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Based on the Transforming Lives research project, this book explores the transformative power of further education.
Outlining a timely and critical approach to educational research and practice, the book draws extensively on the testimonies of students and teachers to construct a model of transformative teaching and learning. The book critiques reductive ‘skills’ policies in further education and illuminates the impact colleges and Lifelong Learning have on social justice both for individuals, their families and communities.
For trainee teachers, teachers, leaders, researchers and policymakers alike, this is a persuasive argument for transformative approaches to teaching and learning which highlights the often unmeasured and under-appreciated strong holistic social benefits of further education.
Underpinned by the idea of the right to a ‘basic minimum’, welfare states are a major feature of many societies. However, the lived experiences of persons seeking and receiving welfare payments can often be overlooked.
This book seeks to remedy this omission by honouring lived experience as valuable, insightful and necessary. It draws on qualitative interviews with 19 people receiving various working age welfare payments in Ireland to explore stigma, social reciprocity and the notions of the deserving and undeserving poor, and to analyse welfare conditionality in the Irish context.
Breaking new ground, this book offers original research findings which contest and inform policy both within Ireland and beyond.
the expectations and assessments of others, real or imagined (Chase and Walker, 2013 ). Attempts to combat this sense of shame, therefore, may also result in the tactic of othering and also self-distancing. Whatever the psychosocial impetus behind othering in a welfare context, what remains clear is that it is undoubtedly very real and that certain groups, namely immigrants, those with substance misuse issues, ‘fraudulent’ disability benefit claimants and those with no previous employment experience, tend to repeatedly come in for negative assessment in this
sixth strand, namely ‘building workforce skills’. By this time, Ireland was entering a phase of economic recovery where the mass unemployment of previous years had stabilised, and unemployment figures were beginning to resemble frictional levels. However, despite this, the focus on activation remained strong, and attention turned towards activating new cohorts as the government (GOI, 2016 : 14) sought to: ‘Increase active labour market participation by people of a working age (including people with disabilities and lone parents) so as to help ensure a supply of
for the research on which it is largely based. The experiences documented in this book are drawn from a set of empirical materials that resulted from a qualitative study carried out in the Republic of Ireland in 2019 and which used in-depth interviews as a mode for data collection. In particular, this study focused on those who either were or had been in receipt of the following core groups of Irish welfare payments: Jobseeker’s Benefit (JB) and Jobseeker’s Allowance (JA); Illness Benefit (IB) and Disability Allowance (DA); One-Parent Family Payment (OPFP
cut her off with the ‘touch of a button’. In interview, Patricia also spoke about a family history of receiving welfare in a way she felt delineated her and her family from the rest of society, positioning them on the edge, excluded and disadvantaged: ‘I’ve grown up with parents on Disability or Widow’s. 2 And as I said, you do feel like you’re on the edge of society. You’re not involved. You’re not involved with like work. You’re not involved – like little things. Like, say, getting involved with the local camogie. 3 If you don’t have the money, if you don
perspective on wider society that has a pleasing egalitarian slant: nobody is better than anyone else . In transformative teaching and learning, the principle of the individual and their identities as the starting point combines with an egalitarian ideal to inform any educational discussion about diversity. At the very least it requires us to take the issues of social class, race, gender, sexual orientation and dis/ability seriously as protected characteristics and to address these in the educational spaces in which teaching and learning happens. Guy is a participant
-old students in colleges have learning difficulties and/or disabilities, compared to 20.9% of school students with special educational needs. Furthermore, as AoC research shows ( AoC, 2019 , 24), 16% of 16–18-year-old college students had previously been classified as qualifying for Pupil Premium and as eligible for free schools meals (FSM). By comparison, the number of students eligible for and claiming FSM in secondary schools is 12.4%. In other words, colleges cater for a much bigger proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds or with learning difficulties
Disability Benefit was affording it.’ While the outcome was ultimately successful for Trevor, this was a period he described as very stressful and his experiences highlight the potential impact of some of the less explicit aspects of welfare conditionality. Trevor subsequently decided to manage impressions differently in future contacts with welfare administrators, essentially holding back certain information for fear of being cut off: “… well, I mean, look, I don’t know. I think it’s sad. It would be nice if it was a lot more open and transparent for everyone really
.” For Trevor, taking these types of decisions were made doubly complex due to the nature of his disability, essentially meaning that to divulge his receipt of DA necessarily also meant divulging his ongoing struggle with bipolar disorder. Trevor, therefore, shows an awareness of the potential for social stigma to occur, something that has been well documented in the contexts of both illness and mental health and welfare recipiency ( Garthwaite, 2015a , 2015b ; Baumberg 2016 ; Patrick, 2017 ; Tyler, 2020 ). For Trish, making decisions about just what to divulge
