Mr. Stephen Rhatigan
Vice Chairperson
Stephen’s love and enthusiasm for Chinese culture was borne out of independent travel within China in 2004 and 2006. A teacher for over 20 years at Our Lady’s School in Terenure, Stephen was presented with an opportunity to fuse this personal interest with his professional endeavours in 2011 when Our Lady’s became one of select schools to pilot the NCCA’s newly developed Chinese Language and Culture course for Transition Year students.
The development and investment in the subject area at Our Lady’s earned the school the most coveted Confucius Classroom status in 2014. As a recipient of the Confucius Classroom award, we continue to work closely with other schools as well as the Confucius Institute for Ireland at UCD to develop the teaching and learning of Chinese language and culture at secondary school level.
Despite not having a linguistic background, with a Degree in History and Geography from UCD and a Masters in Education, Leadership and Management from Trinity, Stephen sought to further learn the cultural and linguistic aspects of the Transition Year course he was delivering. To this end, after earning the HSK 2 standard, Stephen enrolled in the Professional Diploma course at UCD. This, most interesting and challenging course, took Stephen, together with his classmates to the Beijing Language and Culture University in China in the summer of 2016 where they completed the course successfully.
In 2017, together with Mr. Lichao Li, Stephen was invited, on behalf of the Confucius Institute, to present on the Teaching and Learning of Chinese Language and Culture at Junior Cycle, to European Colleagues at a conference hosted by the European Association of Chinese Teaching in Montargis in France.
Since 2017, Stephen has worked in the capacity of Deputy Principal in Our Lady’s School. Although this new position limited classroom teaching, Stephen continued to grow the subject in other manners, namely three successive international student trips to China, each with over 50 students in attendance. 2017 also saw Stephen co-edit the inaugural 你好中国 magazine which focuses on the progressions in the teaching and learning of Chinese language and culture in Irish education.
As Vice President of the IACT, Stephen is passionate about how the teaching and learning of Chinese language and culture can develop to meet the needs of the students. In addition, striving to give local Irish teachers the opportunity and accessibility to deliver lessons in Mandarin whilst developing their studies remains a focus. It is hoped that through the efforts of the IACT together with their partners in education, that Chinese Language and Culture can establish itself as an integral, accessible and successful course at all levels of the Irish education system.