Objectives: The teaching religious, including female religious, have gone into great decline in terms of numbers and influence in Catholic education internationally over the last five decades (O’Donoghue and Potts, 2004), but this has not been accompanied by the emergence of an associated corpus of research (Hellinckx, Depaepe and Simon, 2009, p. 547). Ireland is no exception to these trends. Here, as elsewhere, during the period of their ascendancy , the female religious were considered as being part of the ‘virtuoso’ in official Church discourse, namely, as occupying a loftier position in the Church hierarchy than lay people, and this not only as female religious per se, but also as teachers. Their demise coincided with the advent of the Second Vatican Council, a phenomenon which constituted ‘a “major cultural and religious transformation within Catholicism” (Grace, 2002, p. 55). One outcome was to officially have all non-ordained religious prescribed as lay people, thus dictating a major change in status. Very little, however, is known about the perspectives of the female religious on themselves as religious and as teachers before, during and after the Second Vatican Council. This paper reports on a study where the objective was to address this matter specifically for the Irish situation, but which could inform similar research across Europe. Research questions: The aim of the research was to provide a historical analysis of the experience of being a female religious in Catholic schools in the Republic of Ireland during the period 1950–2008. It was guided by three research questions: • What were the perspectives of female religious regarding what it meant to be a teacher? • How did they carry out their work in the light of those perspectives? • What was the relationship between their perspectives and the wider socio-historical structure? Theoretical framework: Lancy (1993, p. 253) has distinguished between the ‘narrative tradition’ in historical research in which arguments about causation are implicit for the most part, and ‘social science history’ where theories, assumptions and methods of analyses are explicit. This project is conceptualised within the latter tradition. In particular, the principal research questions, in which ‘perspectives’ is a central concept, are derived from ‘interpretivism’, a social theory which constitutes an appropriate theoretical framework for projects aimed at generating rich data of the type sought here. This long-established research tradition, which has been prominent at least during two periods in the last one hundred years (Ritzer, 1994), has over the last ten years been reinstated once again as a central position within contemporary social theory (Prus, 1996; Charon 2001, O’Donoghue, 2007). Silver (1980, p. 267) went some way towards arguing for such an approach in studying the lives of teachers when he argued for "the history of opinion", which he defined as "the history of how people, groups of people, people in action, have interpreted and reinterpreted their world". The approach in this project, however, is much more explicit in terms of clarifying theoretical assumptions, thus reflecting contemporary trends in writing educational biography (Kridel, 1998).

The context in which female religious taught in schools in the Republic of Ireland in the period 1950–2008 was examined, primarily through the use of documentary evidence. The physical and social environments in which these individuals taught, their pedagogical practices and the curricula they imparted were all investigated. Oral testimonies were then gathered with a view to eliciting the ‘life stories’ of these individuals (Goodson, 1992: 6). Participants were selected through the following ‘purposive sampling plan’ (Punch 1998: 193): • 5 participants who commenced teaching prior to the Second Vatican Council; • 5 participants who commenced teaching during the Second Vatican Council 1962–65; • 5 participants who commenced teaching after 1965. Transcripts were analysed using the ‘inductive analysis’ and ‘grounded theory’ procedures outlined by Strauss and Corbin (1990; 1994). Because of the complexities inherent in oral history research, safeguards proposed by Perks and Thomson (1998) were adopted.

An overall synthesis from the interviews and the documentary sources is being generated. While this is work-in progress, it is possible to identify the broad thrust of the outcomes emerging. In particular, both continuity and change across the period in terms of the perspectives of the female teaching religious on the areas of focus have been analysed in relation to three main ‘frames’: motivating factors in becoming a teaching religious; career expectations; and challenges and opportunities. Furthermore, a second level of analysis relates to the extent to which female religious as teachers moved from having their life directed through the construction of a communal identity to an individual one. Overall, the work indicates the possibility of a model for further exploration rather than a set of generalisations which apply to all female religious teachers in Ireland for the period. This should be particularly valuable not only for planning further research for the Irish context to include male teaching religious, but also wishing to extend the agenda across Europe more widely. The presenters gratefully acknowledge receiving a research grant to fund the project on which this presentation is based from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.