New Professor of Education, Policy and Practice

Posted on 11 March 2025 • Education, languages and health, University news

In 2018, there were only 25 Black women professors in the UK, compared to 12,500 white men (WHEN, Women’s Higher Education Network). Today, that number has risen to 74, with the promotion of Dr Carol Azumah Dennis, SFHEA, to Professor of Education, Policy and Practice, within The Open University’s Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS).

Describing herself as “Like a raisin in a bowl of rice pudding”, Professor Dennis said: “In the ivory tower Black women are simultaneously invisible and hyper visible; they are not meant to profess. In 2008, when I was a postgraduate researcher, I attended the inaugural lecture of Professor Heidi Mirza, and was shocked to discover there were only 13 Black women professors in the UK. It didn’t motivate me towards professorship but seeing her in that space did instil a sense of pride and possibility.”

Professor Dennis joined The Open University in 2017 as a Senior Lecturer in Education, Leadership and Management. Today, she is Director of Praxis, the Faculty of WELS’s Centre for Scholarship and Innovation. Her roles at the OU have centred around postgraduate education, having taught research methods on both a Masters and Professional Doctorate programme. Professor Dennis has also been Programme Leader for the Professional Doctorate in Education and chaired two MA modules in Educational Leadership and Management.

100 Black Women Professors Now

Professor Dennis participated in the 100 Black Women Professors Now (100BWPN) programme, an initiative spearheaded by WHEN to increase the number of Black women in the academic pipeline.

The programme not only supports Black women academics to navigate and manage their careers, it is also about challenging institutional assumptions and bias. The programme helps Black women academics and the institutions they work for recognise the need to address fundamental inequities in higher education, and devise strategies to achieve systemic change.

The OU has been a supporter of the 100BWPN programme since its inception in 2021, playing a key role in its design and participating as one of six Higher Education institutions to pilot the programme, and has now seen more than 30 Black women take part in the scheme.

Professor Dennis reflected on the initiative: “The 100BWPN has been a fantastic programme. It has managed the balance between structure and agency perfectly. It does support, mentor, advise and encourage Black Women academics. But most importantly, it explores the contexts we work in and their impact on us. It encourages us to recognise those structures and do what we can to survive them.
“Perhaps the most immediate and exciting impact is that I have met more than a handful of other Black Women academics at the OU. Our paths might not have crossed otherwise.”

Envisioning a future for education

Before joining the OU, Professor Dennis worked at the University of Hull as a Lecturer in Education, acting as Programme Director of Post-16 Teacher Education and of Postgraduate Taught provision.
Prior to Higher Education, she worked in Further Education Colleges with responsibility for teaching, training and managing adult basic skills. She completed her Doctorate of Education (EdD) at the Institute of Education, UCL with a thesis exploring leading and managing quality in adult literacies provision.

Professor Dennis’s research explores post-16 professionalism as ethical engagement with possible educational futures. She aims to envision a future for Further and Higher Education that aspires to more than mere survival; reframing professionalism as grounded in a yearning that defines practice. The research centres around three key areas: Post-16 policy, professionalism and practice; leading and managing quality in vocational education, and teacher education, critical pedagogy, ethics and social justice. An important part of this work is exploring Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in research.

Professor Dennis commented: “Now, of the 24,000 professors in the UK, 74 are Black women and I am proud to be counted among them. But mostly I am appreciative of the colleagues who mentored me, who encouraged me or who otherwise helped me to circumnavigate the micro-aggressions so many minoritised academics experience; only 2% of Black women academics are promoted to professor compared to 15% of white men.
“Before 100BWPN applying for professorship was a vague ambition that I might consider at some point in the future. The programme encouraged me to ask, ‘what am I waiting for?!’, or as my friends in the Women in Higher Education Network phrase it, ‘if not now, WHEN?’”

Professor Dennis’s inaugural lecture takes place in April. Starting with a reflexive account of who she is and the stance from which she speaks, she will look at what it means to decolonise education and offer a manifesto which envisions an alternative vision of what the sector might be.

Register to watch Professor Dennis’s inaugural lecture online or attend in person.