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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

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    Becoming a teacher: primary student teachers as learners and teachers of history, geography and science: an all-Ireland study
    (Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South (SCoTENS), 2009-10) Waldron, Fionnuala; Pike, Susan; Greenwood, Richard; Murphy, Cliona M.; O'Connor, Geraldine; Dolan, Anne; Kerr, Karen
    In 2002 IASSEE embarked on a longitudinal research project which has resulted in this report. The research project has been supported by funding from SCoTENS, St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra and Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. The main purpose of the research was to increase members’ knowledge and understanding of their students with a view to improving the courses on offer in ITE. Throughout the study, the original purpose remained paramount and preliminary findings informed change in the content of courses from an early stage in the process. The research was conducted in three phases between 2004 and 2007/8 with all Bachelor of Education (BEd) students in all of the colleges of education in Ireland. Phase 1 of the project focused on student teachers’ prior experience of and attitudes toward history, geography and science and on the concepts of good teachers they brought with them to ITE. In phase 2 of the study, focus group interviews were conducted in each of the colleges. Phase 3 of the research gathered data on student teachers’ experiences of ITE and on the concepts of good teachers they had developed over the course of the BEd programme. This report presents the main findings of the study. The report is laid out in the following way: The remainder of this chapter outlines the context of the study in terms of initial teacher education in Ireland and the broader context of curriculum change at primary level. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the relevant literature from which this study draws. Chapter 3 gives a more detailed account of the methodology of the research. Chapter 4 presents the findings in relation to the attitudes of the entry and exit cohorts towards the three subject areas. Chapter 5 presents the positive and negative experiences of the respondents in the three subject areas prior to their college entry. Chapter 6 examines their experiences in college and on teaching practice. In chapter 7 the concepts of the good teacher of history, science and geography which the students had on entry and on exit are discussed. The concluding chapter, chapter 8, draws together the findings of the study and their implications for the teaching of history, geography and science education in initial teacher education programmes, along with recommendations for future action and further research.
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    Taking action for climate change: teaching about, through and for climate literacy in schools
    (Education Matters, 2022) Dolan, Anne
    Climate change caused by global warming is already transforming life on Earth. It is the defining challenge of our time, the most significant issue facing all citizens today. Evidence of climate change is compelling. With heat waves in the US, wildfires in Europe, floods in Asia, and famine in the Horn of Africa, summer 2022 clearly illustrates the reality of climate change. In 2015, 193 countries adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), one of which is climate change (UN General Assembly, 2015). In December 2015, at the Paris Climate Conference – the 21st meeting of the Conference of the Parties, otherwise known as COP21 – 195 countries adopted the first-ever universal, global climate deal, officially agreeing to maintain global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. This commitment marks an unprecedented international consensus on the need to transition from fossil fuels within the next few decades. Indeed, the window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all is rapidly closing (IPCC, 2022). To maintain hope and a sense of agency, climate literacy has to be part of the solution to the challenges posed by a warmer Earth. Situated in the fields of Education for Sustainability and Global Citizenship Education, climate literacy is recognised as a core action for addressing climate change. Climate literacy helps students understand and address the impacts of the climate crisis, empowering them with the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes needed to act as agents of change.
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    Indicating engagement in online workplace meetings: the role of backchannelling head nods (Pre published)
    (John Benjamins Publishing, 2024) Knight, Dawn; O'Keeffe, Anne; Mark, Geraldine; Fitzgerald, Christopher; McNamara, Justin; Adolphs, Svenja; Cowan, Benjamin; Fahey Palma, Tania; Farr, Fiona; Peraldi, Sandrine
    Amid COVID-19 and the so-called ‘digital pivot’, online virtual communication has been placed at the heart of our daily lives, both professionally and privately. As we move into a post-COVID context, the affordances of the digital turn have shown that we can operate professionally online but there is a need for a better understanding of communication in the online workplace. This paper first contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of indicators of engagement in multi-party communication online, as evidenced by a small-scale but in-depth corpus-based multi-modal study. Second, it showcases the importance of building naturally-occurring spoken corpora that go beyond written transcription of the spoken word and include annotation of non-verbal behaviour. The work pays particular attention to the incidence, frequency, position and function of spoken and head nod backchannels, exploring the coordination/co-occurrence of these features in online talk. Findings point to a changing profile of how engagement is displayed in online workplace meetings and this appears to be linked to the functionality of the platforms.
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    Doing meetings online: understanding variation in virtual workplace meetings
    (John Benjamins Publishing, 2025-12) Peraldi, Sandrine; Fitzgerald, Chris; Mark, Geraldine; McNamara, Justin; Knight, Dawn; O'Keeffe, Anne; Fahey Palma, Tania
    This paper contributes to previous work on workplace registers by presenting an analysis of a corpus of virtual meetings. The Interactional Variation Online corpus is comprised of recordings of virtual meetings from four different organisations. This study describes how each organisation shares similar practices when engaging in virtual meetings and how variation emerges when each organisation is compared to the other three. Corpus results show how, to establish conclusions related to this register, it is necessary to consider the influence of variation across organisations, the chairing style of each meeting, the formality of each organisational culture and the level of participant engagement in each meeting.
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    “We’ve lost you Ian”: multi-modal corpus innovations in capturing, processing and analysing professional online spoken interactions
    (Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics AELINCO, 2024-02) O'Keeffe, Anne; Farr, Fiona; Fahey Palma, Tania; Cowan, Benjamin; Adolphs, Svenja; McNamara, Justin; Fitzgerald, Christopher; Mark, Geraldine; Knight, Dawn; Peraldi, Sandrine
    Online communication via video platforms has become a standard component of workplace interaction for many businesses and employees. The rapid uptake in the use of virtual meeting platforms due to COVID-19 restrictions meant that many people had to quickly adjust to communication via this medium without much (if any) training as to how workplace communication is successfully facilitated on these platforms. The Interactional Variation Online project aims to analyse a corpus of virtual meetings to gain a multi-modal understanding of this context of language use. This paper describes one component of the project, namely guidelines that can be replicated when constructing a corpus of multi-modal data derived from recordings of online meetings. A further aim is to determine typical features of virtual meetings in comparison to face-to-face meetings so as to inform good practice in virtual workplace interactions. By looking at how non-verbal behaviour, such as head movements, gaze, posture, and spoken discourse interact in this medium, we both undertake a holistic analysis of interaction in virtual meetings and produce a template for the development of multi-modal corpora for future analysis.