Timothy Denis Ireland
As a scholar, practitioner, and policymaker, Timothy Denis Ireland has made an indelible mark on adult education in Brazil for more than forty years. Over the course of his productive career, which spans local, regional, national, and international levels, three particularly notable achievements stand out: his scholarship on the International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA), his development of education classes for workers on building sites, and his establishment of the first prison education program in the country.
Ireland is a former professor in adult education at the Federal University of Paraiba, in João Pessoa. As a scholar, he investigated the CONFINTEA conference cycle over its past six decades to document the history of adult education worldwide. He drew on official records and documents produced by and for the conferences to explore the development of and shifts in the conception of adult education. In Ireland’s resulting book, Adult Education in Retrospective: 60 Years of CONFINTEA (2014), he also investigates the role of UNESCO in articulating and establishing international guidelines for adult learning through the lens of the conference cycle.
As a practitioner of adult education, Ireland created the Zé Peão School Project in 1990, which he led for fourteen years. A joint venture between the Federal University of Paraiba and the local branch of the Building Workers Trade Union, the project set up classrooms on building sites throughout the city to address low rates of schooling among building workers. Undergraduate students who were trained as literacy and basic education teachers served as the instructors. Over the course of the program’s twenty-eight-year tenure, more than five thousand workers enrolled and four hundred teachers were trained.
Finally, as a policymaker, Ireland was selected to serve as the first director of Brazil’s Department of Adult Education at the Ministry of Education, a position he held from 2004 to 2007. While there, he developed a national program, Educating for Liberty, that provides education for people incarcerated in prisons. Prison education had previously not been considered the government’s responsibility in Brazil. The program became part of national policy in 2010 and has served as the foundation for prison education in the country ever since.
In his role as director of the national Department of Adult Education, Ireland also strengthened the Brazil Literate Programme, which in 2007 enrolled 1.9 million students. He also strove to guarantee a stable financial foundation for adult education in Brazil’s permanent education budget.
In addition to his contributions to adult education as a scholar, practitioner, and policymaker, Ireland has played an instrumental role in many other adult and continuing education arenas in Brazil. Among other contributions, from 2008 to 2011 he worked for UNESCO’s Brazil office, launching the proposal for the country to host CONFINTEA VI, which it did in 2009. Ireland also initiated the publication of a collection of books, Education for All, to disseminate studies, reports, and collections of articles on continuing education. In addition, he was a member of the editorial board of Adult Education and Development.
Ireland earned a master’s (1978) and doctorate (1988), both in adult education, from the University of Manchester.