

Available research suggests autistic mothers experience greater dissatisfaction with maternity care compared to non-autistic mothers. Limited research exists exploring autistic mothers' experiences of maternity care, and no research to date has considered maternity care professionals' experiences of delivering care to autistic mothers. This…

Recent policy in Ireland enhanced the position of school placement in Initial Teacher Education programmes. This paper considers how care ethics has a vital role in sustaining the goodwill of the cooperation and guidance from professionals who mediate the school placement setting, noting values of reciprocal caring in placement mentor-mentee roles…

Internationally, there is a growing recognition of teacher educators acting as both agents of and subjects to centrally devised policy reforms. In an Irish context, in which a rhetoric of policy veils teacher accountability behind standards/codes of professionalism, this study sets out to explore how professionalism is communicated to pre-service…

The paper analyses how educators employed on non-permanent contracts in the non-compulsory education sector in Ireland have fared during the COVID-19 pandemic. These employees were starting from a low base in relation to the terms and conditions of their employment when their places of work dramatically pivoted online in March 2020. We argue the…

This study used a personal oriented approach to identify distinct combinations of children's experiences of bullying and victimisation in the Irish primary school context. The study investigated the social and emotional characteristics that predicted those profiles at individual and classroom levels. The sample of 2,062 participants was drawn from…

This article reports on a case study conducted in an urban post-primary school setting, which investigated a teaching and learning group, called a T&L Club, as a model of sustainable professional development for teachers. The group consisted of 18 members from a whole staff of 90 teachers and had been in existence for four years at the time of…

This article focuses on the development of the Altruism Scale for Children (ASC). Analyses revealed a one-factor model with internal consistency of 0.89 and test-retest reliability of 0.94. The authors also discuss the implications for using the instrument for assessing the need for interventions and measuring program outcomes.

In March 2020 when life as we know it changed, we adhered to a new set of rules and a new normal that COVID-19 imposed on not only the population of Ireland but on the entire world. Throughout this experience, the co-authors of this paper engaged in a series of phone, email, Zoom and WhatsApp conversations, reflecting on how their lives changed…

Schools have a duty of care to children that extends beyond educational performance to include wellbeing and welfare. Yet, research has highlighted the tensions that arise when 'care' and 'learning' are treated as binaries, especially when schools operate within unequal socio-­economic conditions. Extended COVID-19 school closures brought these…

The role of schools in developing values is internationally recognised, with many systems grappling to identify and embed values in schools. Within an Irish context, the Education Act (1998) frames values from the perspective of 'characteristic spirit', giving responsibility to boards of management to uphold the characteristic spirit as…

As schools and universities worldwide tentatively move beyond an initial emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the prospect of socially-distanced learning spaces prompts us to ask how we can maintain good educational relationships. Supporting students in a time of far-reaching changes means acknowledging that certain normalised practices,…