Rethinking Education

Welcome to this podcast about education and change hosted by the Canon Collins Trust. We take a deep dive into thinking about the role education plays or doesn’t play in producing change in our society.

We’ll be thinking about what we can learn from the efforts of people who have gone before us, and where they failed and succeeded; and perhaps how their work can help us strategise and imagine today.

But we will also be thinking about how things today are different from the past. What types of new challenges have arisen, and can we just copy and paste past strategies into today’s challenges?

We are joined by an exciting panel of education activists (in order of appearance):

Dr Sara Black is an education researcher, teacher and policy analyst. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, a research fellow on the Cases of Open Learning at the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at UCT, and a co-founder of the Thinking Space Radical Scholarship Collective.

Catherine Sofianos joined the Canon Collins Trust in 2019, and holds the Communications portfolio. She is a writer and creative projects director. She has worked in  development communication for seventeen years. She is a pioneer at heart, and passionately committed to using writing and visual storytelling to influence social change. She has a BA (Hons) in English, a Masters in Applied Linguistics, and a (pending) Masters in Film and TV.

Leah Nasson is a Canon Collins scholar pursuing a PhD in Education at the University of Cape Town. She holds a BA (Hons) in History and Italian, an MA in Italian literature and a PGCE, all from the University of Cape Town. She currently works as a curriculum specialist, and served as Head of History at two independent schools over the course of her teaching career. She is on the editorial board of the journal Yesterday and Today and is a member of the executive board of the South African Society of History Teachers. Her research interests include teacher identity, social justice and the role of the state in the construction of national histories.

Ashley Visagie is a Canon Collins scholar studying for his PhD in education at the University of Cape Town. He is a co-founder of Bottomup, an organisation that promotes critical thinking and social justice among high-school youth, and a member of Thinking Space, a radical scholarship collective.

Carla Watson is the Head of the Jakes Gerwel Graduate Teaching Fellowship. She is deeply passionate about the development of new teachers to thrive in the diverse, challenging South African contexts. She has been recognized as one of 50 most powerful women in South Africa (2020) and Top 200 South Africans (2019) by Mail and Guardian.