How can I engage collaboratively with my pupils to enhance their enjoyment of Oral Irish?

Research is limited on the teaching of OI (especially in English-medium schools) at this time of curriculum change in Self-Study Action Research. My research set out to investigate the gap in my knowledge and teaching of Oral Irish. I wanted to utilise more collaborative, child-centred and autonomous methods in order to enhance engagement, enjoyment and accountability in this subject. In order to achieve this I engaged my pupils in choosing topics to learn about in Oral Irish and enabled them to teach their peers and their parents as part of school and home work. I developed a website to help my pupils in their home learning and they were held accountable for this through the means of blogging their activities. Before beginning this research, my values of collaboration, confidence and self-belief were not being lived in my practice. However, my approach has since been transformed from a didactic style and I am now living closer to these through the use of collaborative and autonomous teaching methods. Data collation was qualitative in nature through various tools such as questionnaires, reflective journals, observations and website statics. The findings discovered that a collaborative Oral Irish approach to homework contributes to increased engagement from pupils, pupil choice allowed for increased enjoyment of Oral Irish, and autonomous teaching approaches to Oral Irish can foster accountability within pupils. Through using my living standards of judgement (Whitehead, 2005), I can conclude that I improved my practice while helping increase pupil engagement in OI which enhanced their enjoyment of this within and outside of school. I generated my own ‘living theory of education’ (Whitehead, 1993) about OI teaching and learning within and outside of the classroom. Lastly, I lived closer to my values of collaboration, confidence and self-belief which boosted my own confidence and self-belief in my practice as well as enjoyment derived from my practice. This research thesis is the story of how I got to the present moment, where I can confidently say that I have generated my own epistemology of practice and developed my claim to knowledge.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

masters

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

National University of Ireland Maynooth

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Vanston, Yvonne Helen

Language dc:language

en