University in Kildare celebrates massive teacher education milestone
The centenary event was organised around the themes of ‘retrospect and prospect’
A university located in County Kildare celebrated a massive teacher education milestone with a special event.
Maynooth University’s (MU) Department of Education has marked 100 years of teacher education at Maynooth, bringing together generations of graduates, current and former colleagues, students and partners.
The history dates to 1926, when the first Higher Diploma in Education began at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth (SPCM) with six students.
Forty years later, in 1966, the Higher Diploma opened to lay students, including women. Among them was Mary O’Rourke, who would later serve as Minister for Education.
And since then, sixty years later, more than 10,000 graduates have completed initial teacher education programmes at Maynooth University.
Over that time, the Department’s work has expanded into undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education, educational leadership, professional learning and research, alongside its work with schools and the wider education system.
According to MU’s head of the department of education, Dr Majella Dempsey, ‘100 years is a long time to keep believing that teaching is worth doing properly’.
She added: “That is what this milestone represents to me; generations of people at Maynooth [University] who quietly decided, year after year, that Irish teacher education was worth reforming, worth expanding and worth getting right.”
‘RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT’
The centenary event was organised around the themes of “retrospect and prospect”, looking back at how education at Maynooth has developed while also considering what comes next.
Led by Dr Rose Dolan, Chair of the Centenary Committee, the event began in Callan Hall on the South Campus, where Higher Diploma lectures were once held, with welcome addresses from MU President Professor Eeva Leinonen and SPCM President Rev Dr Michael Shortall.
Speakers then traced different periods in the Department’s history, including Dr Pádraig Hogan, former MU President Prof Tom Collins and Dr Dempsey, alongside reflections from alumni Prof Jim Gleeson, Diane Birnie and Dr William Donnelly.
Reflecting on teacher education at Maynooth, Prof Collins said: ‘There has always been more to education at Maynooth than the transmission of content.
“It is education as construction rather than education as instruction; learning by doing, alongside a strong pastoral element and an understanding that education happens beyond the classroom,” Dr Collins added.
The second part of the centenary programme moved to the School of Education on the North Campus, where an exhibition traced the Department’s development and participants joined roundtable discussions about its impact and future.
Closing out the event, Dr Dempsey, said: ‘A hundred years in, the work isn't finished, it is just facing a new set of questions.
“We are already preparing teachers for classrooms being reshaped by artificial intelligence, for a national strategy for education that reaches out to 2050, and for a country that will keep asking more of its schools than it did the day this Department began.”
Dr Dempsey also said: “If the last century was about reform, pathways and growth, the next one will be about staying willing to keep reforming because the day we decide we have finished getting it right is the day we stop being any good to the students in front of us.”