The Cork connection

Dr Aine Hyland, UCC's professor of education met Howard Gardner in 1994, when the Harvard academic was on a visit to Dublin to talk about his theory of multiple intelligence.

The visit prompted Hyland to embark on a major collaborative project which has resulted in her department working closely with local schools and individual teachers to ensure children's different learning styles can be accommodated in the classroom. The project involved two years of action research. "We looked at the approaches and tested the theory to see if we could apply it to the Irish curriculum," Hyland explains.

"The project has finished in one way - but not in another," she says. "Having identified that we could use the MI theories in our teaching, quite a number of staff on our HDip programme are using MI and teaching for understanding approaches with our students." There are currently 220 students enrolled on UCC's HDip programme and Hyland reckons that .

"At least 20 of last year's master's students have been taking units on MI and active learning." Indeed, "there's hardly a teacher in Cork who is not familiar with the theory. In Cork it has been taken up with gusto."

Since 1999, Hyland's team has been working with 32 urban Breaking the Cycle schools training first the principals and then the staff of these schools.

"We are continuing to work to keep in touch," Hyland says. "Two of our UCC staff have taken the online course. It's hugely important that we keep in contact with Project Zero - things keep moving on."

According to Hyland, the real impact of MI is on underachieving children that teachers normally fail to reach. "Finding ways in which a child can feel successful makes a huge difference to self-esteem and motivation. In the US, there is a correlation between increasing test grades and the use of MI strategies," she says.