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Meet Dr Sara Black, King's new Lecturer in Education Management and Leadership

It’s Just Research, an ECS podcast
Dr Sara Black

Lecturer in Education Management and Leadership, School of Education, Communication and Society, King's College London

27 January 2022

Dr Sara Black who joined the School of Education, Communication and Society in January 2022, talks about how leaving a job in IT to become a teacher was the best decision she ever made, her varied career in the UK and South Africa, the role of technology in education and why she defines herself as “an activist.”

Dr Sara Black had been working in the IT sector as a software engineer for a few years when she decided to retrain to become a teacher and taught in a variety of schools, including urban township schools and rural schools in her native South Africa, and schools in the UK. She then went on to become a researcher in public education research. 

Sara Black

Dr Black’s research focuses on policy and inequality in public education provision, modes of privatisation in education, and critical sociology of technology in education. She mostly uses critical pluralist perspectives, aimed at social, political, economic and ecological justice.

Dr Black will be teaching on the Education, Policy & Society MA, as well as co-teaching on some other postgraduate courses. Here she shares her journey so far, inside and outside of academia.

1. What motivated you to leave the private sector to become a teacher, and then to enter – and stay in – academia?

I see working in education research as an extension of what took me to the classroom – namely a fervent curiosity in knowledge, education and learning, and a keen desire to think through how education can be maximised to reduce inequality, enabling people to live healthy and fulfilling lives (or also as a force inhibiting this). Transitioning from a private sector trajectory into public education was quite challenging, but I'd rank that change as the best decision I've made in my professional career.

When I first happened upon teaching, the intention was always to take a ‘broader view’ of systems and practices beyond the classroom. But I felt strongly that classroom-based experience, both in the UK where I trained, as well as in disadvantaged schools in my native South Africa, was fundamental to understanding the ‘logic of practice’ in education systems. My experience working in schools remains my most valuable grounding influence on my research and scholarship.

Academia remains, for me, the best option for continuing to pursue these passions (albeit in a limited way), as well as a means to indulge constant curiosity and enjoyment of knowledge production, teaching and learning. While no single position in any society offers the reach and influence we might want for enacting change, it is a pleasure and privilege to have a role that allows as much exploring and learning as scholarship does.

 

2. As a sociologist of education, you have substantially explored the question of the technology; what do you think are the place and role of educational technology (EdTech) in the future of education?

Right now, I think the hegemonic narratives about EdTech are overly naive and simplistic. Technology can genuinely enhance the affordances of pedagogic moments (and has done so for many decades! we talk about tech like it is a new phenomenon, all the while there being a photocopier in almost every school); what concerns me is that the negative externalities are being ignored, as well as a more substantive conversation about what is lost, as well as what is gained.

The relations we need to look at very carefully and closely are those of technology with forms of political economy, and of course the relations we build between our education systems and our economic systems. Right now, those relations are very tightly coupled with economic interests (in narrow terms) setting the agenda for both education and tech. If this remains the case, then EdTech will continue to exacerbate existing inequalities, especially at a macro scale.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. To imagine just and sustainable uses of technology in education, we must untangle and describe these relations. This is what I call ‘quiet activism’ to my students: building the evidence and insights necessary to identify and pursue successful, credible alternatives. Often, I think half the solution is describing complex situations well, in ways that offer gaps, alternatives and critiques. So, to build different systems, or pathways to different – emancipatory – uses of EdTech, we first really need to get to grips with what is happening right now in our classrooms and lessons. We also need to demystify what we call ‘tech’: to paraphrase Audrey Watters, we must get over the hype to get a clear-eyed view.

 

3. You have defined yourself as an activist, what do you fight for?

I like that you’ve used the preposition for and not against. Most often, anyone involved in activist work is asked what they fight against... and this is an easier question to answer, since it is reactive. The normal list would include inequality, injustice etc. and perhaps a rather platitudinal response to the positive form might simply be an inversion – equality, justice, as if these terms are universally understood and agreed upon.

I think I’d say I fight for holding possibility open (perhaps against foreclosure on) hope; it is so easy these days to feel that we have built structures from which we cannot escape. That education will always be subverted to economic ends. That teachers will always be, in some shape or form, ‘another brick in the wall’. That ‘there is no alternative’.

So I’d like to try and fight for hope... Telling the stories of the teachers I worked with in Imizamo Yethu, near Cape Town, was about disrupting dominant narratives to show where hope is found in unlikely places. Moreover, it was about showing that the widespread deficit views of teachers in South Africa were inaccurate, and failed to reflect the hope for that system that lies within teachers. So I think the daily struggle, for me, is to kindle hope. Sometimes that is hope in others. More often than not, it is in myself too.

 

4. What are you planning to work on while here at King’s College London?

I’m looking forward to leading the module on education leadership, perhaps giving it my own twist in 2022/23 after running it in its current form for this year. I’m also looking forward to co-teaching with other colleagues across different master’s courses in the School.

It’s very early days for research plans, but there are certainly some dreams in the works, which might turn into plans and proposals. In particular, I am interested in two research trajectories: one is to extend my prior work on the politics of time and space in schools and what technocratic regulation of time-space means for everyday life and inequality in education. The other is to develop some conceptual work I’ve been doing on online pedagogy and its structural and discursive constraints into some empirical work. This also includes some theoretical writing I’ve been working on about management and leadership in digitally relayed education practices.

In this story

Sara Black

Sara Black

Lecturer in Education and Society

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