This opinion piece is a call to action for all higher education teachers engaged in partnership practice to consider themselves advocates, reluctant or willing, for a partnership approach in higher education, reluctant or willing. By sharing my lived experience of partnership, I highlight some of the considerations facing teachers who are resisting the ‘how we do things’ pressures that reproduce existing learner-teacher power structures and cause tensions between colleagues. However, I argue that without teachers as drivers, partnership practice will remain an idealist goal experienced by few.

This chapter presents a case study of the TOBAR programme, an initiative aimed at diversifying initial teacher education in Ireland. The programme, developed in 2017, is a response to Ireland's National Access Plan (2015-2019) and a growing awareness for the need to diversify the teaching profession in Ireland and is funded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA). The data gives voice to traveller students who participated in the TOBAR programme and will provide unique insights that balance the majoritarian narrative on access and inclusion. Drawing on a series of semi-structured interviews with three students on the TOBAR programme, the authors report that while the programme is having a positive impact on accessing higher education, challenges at student level and at HEI level still exist.

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2012) Asking Angela Macnamara: An Intimate History of Irish Lives. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 228pp. ISBN 978 0 7165 3038 1 hardback €60. ISBN 978 0 7165 3039 8 paperback €24.95.

Ten year old James looks out the backseat car window. He’s familiar with the views and with speaking to his mom through the gap in the seat. For a moment he wonders what it would be like if it was different. Sometimes he would like to stay at home and play with his dog or cycle his new bike to soccer training. He’s used to having his mom drive him…but its boring. Then he thinks; what if a car knocks him down? What if a stranger talks to him? What if he gets lost? No, its much better this way, isn’t it? Could James’ experience be a memory from your childhood? Maybe not but my research would suggests that this is becoming a more common experience. The rapid globalisation of Ireland in recent years has hugely impacted many aspects of family life especially the lives of children, for many reasons; ...