Sharon Feeney

What stick figures tell us about Irish politics: creating a critical and collaborative learning space

This paper focuses upon the interpretation of freehand drawings produced by a small sample of 220 first-year students taking an Irish politics introductory module in response to the question, ‘What is Irish Politics?’ By sidestepping cognitive verbal-processing routes, through employing freehand drawing, we aim to create a critical and collaborative learning environment, where students develop their capacity for interpretation and critical self-reflection. This is because the freehand drawing technique, as part of a critical pedagogy, can generate a more critical and inclusive perspective, as visual representations permit us to comprehend the world differently, and understand how others also see the world. We feel that the drawings provide insights into how our youngest voters perceive their society and their place in it, and thus communicate to us their understanding of Irish politics.

Using drawings to understand perceptions of civic engagement across disciplines: ‘Seeing is understanding’

In this article, we wish to investigate if disciplinary differences exist among students when considering the topic of civic engagement. We use freehand drawing to create a learning environment in the classroom wherein students can seek to develop meaningful associations with civic engagement. The drawings examined here, produced by three different class groups, provide insights into how young adults perceive their society and their place in it, and thus communicate their understanding of civic engagement. Freehand drawing, in bypassing cognitive verbal processing routes, leads students to produce clearer and more holistic images. It allows them to put into visuals a level of comprehension that is sometimes difficult for them to articulate with words. This use of the visual method can help students to identify the tacit knowledge that they already possess.

An Initiative to Apply the Concept and Philosophy of Industry-Oriented Higher Education to Technician Level Software Programmes

The series of CEISEE symposia has been largely focused on honours undergraduate and postgraduate software degree programmes. But the themes involved apply with equal emphasis and measure to programmes leading to ordinary level degrees or traditional technician level programmes, which normally have a heavy practical component. This chapter presents a recent initiative to present a month-long workshop on these themes at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) to some 25 teachers from a number of polytechnic colleges from the Beijing area and organised through the Institute for Vocational and Adult Education (IVEA) of the Beijing Academy of Educational Sciences and the Beijing Information Technology College (BITC).

The Role of the Political Entrepreneur in the Context of Policy Change and Crisis

This paper seeks to investigate the inner mechanics of policy change. It aims to discover how ideas enter the political arena, and how endogenous forces within the policy making environment transform ideas into new policies. The central hypothesis is that in times of crisis, new ideas emanate from a number of change agents, but in order for any of these ideas to enter the institutional environment, one specific agent of change must be present: the political entrepreneur. Without political entrepreneurs ideational change, and subsequent policy change, would not occur. The paper sets out a framework for identifying and explaining the endogenous drivers of policy change, and then tests this framework on two case studies, from two countries. Crises and policy change: the role of the political entrepreneur