The role of transformative thinking and practice in a property entrepreneur's response to the funding crisis since 2008

This portfolio of exploration explores the role of transformative thinking and practice in a property entrepreneur’s response to the financial crisis which swept over Ireland from 2008. The complexity of this challenge and the mental capacity to meet its demands is at the core of the exploration. This inquiry emerged from the challenges the financial crisis presented to my values, beliefs, assumptions, and theories, i.e. the interpretive lens through which I make meaning of my experiences. Given the issue identified, this inquiry is grounded in aspects of theories of constructive developmental psychology, applied developmental science, and philosophy. Integrating and linking these elements to business practice is the applied element of the Portfolio. As the 2008 crisis unfolded I realised I was at the limits of my way of knowing. I came to understand that the underlying structure of a way of knowing is the ‘subject-object relationship’ i.e. what a way of knowing can reflect upon, look at, have perspective on, in other words, make object, as against what is it embedded in, attached to, identified within, or subject to. My goal became enhancing my awareness of how I made meaning and how new insights, which would transform a way of knowing, are created. The focus was on enhancing my practice. This Portfolio is structured into three essays. Essay One reported on my self-reflection and external evaluation out of which emerged my developmental goals. In Essay Two I undertake a reading for change programme in which different meaning making systems were confronted in order to challenge me as a meaning maker. Essay Three reported on my experiment which concerned the question whether it was possible for me as a property entrepreneur, and for others alike, to retain bank finance in the face of the overwhelming objective of the bank to deleverage their balance sheet of property loans. The output of my research can be grouped into General Developmental and Specific Business Implications. Firstly I address those who are interested in a transformational-based response to the challenges of operating in the property sector in Ireland during a crisis. I outline the apparatus of thought that I used to create insight, and thus transform how I thought, these are Awareness, Subject-object separation, Exploring other’s perspectives from the position of incompleteness, Dialectical thinking and Collingwood’s Questioning activity. Secondly I set out my learnings from the crisis and their impact on entrepreneurial behaviour and the business of property development. I identify ten key insights that have emerged from leading a property company through the crisis. Many of these are grounded in common sense, however, in my experience these were, to borrow Shakespeare’s words, “More honor'd in the breach than the observance” in pre Crisis Ireland. Finally I set out a four-step approach for forging a strategy. This requires my peer practitioners to identify (i) what they are subject to, (ii) Assess the Opportunity or challenge in a Systemic Context, (iii) Explore Multiple Perspectives on the opportunity or Challenge with an Orientation to change how you know and (iv) Using the Questioning Activity to create Knowledge. Based on my experience I conclude that transformative thinking and practice is a key enabler for a property entrepreneur, in responding to a major collapse of traditional (bank debt) funding.

A corpus-driven error analysis of the oral and written production of Leaving Certificate Spanish learners

The Leaving Certificate (LC) is the national, standardised state examination in Ireland necessary for entry to third level education – this presents a massive, raw corpus of data with the potential to yield invaluable insight into the phenomena of learner interlanguage. With samples of official LC Spanish examination data, this project has compiled a digitised corpus of learner Spanish comprised of the written and oral production of 100 candidates. This corpus was then analysed using a specific investigative corpus technique, Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA, Dagneaux et al, 1998). CEA is a powerful apparatus in that it greatly facilitates the quantification and analysis of a large learner corpus in digital format. The corpus was both compiled and analysed with the use of UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell 2013). This Tool allows for the recording of candidate-specific variables such as grade, examination level, task type and gender, therefore allowing for critical analysis of the corpus as one unit, as separate written and oral sub corpora and also of performance per task, level and gender. This is an interdisciplinary work combining aspects of Applied Linguistics, Learner Corpus Research and Foreign Language (FL) Learning. Beginning with a review of the context of FL learning in Ireland and Europe, I go on to discuss the disciplinary context and theoretical framework for this work and outline the methodology applied. I then perform detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses before going on to combine all research findings outlining principal conclusions. This investigation does not make a priori assumptions about the data set, the LC Spanish examination, the context of FLs or of any aspect of learner competence. It undertakes to provide the linguistic research community and the domain of Spanish language learning and pedagogy in Ireland with an empirical, descriptive profile of real learner performance, characterising learner difficulty.

A qualitative analysis of parental coping with an early diagnosis of hearing loss in Ireland

The recent implementation of Universal Neonatal Hearing Screening (UNHS) in all 19 maternity hospitals across Ireland has precipitated early identification of paediatric hearing loss in an Irish context. This qualitative, grounded theory study centres on the issue of parental coping as families receive and respond to (what is typically) an unexpected diagnosis of hearing loss in their newborn baby. Parental wellbeing is of particular concern as the diagnosis occurs in the context of recovery from birth and at a time when the parent-child relationship is being established. As the vast majority of children with a hearing loss are born into hearing families with no prior history of deafness, parents generally have had little exposure to childhood hearing loss and often experience acute emotional vulnerability as they respond to the diagnosis. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews primarily with parents (and to a lesser extent with professionals), as well as a follow-up postal questionnaire for parents. Through a grounded theory analysis of data, the researcher subsequently fashioned a four-stage model depicting the parental journey of receiving and coping with a diagnosis. The four stages (entitled Anticipating, Confirming, Adjusting and Normalising) are differentiated by the chronology of service intervention and defined by the overarching parental experience. Far from representing a homogenous trajectory, this four-stage model is multifaceted and captures a wide diversity of parental experiences ranging from acute distress to resilient hopefulness

Politics, Power, PISA: a genealogy of mathematics education policy at second level in Ireland at the beginning of the 21st century

This thesis traces a genealogy of the discourse of mathematics education reform in Ireland at the beginning of the twenty first century at a time when the hegemonic political discourse is that of neoliberalism. It draws on the work of Michel Foucault to identify the network of power relations involved in the development of a single case of curriculum reform – in this case Project Maths. It identifies the construction of an apparatus within the fields of politics, economics and education, the elements of which include institutions like the OECD and the Government, the bureaucracy, expert groups and special interest groups, the media, the school, the State, state assessment and international assessment. Five major themes in educational reform emerge from the analysis: the arrival of neoliberal governance in Ireland; the triumph of human capital theory as the hegemonic educational philosophy here; the dominant role of OECD/PISA and its values in the mathematics education discourse in Ireland; the fetishisation of western scientific knowledge and knowledge as commodity; and the formation of a new kind of subjectivity, namely the subjectivity of the young person as a form of human-capital-to-be. In particular, it provides a critical analysis of the influence of OECD/PISA on the development of mathematics education policy here – especially on Project Maths curriculum, assessment and pedagogy. It unpacks the arguments in favour of curriculum change and lays bare their ideological foundations. This discourse contextualises educational change as occurring within a rapidly changing economic environment where the concept of the State’s economic aspirations and developments in science, technology and communications are reshaping both the focus of business and the demands being put on education. Within this discourse, education is to be repurposed and its consequences measured against the paradigm of the Knowledge Economy – usually characterised as the inevitable or necessary future of a carefully defined present.