Collaborative Community
eduCORE works with a number of sectoral partners in establishing research opportunities, supporting researchers at all levels and facilitating dissemination. We host a lively community of practice with various organisations in the sector and welcome new and emergent research clusters and communities.
Collaborative Partner
Carlow College Research Hub
eduCORE works with our sectoral partner Carlow College in the support of the Carlow College Research Hub. The Carlow College Research Hub was established in 2019 with the following aims:
- to identify existing areas of research within the College;
- to support and promote Staff research;
- to foster a research agenda that aligns with College Strategy, mission and ethos;
- to connect the college’s research expertise with local and national organisations, communities and institutions;
- to play a supporting role in College programme development by identifying, utilising and enhancing existing and potential areas of College research and expertise.
Research in Carlow College, St. Patrick’s is organised under six key themes:
- Politics, Society and Sustainability;
- History, Literature and Culture of Ireland;
- Ideas and Beliefs;
- People, Places and Culture;
- Mind, Memory and Behaviour;
- Education, Theory and Practice.
Details of individual staff research can be found by clicking on the link for each of these themes on the Research Hub website. The hub also places an emphasis on the intrinsic value of Public Outreach for our researchers and their work as an expression of the college’s mission and ethos. The day to day work of the Research Hub involves the organisation and promotion of staff research events, such as conferences and symposia at Carlow College, book launches, new publications, public talks, media appearances, and other public outreach research-related events. The Research Hub is also currently undertaking a project to create a staff publication repository. Finally, a key aim of the Research Hub is also to developing new research collaboration opportunities with local and regional partners.
Collaborative Partner
Gestalt Institute of Ireland (www.gestaltinstitute.ie)
The interdependence of theory, practice and the ‘self’ of the Gestalt practitioner is at the heart of the Gestalt Institute of Ireland’s approach to teaching, learning and research. The MA in Gestalt Psychotherapy programme’s design is based on Bruner’s concept of a spiral curriculum. Its delivery is primarily experiential, with students encouraged to extrapolate from embodied experience to theory and vice versa. The notion of a learning community is central, with all years working together and learning from each other as well as from tutors.
We have a particular interest in developing, honing and researching embodied ‘ways of knowing’ in life and in practice and encourage students to research with others rather than on others. Our qualitative methods emphasise phenomenological, relational, embodied and creative ways of inquiry that attend to the ‘lived body’ of practitioners. The practitioner-based research our students engage in focuses on reflective, reflexive and dialogical approaches to inquiry. With an emphasis on collaborative inquiry informed by action research, learning and knowledge is co-constructed and meaning emerges through collaboration. Our researchers are immersed in their practice. By adopting this approach to critical inquiry our research is aimed at ensuring relevance for the students’ own practice and at developing and contributing to knowledge in our primary fields of psychotherapy, supervision and coaching.
eduCORE embraces opportunities for collaborations across the education sector. Please get in touch by email ([email protected]) or by telephone (059 9175715)
