Getting the Freire Prize

I attended the graduation ceremony for my Masters last week, drawing a line under my year-long career break and self-imposed period of 'thinking space'. It's more than 28 years since I last attended a graduation ceremony (Hull Guildhall in the summer of 1995, in case you were wondering...), and as well as the sense of occasion it was nice to catch up others from the MEd programme at Maynooth.

I received my result a couple of months ago and was aware I'd achieved a First, although it was a nice surprise to learn just before the ceremony that I'd received the highest mark of anyone on the course in 2022-23 and been awarded the Department's Paulo Freire Prize.

Paulo Freire was an inspirational figure to many of us within the world of adult education, championing a critical and dialogical approach to pedagogy where learners are active participants in knowledge creation, as well as emphasising the need to understand power relationships and social contexts in which learning takes place.

His ideas are a welcome antidote to the transactional and neoliberal discourses that have tended to dominate education policy recently, to varying extents in each of the jurisdictions across these islands.

My research was unapologetically Freireist in many of its aspirations and assumptions. I've always believed learning should be done with (rather than to) people, and that it is never context or value-free. Whilst the immediate focus was the professional and personal experiences of ESOL tutors in Ireland during and since the pandemic, it was only really possible to make sense of these with an appreciation of how ESOL has been perceived at a policy level, managed by institutions and how it's funded.

I'm hoping to share my research more broadly - the thesis is now available from the Maynooth University Mural (see “I have to know. I have to understand how to do this!”), but in the meantime I'm delighted to have received this recognition.