Áine Hyland
Áine Hyland (née Donlon) is Emeritus Professor of Education and former Vice-President of University College Cork, Ireland. She was born in 1942 in Athboy, Co. Meath and went to school in the Mercy Convent, Ballymahon, Co. Longford where she sat her Leaving Cert in 1959. She was a civil servant in the Department of Education from 1959 to 1964, during which time she worked as a research assistant on the Investment in Education report. She married Bill Hyland in 1964 and worked for a short period in the International Labour Office in Geneva, Switzerland.
Because of the marriage ban, she was not permitted to work in the civil service on her return to Ireland in 1966, and she spent a number of years in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a university student. She graduated with a B.A. from UCD in 1966 and with a H. Dip. in Ed from TCD in 1969 and an M.Ed in 1975. She was awarded a Ph.D. by TCD in 1982. She was a secondary teacher in Hillcourt School, Glenageary and St. Andrew's College, Booterstown during the 1970s and in 1980 she was appointed Admissions Officer and Senior Lecturer in Education in Carysfort College of Education, Blackrock, Co. Dublin. When Carysfort College closed in the late 1980s, she was appointed Senior Lecturer in Education in University College Dublin. In 1993, she was appointed Professor of Education in University College Cork and was head of the Education Department until her appointment as Vice-President of UCC in 1999. She retired from University College Cork in 2006.
In a voluntary capacity, she has been involved in various education projects during the past 40 years. She was a founding member of the Dalkey School Project, which opened in 1978 as Ireland’s first multi-denominational national school since the foundation of the State. She was secretary and subsequently chair of Educate Together in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She was a member of the Interim Curriculum and Examinations Board in the 1980s and of the Special Education Review Committee in the early 1990s. She was President of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland from 1990 to 1992. In 1995-6, she was a member of the government’s Constitution Review Group and a member of the Technical Working Group on the Future of Higher Education. She chaired the Commission on the Points system which reported in 1999; the Statutory Educational Disadvantage Committee from 2002 to 2005; the National Economic and Social Forum’s Advisory Group on Literacy and Social Inclusion, 2009 - 2010, and a Working Group for the State Examination Commission on Reasonable Accommodations which reported in 2009. She was a member and Vice-President of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for 2002 to 2009 and of the Dormant Accounts Board from 2002 to 2010.
During her years in University College Cork, she chaired a research and development project on Multiple Intelligences, Curriculum and Assessment (1996 to 2000). During that period she was a member of faculty of the Project Zero Summer School at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 2000 to 2006 she chaired a project entitled Bridging the Gap which aimed to bridge the educational gap between students in less advantaged areas of Cork city and their more advantaged peers. She also co-ordinated a Graduate Education Network on behalf of the U.S. based Carnegie Foundation’s CASTL project from 2006 to 2009.
She is currently a lay member of the Barristers' Professional Conduct Tribunal and of the Press Council of Ireland. She is also a member of the Irish Association of Youth Drama and of the Governing Bodies of the National College of Ireland (NCI), of the Church of Ireland Theological Institute (CITI) and of the Medical and Health Sciences Board of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI).
At international level, she is a member of the European Universities' Association's Institutional Evaluation Project (IEP) and in that capacoty has been involved in the evaluation of universities in Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Romania.
She is interested in educational policy and practice at all levels of education. She supervised and was external examiner for more than 20 PhD theses in the past 15 years. Her own PhD thesis was entitled The Administration and Financing of Irish Education, 1830 to 1930. Her publications include a three volume collection of extracts from Irish educational documents from earliest times to the 1990s, which she co-edited with Kenneth Milne. (Irish Educational Documents Vols. 1, 2 and 3 published by the Church of Ireland College of Education, 1987, 1992 and 1994). She has published more than 50 articles, reports and papers as well as presenting at numerous conferences nationally and internationally.
Áine Hyland has three daughters and six grandchildren.
Publications
Multi-Denominational Schools in the Republic of Ireland 1975-1995 Paper delivered by Professor Áine Hyland, Professor of Education, University College, Cork, Ireland, at a Conference Education and Religion organised by C.R.E.L.A. at the University of Nice. 21-22 June 1996
A Review of the Structure of Initial Teacher Education Provision in Ireland. Background Paper for the International Review Team May 2012. Higher Education Authority.