Titans

A large-scale, site-specific play for the opening of the Titanic Belfast building. A shipyard preacher, desperate to be reunited with his wife and daughter, performs an arcane rite on the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, meeting souls connected with the sinking of the ship.

Inventors:Marconi's Device for Dialling the Dear Departed, The Flying Fenian

Two short site-specific pieces performed with others at the Royal Ulster Agricultural Show for Kabosh Theatre Company, as part of their continuing effort to broaden theatre audiences. One, using the form of the Edwardian melodrama, tells of Marconi's efforts to create a device to communicate with the dead. The second tells the tale of the Christian Brother who invented the submarine, John Philip Holland.

Monster, Dinosaurs

A short play performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, set in the world of dissident republicanism.

Weirdwolf

A public rehearsed reading for Tinderbox Theatre Company as part of the Pick n Mix drama festival. An allegory for mental illness this blackly comic play tells the story of a man becoming a werewolf.

Monsters, Dinosaurs, Ghosts

A stage play for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin 4-27 June 2015

Teaching and learning technologies in Higher Education: Applied behaviour analysis and autism.

Professionals on both international and national levels who work with children with autism are expressing the need for graduate-level training in applied behaviour analysis. The implementation of effective instruction in higher education for professionals working with children with autism and their families is a complex undertaking: the learner needs to acquire an understanding of the principles and procedures of applied behaviour analysis and also adapt this knowledge to the learning prerequisites of individuals with autism. In this paper we outline some current thinking about adult education and blended learning technologies and then describe and illustrate with examples emerging possibilities of multimedia technology in the development of teaching materials. We conclude that synergies between graduate-level curriculum requirements, knowledge of adult learning, and communication technology are necessary to establish comprehensive learning environments for professionals who specialize in autism intervention.

Transformative Aesthetics: Between Remembrance and Reconciliation in Contemporary Northern Irish Theatre

This article explores the ways in which two recent plays by the Tinderbox Theatre Company in Belfast – Jimmy McAleavey's The Sign of the Whale and David Ireland's Everything Between Us – engage with current political debates in Northern Ireland about how to deal with the ‘legacy of the past’. Both plays dramatise the uneasy tension between the demands for remembrance and reconciliation. I suggest that they give rise to a ‘transformative aesthetics’ that proposes an un-remembering of the past to make way for a transformative re-remembering for the future. This process, however, does not imply an easy resolution or transcendence of the antagonisms, debates, and traumatic memories. Instead, it suggests an intense and complicated engagement that sits in vexed opposition to the restorative conception of reconciliation and both a politics and a political context of ameliorative forgetting that dominates the Northern Irish Peace Process.