School plcaement (SP) is a key component of all ITE programmes, both North and South.
Increasingly, pre-service teachers (PSTs) find themselves at the intersection of two interconnected crises: a cost of living crisis and a teacher supply crisis.
PSTs on SP in Ireland are unpaid, leading to significant financial burden (travel, living costs, materials), resulting in 61% of PSTs working part-time jobs during SP.
In addition, Ireland faces a significant teacher shortage (e.g., 1,847 vacant posts in March 2025), which places pressure on school management to find appropriate cover for absent teachers.
Over recent years, anecdotal evidence suggests that PSTs are being asked to do more and more Supervision and Substitution (S&S) whilst on SP.
A recent study, found that 91% of PSTs undertook S&S during their final block of SP. 79% of PSTs did an additional 2–10 hours of S&S each week, on top of their ten hours of assigned classes.
From our perspective, there is limited information (policy and empirical evidence) currently available on the extent of, or the effects of, this extra burden on PSTs whilst on SP.
We would like to partner with a HEI in Northern Ireland to capture the lived experiences of PSTs on SP, who are navigating the formative stages of their careers against the backdrop of an educational system short on teachers.

To research the impact that belonging to a CoP has on post primary teachers’ identity, leadership, autonomy and on their professional learning.

Creativity is frequently presented from authoritative positions to student teachers who are then required to meet particular requirements or to assess the extent to which they agree or disagree with given ideas. ‘Top-down’ approaches include how ministries of education include discourses of creativity when writing curricula and education policy, or how the aspirations of the cultural industries sector inform curricula. This proposed study presents an opportunity to access rich accounts of creative experiences and practices from student teachers in a number of subject areas. It is only possible to understand creativity – a concept central to the curriculum of students from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and to ‘write creativity’ into curricula and policy documents in such a way that it will make an impact with teachers and students when current understandings are accessed. Without rich examples of the concept accessed from those student teachers soon to be working in schools, we cannot extend our knowledge of the concept or merge knowledge of commonalities between different jurisdictions or subject areas. This study can advance understandings and make suggestions/proposal for further advancing provisions for creativity in schools in line with most current thinking on creativity in the literature, but in a relevant way that begins with authentic experiences of student teachers.

• ‘Big Pictures of the Past’ is a collaborative project involving researchers and history educators from the School of Education in UCD and the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA).
• The researchers worked with a group of student teachers from UCD in 2019-20 and 2020-21, and a cohort of first year history students taught by them across different settings while on school placements, both in the first and second years of their PME studies.
• Acknowledging that acquiring ‘big picture’ understanding of the past is an integral part of the junior cycle history specification, the project is focused on ascertaining what types of ‘big pictures’, if any, junior cycle students possess, and how they might be supported to develop more robust ‘big picture’ understanding.
• The project also explores the nature and extent of ‘big picture’ understanding that student teachers possess.
• ‘Big picture’ mean the capacity to demonstrate long-term chronological understanding and to make connections between events and developments from different periods of time, or what might be termed the ‘broad sweep’ of history.
• The concept of student voice was invoked by the researchers as a key feature of the research approach, recognising the importance of students talking about their experience of learning and teaching in history, and ensuring that their voice has a meaningful impact on how these experiences are shaped.
• The researchers argue that using frameworks of eras can meaningfully support students to acquire meaningful ‘big pictures’ of the past. A framework is a device that can help students grasp the concept of ‘big picture’ thinking.
• As well as presenting a report, the researchers have developed an experiment framework that could be used in the Junior cycle classroom to support students’ ‘big picture’ understanding. It is called ‘Our History Scaffold’ and consists of 10 eras.

Interprofessional collaboration within the education system has been a proven and longstanding exemplar of continuous professional development. Teachers, when viewed as ‘change agents’, Cordiner, M. (2014), have the professional capacity ‘to develop and steward knowledge’ within their respective fields, educational institutions and wider school communities Wenger, E., McDermott, R. & Snyder, W.M. (2002). By merging primary and post-primary professional practices to help support Modern Foreign Language (MFL) pedagogy in Immersion Education (IME), we are succinctly reinforcing Lave and Wenger’s definition of Communities of Practice (CoP), whilst simultaneously enhancing plurilinguistic competencies through cross-sectoral and cross-contextual collaboration. (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

I hope to conduct my research in conjunction with the
“Say Yes to Languages Initiative 2017-2026”.
Currently 1,200 primary schools are participating in this scheme to pilot and gauge the children’s response to the MFL/ISL model. However, only 49/1200 of those school are Gaelscoileanna.
Gaelscoileanna acutely align with broader efforts to revitalize and preserve the Irish language. Additionally, there is a long history of governmental, cultural and other educational initiatives that actively participate in promoting immersion programmes and bilingual education to strengthen the Irish language’s presence. However, it is curious to see how Irish-medium educational establishments have been played such a minute participatory role in this pilot scheme. Gaelscoileanna should be encouraged and celebrated for their efforts to preserve linguistic integrity and used as blueprints towards successful language acquisition establishments going forward.

Without this investigation into Gaelscoileanna’s response to MFL teaching and learning, there is undiscovered data and unlocked potential as to what can learn from students’ metalinguistic skills as MFL learners in the Irish context. Bilingual and immersion education should be used as didactic capital and used advantageously in order to reflect social reality.

This comparative, collaborative study seeks to explore Irish and Northern-Irish primary teachers’ understanding of historical empathy and experiences of teaching historical empathy as part of History Education in primary schools. Historical empathy involves successful reconstruction of the beliefs, values, goals, and attendant feelings of people in the past (Donnelly and Sharp, 2020). The findings from this mixed-methods project will help inform History Education curriculum design
and pedagogy in an evolving policy context for Primary Curriculum and History Education in both jurisdictions, and will be pertinent and beneficial
for History Education; primary education; teacher education; social-justice education; educational policy; and educational practice.

Ba mhaith liom iniúcadh a dhéanamh ar na chleactais dearfacha atà ar siúl i scoileanna làn-Ghaeilge chun tacú le daltaí a bhfuil RSO acu agus conas is féidir na chleactais seo a roinnt.

I would like to study how effective practices can be shared across regions to help meet the needs of students with special educational needs learning through Irish. This project will be undertaken through the medium of Irish.