Marita Kerin

Biography

Marita recently retired from the School of Education at Trinity College Dublin, where she remains actively engaged in academic and outreach initiatives. Her focus is on university-community links. Her research interests centre on the longevity and transformative learning that emerge from professional partnerships facilitated through co-teaching. One example involves undergraduate music education students serving as expert musicians, and co-teaching with primary teachers as expert educators. This model's enduring success over a decade inspired the creation of Quavers to Quadratics, an interdisciplinary educational outreach programme. Co-founded with physicist Dr. Shane Bergin and the National Concert Hall’s Education and Participation team, Q2Q has operated for over ten years with funding from Science Foundation Ireland and the ESB. It engages pairs of undergraduate music and physics students as subject experts, facilitating informal, interdisciplinary, learning experiences for primary children and their teachers, occupying the role of education expert.  Her broader research explores co-teaching as a mechanism for inclusion and professional development via sustained educational partnerships. Her interests also extend to artistic biography and the long-term effects of TCD chapel chorister participation. A frequent presenter at international educational and music education conferences, she enjoys co-publishing with colleagues from AERG contributing to the fields of education and music pedagogy.