We are delighted to announce Zoryana Pshyk as the keynote speaker for IDEA Conference 2026, taking place on Wednesday, 24 June at The Grand Hotel Malahide, Co. Dublin. This year’s theme, Education for Liberation: GCE in an Age of Crisis, draws directly on Paulo Freire’s legacy to explore the role of Global Citizenship Education in today’s world

Zoryana is an accomplished adult educator and researcher whose work puts education for liberation into practice. She is a facilitator with Partners Training for Transformation, Chair of the Kildare Integration Network, and a founding member of Maynooth University of Sanctuary. Her approach is grounded in Freirean critical pedagogy, with a focus on dialogue, action and challenging oppression.

She currently works as a Community Engaged Research Officer at TU Dublin and a Teaching Supervisor at Maynooth University and is completing her PhD in Adult and Community Education at Maynooth University.

Find out more about Zoryana’s work here: 

• ORCID Profile: ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0252-7020 
• International TOGETHERNESS project with TU Dublin 

Author of A Story from the Margin published in The Adult Learner journal 

Read Zoryana's full bio:

Zoryana Pshyk is an adult educator, facilitator, researcher, and community practitioner. Zoryana was born in Ukraine and has been living in Ireland for the past twenty years and holds both citizenships. Her work is grounded in the belief that education can become a space where people reclaim their voice, dignity, agency, and the possibility of acting together to change the world. Drawing from her own lived experience of migration and her experience of the Irish direct provision system, alongside years of working with asylum seekers, refugee, and marginalised communities, her practice explores how we as educators can help people to unlearn oppression, and move beyond systems of survival, and towards solidarity and collective transformation. 



Zoryana’s work across community education, higher education, participatory research, and intercultural practice is deeply underpinned by the philosophy of Paulo Freire and traditions of critical pedagogy that understand education as a shared process of dialogue, reflection, consciousness, and action. Zoryana currently works as a Community Engaged Research Officer with TU Dublin, contributing to the international TOGETHERNESS project, which explores how higher education, communities, and civic partners can work collaboratively to strengthen socially engaged research. Her work focuses on creating participatory and community-engaged spaces where communities are not treated as subjects of research, but as knowledge holders, co-creators, and active participants in shaping educational and social change. She also works as a Teaching Supervisor with Maynooth University, where she previously lectured in Philosophy of Adult Education. 

Zoryana is a PhD candidate with the Department of Adult and Community Education, Maynooth University. Her research and writing focused on emancipatory and transformative learning, narrative enquiry on displacement and war, and access to higher education for refugees and asylum seekers. She is the author of A Story from the Margin published in The Adult Learner journal, alongside publications and presentations exploring Freirean praxis, racism, community education, war, and the experiences of displaced communities navigating systems of exclusion and finding their voice through education.  Zoryana is also a facilitator with Partners Training for Transformation, chair for the Kildare Integration Network, and one of the founding members of the Maynooth University of Sanctuary. 

Zoryana has worked alongside diverse communities across Ireland to create learning spaces rooted in dialogue, storytelling, participation, and shared humanity. She believes that personal is always political. For her, democracy is not simply a political structure or institutional process, but something lived and collectively practiced through critical reflection and action — praxis, that can help communities challenge injustice, build solidarity, and imagine more democratic and compassionate ways of being together in the world. 

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0252-7020