Dr. Jean McGowan & Lily Murphy Her Next Step Episode 3

Hello and welcome to Her Next Step, the podcast where women in the public service talk about how their passion and their intuition led them to interesting and exciting career paths. We'll hear about the fears and challenges that could have held them back and about the internal and external supports that enabled them to take their next step. I'm Lily Murphy and I'm speaking to women whose stories will, I believe, inspire you to wonder what stepping stones would help you to take your next step. My guest on the show today is Dr. Jean McGowan. Jean is passionate about creating the conditions where children can thrive in a challenging school environment. Jean's career path from teacher to school principal to her current role as postgraduate researcher and school placement supervisor in the School of Inclusive and Special Education in Dublin City University has not been without its challenges. We'll explore some of these challenges and the passions and motivations that enabled Jean to continually take her next step. Jean, I'm delighted to have you here for Her Next Step. I'm curious to know if I'd stood in front of a group of your peers in National School, Secondary School or your family and said somebody here will have a PhD in Educational Research. Would they have looked at you? No, no. And we wouldn't have looked at anybody in our group because that isn't what it was like. You know, you got a job after school. You either maybe became a teacher or a nurse or you got into the bank or the civil service and that was well, that was as far as it seemed to go. But even in primary school, I always had an inkling that I'd love to be a teacher because way back in those days, and this was kind of the late 70s, when we were in fifth and sixth class, you know, if the infant teacher and in those days it was infants first and possibly even second some years, if that teacher was out, the principal would just pick one or two of the fifth and sixth to go in and mind the class, teach the class. We'd hear their reading, you know, when I think of it, we wouldn't do anything like that nowadays. But we didn't think anything of it. We just loved going into the younger children and playing teacher. Yes, that's what we would do.