Dr. Lorraine O’Connell is an experienced secondary school music teacher and choral director, working as a lecturer at TU Dublin Conservatoire. In addition to teaching Music Education courses within the undergraduate programmes, she supervises undergraduate and postgraduate research and teaches Musicianship (within the Junior Conservatoire). Her role also includes coordinating the Musicianship programme for the Junior Conservatoire, which includes developing the curriculum and teaching materials.

O’Connell was awarded a PhD in 2012 for her collaborative research in developing a programme to teach the statutory music curriculum in the lower secondary school. She also holds a post-graduate diploma from the Kodály Pedagogical Institute (Hungary). In 2012-2013 she was awarded a Teaching Fellowship Award (with Dr Anne- Marie O’Farrell) for the research project ‘Composer in the Classroom’. Her research interests include music curriculum development, music teacher education, the reflective teacher, psychology of music education, learning theories and teacher as researcher including collaborative research. She has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences and published in music education journals and in the European Perspectives on Music Education book series. She has taught on many CPD courses for Irish music teachers (classroom and instrumental/vocal) and on numerous Kodály courses in Ireland, Hungary and Scotland. O’Connell is a founding member of and currently serves on the committee of the Society for Music Education in Ireland (SMEI). She is the EAS (European Association for Music in Schools) National Co-ordinator for Ireland.