Catherine is an Administrative Officer in the Parenting Support Policy Unit in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.  Her work is centred on the promotion and the development of the What Works initiative. This initiative was designed with the Department and funded under Dormant Accounts with the aim to maximise the impact of prevention and early intervention to improve outcomes for children and young people.

The What Works Initiative focuses on four work strands: Data, Evidence, Professional development and capacity training, and Quality. In her work, Catherine manages various funding measures and develops programmes such as Action Learning that are available to those working with children and young people in Ireland.

Catherine’s work also focuses on the exciting development of the What Works Evidence Hub, which is currently receiving applications from prevention and early intervention programmes for review through an open call. The Evidence Hub is an ongoing project between the Department and the Early Intervention Hub (UK).

Catherine has previously worked with the European Parliament, the HSE and the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Dr. Yvonne Crotty is an Associate Professor in the School of STEM Education, Innovation and Global Studies in the Institute of Education, Dublin City University and Co-Director of the International Centre for Innovation and Workplace Learning. 

Yvonne is passionate about teaching and learning and taught at post-primary level education for 15 years before joining DCU. She coordinates and teaches on the Teaching Methodologies module for Initial Teacher Educator in Science, Maths, PE and Biology and undertakes Teaching Practice supervision.  Yvonne has developed an educational entrepreneurial approach to action research (EEA) which enables Masters and PhD researchers in a range of work contexts to create multimedia artefacts to transform work practices.

Yvonne is on the Management Board of Media and Learning (MEDEA) which promotes and stimulates the use of media as a way to enhance creativity in teaching and learning at all levels of education in Europe. For the past 10 years she has collaborated on European universities and is currently a partner in EU projects KLabs4Kids Sustainability and Education Hacking. These project involve teachers in bringing innovative practices into their classroom. Yvonne has collaborated on projects with industry and in practice oriented education projects in law and education. 

Website – https://www.dcu.ie/stem-education-innovation-global-studies/people/yvonne-crotty

Dr. Margaret Farren, Associate Professor in the School of STEM Education, Innovation and Global Studies in the Institute of Education, Dublin City University. She is also Co-Director of the International Centre for Innovation and Workplace Learning.

Margaret teaches on Masters degree programmes and supervises Masters degree and PhD students who are using research approaches that contribute to personal knowledge and knowledge in the field of practice. She also supervises teachers who are on school placement. Margaret was a member of the DCU Research Ethics Committee (REC) from 2016-2019 and on behalf of the committee produced guidelines to support researchers carrying out insider research.  She is one of the founding member of the International Journal for Transformative Research (IJTR) – a journal that emerged out of a belief that professionals in any work setting can research their own practice with transformative outcomes for themselves and others.

For the past number of years Margaret has been involved in EU projects. She recently coordinated the EU FRONTIERS project. A series of international e-schools, and professional development was organised as part of the project which enabled teachers to design and develop of classroom activities in a collaborative way.

Margaret Farren website – https://www.dcu.ie/stem-education-innovation-global-studies/people/margaret-farren

We are four teachers in Ireland, who have undertaken research into our practice. We believe, like Russell (1932) and Dewey (1966),in the importance of education as a lifelong process that has the capacity to confer on participants liberatory and life-enhancing experiences.

We believe that the articulation of our living theories (Whitehead, 1989) that have emerged from our action research invetigations into our workplace practices can have implications for other practitioners who choose to engage in self study.

Our doctoral theses are the narrative accounts of our research programmes that has enabled us to make our original claims to knowledge. We explain our self-study action research methodology as a living transformational process. Our findings about our pupils’ and our own learning offer new conceptualisations about the capacity of pupils to learn in their own ways

Born in Ireland, Harry Shier worked in England for many years, first in children’s play, then in children’s rights and participation. In the 1990s he developed the “Article 31 Children’s Consultancy Scheme”, which enables children to act as expert consultants to the management of major cultural institutions; an experience crystallised in his 2001 paper “Pathways to Participation”, which introduced a tool for analysing children’s participation now widely used throughout the world.

In 2001 he moved to Nicaragua in Central America to work with local community education organisation CESESMA, supporting child workers on coffee plantations in claiming and defending their rights. While there he developed a new approach to supporting children as researchers known as Transformative Research by Children and Adolescents.

In 2016 he was awarded a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast for his study on Nicaraguan children’s perceptions of human rights in school. He now lives on the banks of the River Liffey in County Kildare, where he is working on a range of children’s rights and participation initiatives, including the COVISION project at UCD.

All his published work is at www.harryshier.net

Mary has worked for more than 40 years as a teacher, and teacher educator, in a range of contexts. During that time, she taught physics in secondary schools, and been senior lecturer in Ulster University and Edge Hill University.  Her teaching has mainly focussed on research methods and reflective practice modules for Masters students, and she has extensive experience of supervising masters and PhD research projects. She has run a national programme for mathematics education for primary teachers in England, been director of professional learning programmes in Edge Hill University, and undertaken a number of national and international community-based action research projects, including the British Academy Funded Newton Fellowship project (hosting Prof. Lesley Wood) in South Africa.

She has now left full-time employment, but does some part-time work supervising teacher research projects with the University of Galway, and does some teaching and research supervision for the Irish Hospice Foundation’s MSc Loss and Bereavement. She is currently co-lead (with Andy Convery)of the Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN: https://www.carn.org.uk/ ) and one of the founding editors of the open access journal, CARN Praxis (https://carnpraxis.org/ )