Teachers Inspire Ireland

We conclude the series by meeting the four teachers who were presented with their Teachers Inspire award for 2023 at a special event in DCU in May.

The awards were presented by our curator, and podcast host, Louise.

The awardees for 2023 are: Jill Farrell, a primary school teacher in County Limerick, Joe O'Driscoll, who was a primary school teacher in County Cork, Dublin secondary school teacher Meg Offiah and Ursula O’Mahoney, a primary school teacher in County Tipperary. 

Two were nominated by parents and the other two by former students. After the event they joined Louise to record this episode, which closes our podcast series.

For our penultimate episode we talk to Joyce Abbott, a teacher who inspired a student to name a hit TV series, set in a school, after her!

The former student is American comedian and actress Quinta Brunson and the show is Abbott Elementary.

As well as popular characters, great scripting and touching storylines, it portrays the huge efforts made by teachers, often with little resources, to do the best for their students.

Joyce spoke to Louise from Philadelphia about the programme, her love of teaching, what she recalls about Quinta and why, even though she is retired, she is still passionate about education.

Providing teachers with the opportunity to work with student teachers while also progressing their own studies, is at the heart of the Teacher Fellowship Programme.

It is a unique programme offered by DCU and the second group of teachers began their fellowship a few months ago.

Louise is joined by two of them – primary school teacher Emma Farragher and secondary school teacher Niall Farrell.

They tell her why they applied for the fellowship, what they enjoy about it and what they will take from it back to their classrooms.

The Teachers Inspire awardees have come from primary and secondary school level. 

One question we have frequently pondered is why there are so many more women than men picking teaching as a career, particularly in primary school.

To discuss this, Louise is joined by Dr Alan Gorman who is Assistant Professor in the School of Policy and Practice lecturer in DCU Institute of Education.

He trained, and worked, as a primary school teacher before moving to third level and in 2022 he was awarded the DCU President's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

They discuss the possible reasons behind the gender divide and also hear from Alex Finnegan, who says he wanted to teach since his own days in primary school. He is recently qualified and teaches 5th class.

For the final time in this series we meet one of the 2022 Teachers Inspire awardees and the parent who nominated her.

Some of the most moving and powerful nominations are from parents and often it is because the teacher has noticed ‘something.’

Joining Louise is Gemma Maher, who is now the principal at Rathcoole Educate Together National School in county Dublin but, as you will hear, the nomination goes back a few years.

It was made by Kirsten FitzGerald who explains that Gemma played an important role in validating concerns about her daughter who at the time was one of Gemma’s first class pupils.

Gemma and Kirsten also recall teachers from their own school days.

DCU is unique when it comes to autism because in 2018, it became the world's first designated autism-friendly university and plans were announced last year to make it an even friendlier campus for autistic staff and students with the launch of phase two of the autism-friendly project.

In this episode Louise is joined by Fiona Earley, the Autism Coordinator in DCU, and by Clíodhna Harrison, a DCU Computer Science graduate who found out she was autistic during her time in DCU.

Fiona talks about the research that has gone into the project and the changes that have been made on campus. 

Clíodhna shares her experiences about how everyone she met in DCU was ‘doing their best to ensure that every neurodivergent student gets what they need, as well as educating others about neurodiversity.’

She says this sends a message of acceptance and equal opportunities.

The teenage years bring challenges for all young people. 

For this episode Louise is joined by Jacob Donegan who by the age of six knew he was not in the right body.  He tells her about the day he saw a story in a magazine about a girl who ‘transitioned to the boy he was,’ and he turned to tell his father, “that’s me.”

Now in his twenties, Jacob has been very open about his transitioning journey on social media. He has 1.2 million followers on TikTok alone.

He chats to Louise about navigating his journey and where he found support. He recalls a teacher in secondary school who was understanding and gave him the, “freedom to be who I was.”

He is hopeful that schools are becoming more supportive of trans students and tells Louise about an all girls school with one trans student and the school reached out to Jacob and asked him to send in a video they would play for the whole school.

Jacob said, “that's empowering. That's amazing. That's beautiful to see.”

Louise is joined by Drs Kay Maunsell and Leanne Coll who, with their DCU colleagues, deliver a ground breaking Graduate Diploma in SPHE/RSE.

The students are experienced secondary school teachers from across the country and they are the first group to study on the programme which is the only specialist teacher development programme of its kind at post primary level in Ireland. 

Leanne and Kay tell Louise it is underpinned by a rights-based and inclusive approach and they discuss how sex education has changed since Louise was in secondary school!

One of the students on the programme – Galway teacher Annemarie Browne – shares her experience and how she wants her students to have a positive experience of SPHE/RSE.

Louise also hears that the future for quality comprehensive sexuality education is looking good.

It is time to meet another of the Teachers Inspire awardees of 2022.

Ruairi Farrell is the Principal of Greystones Community College but some 15 years ago he was a Year Head in another school where he intervened after becoming concerned about a student.

The student was Ciara Nolan and in her nomination to Teachers Inspire last year she said he was ‘always looking and making sure everyone was okay but when he realised I was suffering, which was probably before I even realised I had a problem, he had called me out of class one day and asked me to speak to the counsellor.’

She had developed an eating disorder and while it was many years ago, she never forgot what he did. 

We hear Ruairi discuss what it meant to have been nominated, the teachers that inspired him and what he has in place in his school to support today’s students, including a psychotherapist.

Louise talks about having an eating disorder when she was in secondary school, attending counselling and how she thinks having a psychotherapist in school is a very positive initiative.

Her memoir ‘Poor” has been a bestseller for months, it has won two awards in recent weeks and in this episode Dr Katriona O’Sullivan joins Louise to talk about the teachers at primary and second level that she has never forgotten.

 Some showed her how to wash, another nurtured a love of reading and literature. But they also did much more: they made her feel empowered and cared for. In many ways they epitomise what Teachers Inspire is about.

 Education, and access to it, remain very important to Katriona who is a psychologist and a senior lecturer in Maynooth University.