Institutional Archive of Scholarly Content (IASC), Hibernia College

Welcome to the IASC Repository at Hibernia College

IASC (Institutional Archive of Scholarly Content) is an open access repository designed to store, archive and disseminate the work of Hibernia College faculty, staff and students. It includes peer-reviewed publications, conference papers, research reports, presentations and examples of exemplary student work. 

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Hibernia College
  • Digital literacy for all: reflections on creating a short course in digital literacy

    Byrne, Ann; Davey, Emberly; O'Dowd, Irene (2024)
    Presented at the A&SL LAI Conference, 21st of March 2024, Dublin, Ireland. In today’s internet-dominated interconnected world, where anyone with a phone can publish something and share it worldwide, critically assessing the integrity of information has never been more important or more challenging, and to do this successfully requires digital literacy skills. Inspired by global initiatives such as the United Nations SDGs and the European Commission’s DigComp framework, we created an open digital educational resource to help foster digital literacy within our institution and beyond. This project ties in with an ongoing academic integrity project within our institution; it also coincides with the increasing availability of generative artificial intelligence systems that can potentially spread misinformation at scale. In this context, we feel the project is a very timely one. In this paper, we reflect on the process of developing the course, share what we have learned along the way, and indicate future directions for the project.
  • School Placement in Initial Teacher Education: Partnership or Paralysis

    Casey, Elva (2024)
    The concept of partnership in school placement is not new to the initial teacher education (ITE) reform agenda (Furlong et al., 2000). Despite its prevalence in the rhetoric on placement, the nature of partnerships, the definition of partners, and the extent to which partnerships are voluntary or enforced are all far from universally accepted facts. Harford and O’Doherty (2016) argue that the partnership metaphor has been applied very loosely to describe collaboration and consensus, without any real definition of what is meant by it. Partnership in school placement is often discussed in policy documents and guidelines as a fait accompli, but when we probe the use of the word, we find it can be applied to many ways of organising collaboration between higher-education institutions (HEIs) and schools (Gorman & Furlong, 2023). It can vary in meaning depending on who uses it, whether site of practice, HEI, professional body, or student teacher. It can also be used to reflect distinct interpretations and motivations (Stuart & Martinez-Lucio, 2004). If we cannot agree on what partnership is, how can we hope to understand who the partners are and how they should fulfil their roles? This article posits that the confusion around partnership has hindered the development of school placement into a meaningfully experienced first step in the continuum of professional development, resulting in a paralysis of reform in school placement.
  • Inclusion as Lived and Felt in the Leaving Certificate Applied Programme: A case study exploring spatial discourses of inclusion

    Curneen, Annmarie (Education Matters, 2024)
    Parity of esteem has long been an enduring theme of educational discourses of inclusion. This article examines parity of esteem through the lens of the Leaving Certificate Applied (LCA) programme by focusing on spatial discourses of inclusion. For this article, parity of esteem relates to issues of value and recognition of difference and the resulting experience of inclusion as something that is lived and felt in school contexts. The article draws on research conducted by the author over a 10-month period with four case-study schools in the north-west of Ireland. The LCA programme is a distinct, modular, self-contained, two-year Leaving Cert pre-vocational programme. It ‘emphasises forms of achievement and excellence which the established Leaving Certificate has not recognised in the past. It offers a specific opportunity to prepare for and progress to further education and training’. (PDST, 2019, p.7). The programme incorporates work experience and learning that takes place outside the classroom. It is ringfenced, meaning it is separate from but equal to the Leaving Certificate Established (LCE) programme and is not part of the CAO points system. However, recent changes announced as part of Senior Cycle redevelopment mean that since September 2022 LCA students ‘have the opportunity to take Leaving Certificate Mathematics and, where possible, a Leaving Certificate Modern Language’ (DoE, 2022).
  • When the Mind Meets the Body: Health and wellbeing for schools

    Burke, Jolanta; Dunne, Padraic J.; Doran, Annemarie (Education Matters, 2024)
    Most risk factors for developing non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, are established during adolescence. Urgent action is required to prevent the premature death of this cohort in Ireland as a result. We conducted a quasiexperiment combining positive psychology and lifestyle medicine to help students improve their sleep, nutrition, stress management, and physical activity. Here we reflect on our findings and the implications for school wellbeing policy and practice.
  • HECA Research Conference 2023: Sharing an Open Research Landscape

    O'Dowd, Irene; Byrne, Ann; Butler Neff, Linda; O'Sullivan, Patricia; Browne, Andrew; Zorzi, Debora; O'Connor, Noel; McKenna, Robert; Haugh, Trevor; Finkbeiner, Kristin; et al. (Dublin Business School, 2024)
    This paper provides a succinct overview of HECA's second annual research conference, held at DBS on November 14th 2023.

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