Rowing, research, and reimaging education with Sarah Sharp

Sarah Sharp has almost gone from one extreme to another in her relationship with rowing.

When the PhD student first arrived to study an MPhil at Pembroke College, she had never before seen a rowing boat. “I was miles away from the rowing world,” explains Sharp. “It was never something I had encountered. It never meant anything to me, so I had never really engaged with it.”

She first learnt to cox, but on returning to do a PhD at Jesus College, she learned to row, and is now in the first year trialling with Cambridge University Boat Club women’s lightweight squad. So it begs the question: what changed?

“Everybody knows that Cambridge is famous for rowing, and I didn’t know anything about it,” says Sharp. “I came initially for a one-year Master’s, and I decided I was going to do everything I possibly could in one year. In freshers’ week, they had one of those taster trial days at my College, and I fell in love with it as a sport.”

The Master’s course soon became a PhD in environmental education, which was made possible by scholarships from the Cambridge Trust and the Pigott Foundation.

She is based in the Faculty of Education, and is now in her third year looking at creative approaches to ways of knowing as a step to develop sustainable mindsets. “How can we understand ourselves as situated within an unfolding relational world beyond the human nature dualism,” Sharp expands about her research area. “The thinking is that the way we currently teach in secondary schools is making it challenging for us to face the current multiple environmental crises, basically. So, what ways of learning might help us think with the complexity and multiplicity within those challenges. How can we learn ways to hold multiple complexities together? And what could this mean for ways we create the future?”

“The end result is environmental education, but I’m not teaching about climate change, rather exploring how we might go beyond learning about the world and towards learning ways we shape the world through our understanding of it.”

Her pathway into the field was not linear. She did her undergraduate degree in drama, looking at theatre for a changing climate, and she then worked in a theatre’s education outreach department, before becoming a drama teacher. That interest in creativity, working with young people and the environment led to the evolution of her area of PhD research. “As it is not a science PhD, it’s like an amorphous, evolving thing that gets deeper and deeper the further I go into it,” suggests Sharp. “I think I see it more as a step in a longer journey. I’m seeing it in the bigger picture of education policy, as in this might lead to something else that leads to something else which could lead to policy change.”

The rowing helps to bring a nice balance to her studies, and the nature of everything that is CUBC is not lost on Sharp, whose previous sporting background had been in sailing and white-water kayaking, among a myriad of other disciplines.

“It is exciting to be part of such an historic and significant institution,” she adds.

“It is cool that’s it’s something I have seen on TV , and now get to experience from the other side of the veil. I think I have been a little bit starstruck by the whole thing.”

That is probably understandable given the progress that Sharp has made in three quick years, and who knows what awaits her in the next six weeks.