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The purpose of this paper is to investigate and review how the practices of Lesson Study fare in enhancing the professional capabilities of mathematics teachers when introduced as part of a pilot project in reforming the post-primary mathematics curriculum in Ireland.

Totally, 250 mathematics teachers teaching Junior and Senior Cycle mathematics in 24 post-primary schools constitute the population of this study. The schools which participated are representative of the range of all post-primary schools in Ireland.

Lesson Study has an important role to play in the continuing professional development of teachers in the 24 post-primary schools and beyond in Ireland. An investigation of the maths teachers’ engagement with Lesson Study reveals some considerable initial resistance. Reasons for this resistance are examined and the lessons learned from the steps taken to deal with this are reviewed. Lesson Study is an innovation that teachers need to understand deeply and to practice regularly through mutual support if they are to avail of it fruitfully. Accordingly, further approaches need to be explored, not least the important role of school leadership, to adapt Lesson Study more fully and more productively to the professional cultures of teaching in Ireland.

An analytic and evaluative account of the challenges and complexities involved in introducing Lesson Study to post-primary schools in Ireland is presented for the first time.

A consideration of the implications of technological change for public library staff and managers in the UK is based on the selected results of a literature review. Recent developments affecting the growth of information and communication technology (ICT) in public libraries provide a context against which research into the effects of automation, the introduction of ICT in a variety of library environments and into society generally, are explored. The value of attitudes to ICT are questioned noting that attitudes are often seen as being important in determining the successful implementation of ICT in libraries. Training is suggested as an appropriate means of enabling staff to cope effectively with technological change. Successful training needs to appreciate that staff have different needs and so prefer different training methods. Resistance is also viewed as a natural response to change that managers should note and attempt to understand, if and when it occurs.

In this introductory chapter, I discuss the rationale for this edited collection and the contribution it can make to advancing knowledge of gender inequalities and promoting social justice in the medical profession and medical education. I provide a short overview of and critique of popular debates in the medical community in the United Kingdom and I also discuss briefly research about women’s careers in the United Kingdom and globally. The introductory chapter provides a description of each chapter and its contribution to scholarship about gender, careers and inequalities in Medicine/Medical Education.

“Since films attract an audience of millions, the need and appetite for information about them is enormous.” So said Harold Leonard in his introduction to The Film Index published in 1941. The 1970's has produced more than enough — too much — food to satisfy that appetite. In the past five years the number of reference books, in this context defined as encyclopedias, handbooks, directories, dictionaries, indexes and bibliographies, and the astounding number of volumes on individual directors, complete histories, genre history and analysis, published screenplays, critics' anthologies, biographies of actors and actresses, film theory, film technique and production and nostalgia, that have been published is overwhelming. The problem in film scholarship is not too little material but the senseless duplication of materials that already exist and the embarrassing output of items that are poorly or haphazardly researched, or perhaps should not have been written at all.