Geraldine Simmie PhD and Michelle Starr PhD welcome everyone back to the start of another academic year 2026-2027 in the EPI∙STEM research centre in the School of Education at the University of Limerick.

Geraldine and Michelle open the discussion through recallingsome of the summer events and chatting about their summer readings in educational policy and in research. This is particularly of interest given the frenzy today in the world of education about the rise of AI tools in learning, teaching and research and issues in the wider world that are threateningdemocracy.

We finished up the summer with a summer school in UL for ourESAI Critical and Feminist Special Interest group that was well attended and had keynotes from Professor Emeritus Kathleen Lynch from UCD and Professor Emeritus Helen Gunter from the University of Manchester. In the last few days, we started the new year with a milestone celebration by the Sixmilebridge Historical Association marking Minister Donogh O’Malley’s free education scheme in 1966. The plaque was unveiled by the Minister for Education and Youth Hildegarde Naughton T.D.

What is of greatest interest here is that democracy alwayscomes into being in every country through its education system. That makes for a very special question today: how and in what ways are we bringing democracy into being in our education system today, in Ireland elsewhere.

Geraldine introduced the listeners to a book by Kyriazi etal. published earlier this year by Elgar publishing entitled ‘The Biological Turn in Education Policy’. While in the last century there may have been competition or peaceful co-existence between a humanistic paradigm in education and a more economistic-technical paradigm, it is clear that in this century the production of knowledge in education has started to migrate from the social sciences and humanities to the life sciences, and the deeper connection to the individual body and brain. Michelle and Geraldine tease out some of theimplications of this, both for general education and for STEM education now andinto the future. 

The musical performance today is by Rosemary O’Malley andEstaban Flores, both graduates of the Master’s in Traditional Music in the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in UL. Rosemary, originally from Chicago, works in the European Centre for the Study of Hate in the School of Law in UL. Esteban, from France works in SAVINS music store in Limerick city. Here Rosemary and Esteban play a set of three jigs, My Darling Child, The Piper’s Picnic and The Munster Bacon.