Civically Engaged Teaching and Learning
The winner of the Engaged Teaching and Learning Award for 2025 is Prof Eimear McGlinchey, in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, along with an extensive Trinity team: Eilish Burke, Martin McMahon, Kathleen Byrne, Mei Lin Yap, Paul Horan, Mary McCarron, Michelle Cleary, Katrina Byrne, Fidelma Flannery, Carmel Doyle, Sandra Fleming and Paul Keenan. The team will also include the expertise of AVISTA CLG, a major provider of intellectual disability services in Ireland.
The project is about the inclusion of people with an intellectual disability as lecturers in intellectual disability nursing programs, in order to foster critical thinking and empathy among nursing students while empowering people with an intellectual disability through valued, practical roles in academia.
Traditional nursing education has often excluded the direct voices of people with intellectual disabilities, instead presenting their experiences through the interpretative lens of non-disabled educators. This exclusion perpetuates hierarchical structures that marginalise people with an intellectual disability and limits opportunities for students to engage authentically with the lived experiences of the population they are training to support.
In the modules Eimear already leads, two people with an intellectual disability have been engaged as paid guest lecturers. While this has promoted voice of lived experience, it remains largely restricted to this one module, without wider uptake. Participation in Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs)—a critical assessment method in nursing education—remains underexplored for this population. The Intellectual Disability discipline are absolutely committed to supporting the involvement and it has been previously agreed that broader including should take place.
This project will co-develop resources that promote the increased inclusion of individuals with intellectual disabilities in teaching and assessment within the Intellectual Disability Nursing program, including materials for participation in OSCEs.