SP24-0124 Curriculum Making and Curriculum Ownership: Connections to LAOS and SSE

Curriculum Making and Curriculum Ownership: Connections to LAOS and SSE

DATE:      Monday, 22nd April 2024
TIME:       7.00 pm to 8.00 pm
VENUE:   Online Via Zoom

Target Audience: Early Years Educators, Primary Teachers, Post Primary Teachers and those with Leadership Roles in Education 

The widespread acknowledgement of the  importance of school development, school improvement and quality in education in the Irish educational landscape has led to the growing awareness of the integral aspect of curriculum leadership for educators in schools. School Self-Evaluation: Next Steps (SSE – Dept. of Ed. 2022) and Looking At Our Schools (LAOS – Dept. of Ed. 2022, updated Jan 2024) provide considerable scope to make curriculum leadership, along with teacher agency and school collaboration, a space where teachers realise the importance of their own agency in curriculum.

Looking at some other jurisdictions across Europe briefly, we can see how educators can be enabled and thwarted in their realisations of curriculum-making and curriculum leadership. This free taster-session will briefly explore curriculum and teacher agency in Scotland, Portugal, and Finland (Priestley et al, 2021), before looking at how SSE and LAOS can guide curriculum-making here in Ireland. The core construct of agentic participation by educators in curriculum-making will be scaffolded by how practitioner-led action research methods and reflection (Sullivan et al, 2016) can support developed, meaningful and contextual understanding to enhance the SSE process. The session will explore some practical examples of how SSE can be reimagined as curriculum-making.

Bio of Presenter - Eamonn Mitchell

Eamonn Mitchell is a teacher educator at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. He has worked as a primary school teacher for a decade prior to his appointment in Initial Teacher Education in 2008 as a visual art education lecturer. Thereafter, Eamonn has been involved in ITE as school placement tutor, school placement coordinator, and as acting Director of School Placement. Currently, Eamonn coordinates and lectures in postgraduate education on the PME, M.Ed. and M.Ed. (Educational Leadership and Management) programmes.

Eamonn’s interests lie in the intersectionality between philosophy of education, theories of caring, leadership, democracy, and social justice. Curriculum-making and agency in curriculum practice has always been to the forefront of Eamonn’s teaching. Over the past fifteen years, he has contributed regularly to educational discourse at national and international conferences, in academic papers, and within the primary education community in Ireland. Eamonn values educational research that embodies practitioner focus, qualitatively-rich data, and acknowledges the arts as a viable medium of re/presentation.