Dr. Sarah Fine

Biography

Sarah Fine is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education Studies and is part of the UCSD-CSUSM Joint Doctoral Program in Education Leadership. She is deeply committed to transforming PK-12 schools into more humanizing places for teaching and learning. Her research interests lie at the intersection of educational change, learning sciences, and social justice pedagogies. With empirical work conducted in over forty secondary schools across the United States and Canada, her approach is ethnographic, ecological, and action-oriented. Dr. Fine began her career in 2005 as an English teacher in a public high school in southeast Washington, D.C. In 2017, she received a fellowship from the Spencer Foundation and National Academy of Education under the direction of Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, during which she completed her doctorate in Culture, Communities, and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. For six years, she served as the founding director of the San Diego Teacher Residency, an innovative, justice-focused M.Ed./credential program at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. She has also taught as adjunct faculty at both UC San Diego and Harvard. As a poet-turned-social-scientist, Dr. Fine combines qualitative research with theory-building and storytelling to reach broad audiences. Her work includes podcast conversations, a TEDx talk, and publications in mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post and Education Week, as well as scholarly journals including the Journal of Educational Change and the Harvard Educational Review. Her recent book, co-authored with Dr. Jal Mehta, titled 'Search Deeper Learning: The Quest to Transform American High School', won the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 2021.

Research Interests