Education Research Collection

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 79
  • Publication
    Peigí's Adventures in Science
    (UCD, 2021-10-01) ;
    Peigí’s Adventures in Science represents an innovative collaboration between two UCD staff members, Dr Shane Bergin, a physicist and Dr Declan Fahie a teacher educator and former primary school teacher. The four stories offer an age-appropriate introduction to social justice and science themes. Designed specifically for junior classes, issues of fairness and equity, in tandem with science topics like space, travel, environmental awareness and growing things, are explored gently through the medium of story. The central character, Peigí the cocker spaniel, is the common thread throughout the four stories and her adventures provide the young reader with engagement and excitement while highlighting both the everyday nature of science and the importance of treating others with care and consideration.
      15
  • Publication
    Affective Equality and Social Justice
    The nurturing that produces love, care, and solidarity constitutes a discrete social system of affective relations. Because the relational realities of nurturing and caring constitute a distinct form of social practice, the affective system is a site of political import, separate from, though intersecting with economic, political, and cultural systems. This chapter claims that affective relations are not social derivatives in matters of social justice. Rather, they are productive, materialist relations that constitute people collectively, both positively and negatively, in mental, emotional, corporeal, and social terms. The chapter highlights the merits of Fraser’s three-dimensional theory of justice (2008) but also its limitations regarding the sociological and political realities of the affective domain of social life.
      33
  • Publication
    Care and affective relations: Social justice and sociology
    This article examines the ways in which the care-indifferent and gendered character of much political egalitarian theory has contributed to a disregard for the care-relational dimensions of social injustice within the social sciences. It demonstrates how the lack of in-depth engagement with affective relations of love, care and solidarity has contributed to an underestimation of their pivotal role in generating injustices in the production of people in their humanity. While humans are political, economic and cultural beings, they are also what Tronto has termed homines curans. Yet, care, in its multiple manifestations, is treated as a kind of ‘cultural residual’, an area of human life that the dominant culture neglects, represses and cannot even recognize for its political salience. If sociology takes the issue of relational justice as seriously as it takes issues of redistribution, recognition and political representation, this would provide an intellectual avenue for advancing scholarship that recognizes that much of life is lived, and injustices are generated, outside the market, formal politics and public culture. A new sociology of affective care relations could enhance a normatively-led sociology of inequality, that is distinguishable from, but intersecting with, a sociology of inequality based on class (redistribution), status (recognition) and power (representation). It would also help change public discourse about politics by making affective in/justices visible intellectually and politically, and in so doing, identifying ways in which they could be a site of resistance to capitalist values and processes.
    Scopus© Citations 32  29
  • Publication
    Social Class Inequality in Ireland: What Role does Education Play?
    (Douglas Hyde Gallery, 2022-03-31) ;
    While inequalities outside of education impact on those within, the internal life of education neutral in class terms. Education, or more accurately, the schooling system, is intimately bound up with the reproduction of the class structures of our society. To begin with, the school system is largely designed, managed and controlled by those who are already the successful beneficiaries of that system, and these tend to be the same people who have power, status and money in other areas of economic, cultural and political life. Those who plan schools, design curricula, set and assess examinations are generally part of the cultural elite of society. And while the cultural elite (most of whom are middle class or upper middle class) are not necessarily part of the economic elite, there is deep overlap between the owners of wealth and the owners and controllers of cultural and social capital in Ireland and elsewhere (Bourdieu and Passerson 1977; Courtois 2018).
      131
  • Publication
    Experiences of remote teaching and learning in Ireland during the Covid-19 pandemic (March–May 2020)
    Initiated in 2018, Children’s School Lives is an exciting, longitudinal study following 4,000 children in 189 schools through their primary school years. Children’s lived experiences and voices are at the heart of this research. The report, Experiences of Remote Teaching and Learning in Ireland During the Covid-19 Pandemic (March – May 2020), is the second publication arising from the study and focuses on children’s experiences and those of their teachers, principals and families, during the period of school closures earlier this year. The report highlights the important role of education and primary schools in children’s and families’ lives. It also spotlights the centrality of relationships in primary education, those between children and their teacher, between teachers and parents, and relationships between teachers and school leaders. The rich, authentic voices throughout the report give us insights into the many challenges that emerged out of the need to reconfigure and reconceptualise teaching and learning in the context of a global pandemic. This saw primary schooling being relocated from a shared physical space, the classroom, to an online environment, necessitating enormous work, engagement and commitment by study participants—children, parents, teachers and school leaders—to enable teaching and learning to continue. The report also affords us glimpses of how this changed learning environment impacted, positively and negatively, on children, their families, teachers and school leaders.
      105