 I think, principally because teaching and learning is the core of the mission of everything that we do in higher education. Universities and colleges were established with the centres of learning but I think in addition it's through our own teaching that our learning and knowledge is challenged, tested, refined and improved. It's pretty clear that the quality of teaching and learning in the Irish higher education system is vital. We need to make sure those quarter of a million young people have the highest quality possible and with the most modern teaching and learning methods, techniques, assessment opportunities, learning outcomes that they can so that these young graduates and not so young graduates across the full range of academic profiles and business and economic and enterprise profiles and all the cultural and social activities that get involved in as well so that they can bring their full potential to these. Teaching and learning is valued and turned through academic achievement awards and scholarship examinations. However, individual skills award those to attain excellent adults during the year. While awards are great communication between students and lecturers and TA's is vital. I've built up a good relationship with my lecturers and this summer my list of agency providers are commended to be on the work of the last particularly difficult year. While awards are brilliant on the CV, awards of encouragement from academic staff are also essential to encourage students by recognising students' efforts and pushes them to achieve. I think the first thing to recognise is that there are a lot of competing agendas in higher education and I think the first thing to say is that good teaching and good pedagogical practice takes quite a lot of expertise and effort and I think that there needs to be recognition that that expertise is both within the discipline itself but also pedagogical and as a core activity within higher education I think we need to recognise its significance in terms of the contribution that it makes and we often don't talk about contribution. For a head as an NGO focus on creating inclusive environments in education and employment for people with disabilities we understand that the classroom is right at the heart of learning and the teacher is at the heart of the classroom and that's why we place huge stock on our work on promoting inclusive pedagogical frameworks like universal design for learning because if the pedagogy isn't inclusive then the door to learning is already halfway closed for many individuals so we really understand the powers that teachers have to make a difference in people's lives. I think if you ask most people of the functions of the university they'll point to teaching and research and in many ways to me those are really kind of academic signage twins it's very hard to separate the two but I think research without dissemination can very easily become quite sterile and it's very important for us to nurture the next generation of scholars through our teaching and also I think there's a societal value we need to teach our students to think intensively and critically and that largely comes through the teaching activity. By valuing teaching and learning in higher education we can start to see students and teachers work together in student partnership approaches and start to reap the benefits of them as well which should be a huge advocate of as well. I think vital week is great for this because we can showcase best practices around teaching and learning and then other teachers can start to pick up the tips here and there and maybe adapt their practices or reflect on their own. When teaching and learning is valued students feel cared for and empowered to achieve they could be inspired themselves to look into research to be to become really passionate about a certain area if they see somebody's really passionate about an area they're more likely to be inspired into looking into that as well and I think someone being so passionate about an area can really be passed through to other people through really quality teaching and learning. Perhaps in the past we've seen it as some kind of dual system whereby we have subject expertise and then bolted on to that we have the ability to teach and the challenges that people face when they're trying to learn that particular subject and I feel that's not the entire picture for me subject expertise incorporates not just the expertise intrinsic to the subject itself but also an understanding of the ways in which people can acquire the skills knowledge and dispositions of that subject and that's that's a pedagogy that is a teaching and learning expertise that's built into and forms part of the subject expertise so therefore the notion of vitality is perfect for this particular series of events. You know why is teaching and learning vital in higher education? I mean well if it's not vital in higher education then you know we have a bigger question in a way to be asking so teaching and learning assessment and student engagement are absolutely core to what we're about as a university where we're here to turn out I think and to help people develop professionally in terms of their knowledge their academic excellence their technical excellence but also as people so what's the essence of graduateness you know are our graduates ready you know in terms of knowledge willing in terms of confidence and able to speak up and to be politically and socially aware to be mindful of our environment to think about equality diversity and inclusion and also to contribute actually whether that's to work or enterprise to the economy but also to society if we're not getting that and it's it's to teaching or learning our assessment our student engagement and that kind of that the work that we do in those spaces are crucial actually to our mission of turning out good graduates and it's the essence of what we do. I think just to step again back from that I think everything we do in higher education is vital but I think it's nice to have this lens now from the National Forum which is focusing on the work the core work that we do because it is the core work we do and it's an absolute privilege to teach students and it's difficult to assess them sometimes but at the same time it's core to our work and so valuing that type of work is really really important and I'm delighted that the Forum are focusing in on scholarship as well because I suppose Ireland is unusual maybe in comparison to other jurisdictions in that our staff primarily come into teaching without having a formal teaching qualification and yet they are encouraged and they are supported within their their institutes to ensure that they are not only up to date in their discipline specific knowledge but also in terms of the knowledge around the whole discipline area of learning teaching and assessment and so the fact that the Forum are again putting this lens on valuing this is really really important so that we see being up to date being able to engage in new pedagogic approaches being able to use digitally enhanced approaches etc is really really important but for me the key thing is that it's evidence-based so we're not doing it for the sake of doing it we're doing it because we have we have researched it we have seen what our best practice is and we are then adapting to suit our own context and and so I think it's really really important that we name it we say research is important but valuing our core area of learning teaching and assessment is just as important I think it's really vital because teaching and learning is what we do it's sometimes considered our job but we actually don't think about how we practice it so I think it's really important that we not only help people to become scholarly teachers but we also support them in engaging with the scholarship teaching and learning through their practice so again it's about engaging and working with colleagues and also kind of helping each other to get out our practice and disseminate it and make sure that everybody shares the good resources that we are producing