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Blackie to combine love for science and teaching in scholarship
Author: Corporate Communication/Sandra Mulder
Published: 20/02/2020

​Stellenbosch University (SU) chemistry lecturer Dr Margaret Blackie, who recently received a three-year teaching fellowship from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), is committed to sharing her knowledge not only in the field of education but also in the subject of chemistry.

Dr Margaret Anne Lillias (MAL) Blackie or Dr Blackie MAL, as she is referred to in publications, is a senior lecturer at the Department of Chemistry and Polymer Science in the Faculty of Science.

Being a bright spark, she started studying chemistry at school at the age of 15 because she had the opportunity, enjoyed chemistry and was “pretty good" at it. This being her logic, she kept on studying until she was able to add a PhD in Chemistry to her name.

She received her BSc degree from Rhodes University in 1996, followed by a BSc Honours in 1998 and a PhD in 2002, both from the University of Cape Town (UCT).

After that, she discovered a second love – teaching – and then her path led her to become an academic – another thing she enjoys and that she excels in.  

The discovery of her second love came when she did research in education. Between 2007 and 2009, she was a contract lecturer at UCT. “I enjoyed teaching and realised that I would like to become an academic. When the position of lecturer in organic chemistry became vacant at SU, I applied and was appointed from January 2010. And here I still am – 10 years later," she says.

Her career at SU over the past 10 years has been an interesting road. She became a senior lecturer in Organic Chemistry in 2013, a position she still holds today. But during this period she was also a research associate in Practical Theology at SU (September 2013 to August 2017) and from July 2015 to January 2016 she was a research scientist at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, in the US.

She has received several awards, including three Stellenbosch University Rector's Awards for General Performance (2010, 2013 and 2014), First-year Academy Prestige Award – most influential first-year lecturer (2014 – nomination by top first-year student) and the HB and MJ Thom Award for overseas research (2015).

Blackie has also held two other fellowships in her academic career – the Claude Leon Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Professor Kelly Chibale (Medicinal Chemistry) at UCT from 2007 to 2008 and the Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Professor Jenni Case (Engineering Education) at UCT in 2009. During this time, she did intensive research in the fields of medicinal chemistry, engineering education and spirituality.

She has a clear plan for the Teaching Fellowship and knows exactly what she wants to do with it. She will conduct research on pedagogy in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. In this study, she plans to analyse the different teaching and learning practices and identify ways of improving the teaching and learning experiences of lecturers and students.

The research information and data will also contribute to the development of a short course in the scholarship of education aiming to give academic staff in STEM disciplines access to the analytical resources available in the suite of tools that comprises Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). She will base her research on LCT. This theory supplies a framework for shaping the teaching practices. According to LCT, research and teaching are motivated by concerns for social justice and knowledge-building.

She explains that a class of students is a very complex teaching environment, especially for the lecturer to reflect back and determine whether the teaching was successful in explaining the work.

“Traditionally, if your teaching practice did not work, you would try something else without necessarily determining the reason why the first attempt failed," she says. “We should investigate and see what the cause of the failed attempt was, rather than just replace the failed one with another attempt."

Blackie follows a “reflective teaching" method by pausing occasionally during the lecture, asking students if they understand everything. She will also ask the students difficult questions to help them see whether they are understanding the work.

“They can then reflect and see where they are. The situation in the classroom is actually complicated. You have this social interaction of different people, backgrounds, thoughts and perceptions. I am a very strong introvert and the social interaction is exhausting to me, but it is necessary to understand the students, how they think, interpret new knowledge and what is happening within the students and how are they engaging with it. You need to know when to pause, when to continue, go slowly or add another example."

 Blackie's teaching satisfaction comes from seeing the students starting to grasp the work, seeing their knowledge growing and seeing them make the connections between the chemistry concepts.