In the EPI•STEM PODCAST Episode 13, co-hosts Geraldine Simmie PhD and Michelle Starr PhD welcome their special guest Associate Professor Donal Canty, Deputy Head of the School of Education and Senior Lecturer in TechnologyEducation at the School of Education, University of Limerick.

Donal shares the origins of his passion for educationand for technology education from his early life growing up in Kerry. Interestingly, Donal connects his current role as an academic in UL and his former role as a secondary school teacher with the importance of the ethic of care and relationship needed to play his best in a team and to have that positive commitment to the common good.

Donal’s passion for teaching and research lies in his deep interest in pedagogy and assessment, and especially in teaching student teachers of technology education in the School of Education how to scaffold the formative assessment of their students. Here he talks about one of his recent publications examining the pedagogies behind that skill of formative assessment using an expansive framework provided by Xu & Brown in 2016. The advantage of this framework is that it provides an uplifting and holistic view ofassessment that includes affective care and cultural contexts. Donal published his paper with colleagues in UL, from the School of Education in UL and from the Faculty of Engineering and Informatics, Technological University of theShannon.

The musical selection today is by Ayyaz Mehmood, afinal year student in the Performing Arts in World Music in The Irish World Academy of Music. Ayyaz is a singer and a songwriter. Here Ayyaz is playing acoustic guitar and singing one of his own compositions, entitled ‘Homelife’.