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The purpose of this study is to understand the meaning of the term well-being as conceptualised by parents, grandparents, principals and teachers in the Irish primary education system.

A hermeneutic phenomenological approach was adopted to understand the nature and meaning of the phenomenon of well-being. Interviews were carried out with 54 principals, teachers, parents and grandparents from a representative sample of primary schools in Ireland. Each participant was asked the same, open, question: “What does well-being mean to you?” Responses were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a combination of the principles of the hermeneutic circle and Braun and Clarke’s framework for thematic analysis.

Three conceptualisations of well-being were identified (1) well-being is about being happy, (2) well-being is about being healthy and safe and (3) well-being is something you “do”.

To the best of our knowledge this paper is the first of its kind to describe how well-being is conceptualised by adults in Irish primary school contexts. In particular it highlights how neoliberal conceptualisations of well-being as a “thing”, a commodity exchanged on assumptions of individualism, moralism and bio-economism, have crept into the education of our youngest citizens.

Researchers play an essential, and indeed powerful, role in honouring and empowering the voices of people from marginalised communities. This chapter seeks to step beyond the already comprehensive ethical and methodological literature on ‘doing’ research by offering a reflection on the less articulated, but no less substantiative, aspects of conducting qualitative research with those for whom that which is most important, as the writer Audrey Lorde suggests, must be spoken. The delicate dance of interest and objectivity, a tolerance of not knowing and uncertainty and the willingness to hold competing truths with equal reverence are discussed and illuminated with examples from my own research with young people with experiences of mental health difficulties. This chapter is offered with the intention of foregrounding some of the more tacit, but no less bruising, aspects of the research interplay. Equally, it is offered in the hope that, in bringing into the open our limitations and vulnerabilities as researchers, we might be better positioned to understand, indeed honour, that which is most important for those in distress.

Purposes – The overall aim of the chapter is to explore children's acting and disputing within a family role-play and highlight how different roles are argued upon and negotiated by the participants, both verbally and nonverbally.

Methodology – The chapter is drawn from a single play episode between five 6-year-old girls at a Swedish preschool. The analytical framework of the study is influenced by ethnomethodological work on social action focusing in particular on participants’ methodical ways of accomplishing and making sense of social activities.

Findings – The analyses show that the girls use a range of verbal and nonverbal resources to argue and accomplish the social order of the play (i) using past tense to display the factual past event status, and present tense to bid for upcoming events, (ii) building a mutual pretend understanding of places and objects that were used to configure nearness as well as distance in the girls’ interaction and relationship. Finally, the analyses clearly show that the significance of a pretend role is situated and depends on the social context in which it is negotiated.

Practical implications – To get acquainted with detailed analyses of children's pretend play can be useful for preschool teachers’ understanding of how children build relationships within the play, and hopefully awaken their interest to study children's play in depth in everyday practice.

Value of chapter – The present chapter contributes to a wider understanding of how social relationships are argued and negotiated by preschool girls within pretend family role-play.

This chapter focuses on women's descriptions of their own violence in nineteenth-century Ireland, as revealed in prisoner petitions held in the National Archives of Ireland. It uses the case files of women imprisoned or sentenced to death for violent crimes such as infanticide, manslaughter, murder, wounding and assault. This chapter takes an empirical approach and considers the ways that women explained and rationalised their violent acts. An analysis of the petitions offers an insight into women's views of their own violence, gendered attitudes at the time, and women's sense of the factors that might lead to a commutation of sentence. The accuracy or truthfulness of the petitions is not important in this study; instead, the chapter explores the self-image that women wanted to portray and the tactics that they opted to use to seek a reduction in their sentences. As shown in this chapter, most women emphasised their passivity: they typically claimed to be innocent, coerced or provoked into violence.

The purpose of this paper is to critically explore and foreground secondary religious education (RE) student teachers’ accounts of the dilemmas they experienced in their classrooms and schools in a highly racialised post referendum environment. Teacher narratives are analysed in order to suggest ways in which a transformative teaching and learning agenda drawing from a pluralistic human rights framework can be reasserted in place of government requirements to promote fundamental British values (FBV).

Qualitative data were collected in focus group interviews to gain insights into how the referendum environment was experienced phenomenologically in localised school settings.

The interview data reveals the complex ways in which the discourses circulating in the post referendum milieu play out in highly contingent, diverse secondary school settings. These schools operate in a high stakes policy context, shaped by the new civic nationalism of FBV, the Prevent security agenda and government disavowal of “multiculturalism” in defence of “our way of life” (Cameron, 2011). A key finding to emerge from the teachers’ narratives is that some of the ways in which Prevent and FBV have been imposed in their schools has reduced the transformative potentials of the critical, pluralistic RE approaches to teaching and learning that is promoted within the context of their university initial teacher education programme.

The findings suggest that existing frameworks associated with security and civic nationalism are not sufficient to ensure that young citizens receive an education that prepares them for engagement with a post truth, post Brexit racial and political environment. Transformative teaching and learning approaches (Duckworth and Smith, 2018), drawing upon pluralistic, critical RE and human rights education are presented as more effective alternatives which recognise the dignity and agency of both teachers and students.

This paper is an original investigation of the impact of the Brexit referendum environment on student teachers in a university setting. In the racialised aftermath of the referendum the need for transformative pluralistic and critical educational practice has never been more urgent. The data and analysis presented in this paper offer a compelling argument for a root and branch reformulation of current government security agendas in education.

Simulation technology has been used as a viable alternative to provide a real life setting in teacher education. Applying mixed-reality classroom simulations to English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher preparation, this qualitative case study aims to examine how pre-service teachers (PSTs) practice culturally and linguistically responsive teaching to work with an English learner (EL) avatar and other avatar students.

Using an embedded single case study, three PSTs’ teaching simulations and interviews were collected and analyzed.

This study found PST participants made meaningful connections between theory and practices of culturally and linguistically responsive teaching, particularly by connecting academic concepts to students’ life experiences, promoting cultural diversity, using instructional scaffolding and creating a safe environment. Nevertheless, they needed further improvement in incorporating cultural diversity into content lessons, creating a challenging and supportive classroom and developing interactional scaffolding for ELs’ language development. The findings also show that while PST participants perceived simulation technology as very beneficial, expanding the range of technological affordances could provide PSTs an opportunity to undertake a full range of critical teaching strategies for ELs.

This research contributes to broadening the realm of mixed-reality technology by applying it to ESOL teacher education and has implications for both ESOL teacher educators and simulation technology researchers.

The Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as Welfare Reform, implemented, in addition to many other features, a 60-month lifetime limit for welfare receipt. Research to date primarily documents individual-level barriers, characteristics, and outcomes of those who time out. Very little scholarly work considers experiences of mothering or carework after timing out. In this chapter, I ask, what kinds of carework strategies are used by women who have met their lifetime limits to welfare? What do the ways mothers talk about these strategies tell us about the discursive forces they are resisting and/or engaging? Using in-depth interviews at two points in time with women who have timed out of welfare (n = 32 and 23), this analysis shows how mothers’ strategies and the ways they discuss them reveal covert material and symbolic resistance to key discourses – negative assumptions about welfare mothers and a culture of work enforcement – and the conditions shaping their lives (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004). Mothers use carework strategies very similar to those identified in many other studies (e.g., London, Scott, Edin, & Hunter, 2004; Morgen, Acker, & Weigt, 2010; Scott, Edin, London, & Mazelis, 2001), but they provide us with an understanding of carework in a new context. The three groups of strategies explored here – structuring employment and non-employment, protecting children, and securing resources – reveal raced, classed, and gendered labor in which women engage to care for children in circumstances marked by limited employment opportunities and limited state support. The policy implications of mothers’ strategies are also discussed.