Dean did her schooling at St. Lawrence’s Girls School, Karachi and then studied at St. Joseph's College, Karachi. She completed an M.Sc at the University of Karachi, and earned her M.Ed from the Aga Khan University's Institute for Educational Development. She later earned a Ph.D in education in 2000 from the University of Alberta, Canada. Her dissertation, Islam, Democracy and Social Studies Education: A Quest for Possibilities, was supervised by Terry Carson.
Career
In 1983, Dean was working as a social worker in Pakistan's only clinic for heroin addicts. Dean joined the Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development in 1996. She was promoted to the rank of Assistant Professor at the University in 2000. By 2008 she was an associate professor, and head of academic and student affairs at the university. In December 2008 she was awarded the Centre for Civic Education Pakistan’s Civic Educator Award 2008. In 2009, Dean was appointed as the principal of Kinnaird College in Lahore, a prestigious women's institution in Pakistan. She resigned in 2010, to become principal of St. Joseph’s College for Women. At St. Joseph’s Dean introduced a computer science programme for intermediate students and a four-year BBA programme. In 2014 she left St. Joseph's College to join the VM Institute for Education, Karachi, as its director. In early 2015, Dean was a member of the advisory committee on curriculum and textbook reform and the Sindh Textbook Board when religious leaders from the Punjab and Sindh began complaining about her work, accusing her of being a foreign woman who was writing curricula and textbooks that were secular and against Islam. She was denounced at the April All-Parties Conference at the Karachi Press Club organized by the Islamic extremist Jamaat-e-Islami and its militant, Al-Qaeda-linked student wing, the Islami Jamiat Talaba, and in she believed that political and religious groups were engaging in a hate propaganda campaign. In May she received phone calls threatening her life and she fled the country. After leaving Pakistan, Dean became the associate dean for arts and sciences at the University of Central Asia, an international university with campuses in the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.
