Dr. Samantha-Kaye Johnston is endlessly curious about the mind - how people think, read, and make sense of the world. This curiosity drives her work as a McKenzie Research Fellow at the Assessment and Evaluation Research Centre (AERC), Faculty of Education, where she explores how AI-enabled EdTech eco-systems can be designed to not just personalise learning, but to empower students with autonomy fostering their growth into independent and critical thinkers.

Before academia, she navigated the EdTech industry as a Product Manager, always drawn to the intersection of technology, learning, and human and machine autonomy. Later, as a Research Associate at the University of Oxford's Department of Education (Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment) and Department of Computer Science (Human-Centred Computing), she conceptualised and led projects, including the Digital Autonomy Machine Experiment and On Whose Terms in EdTech Implementation research initiatives that seek to challenge the way we think about autonomy, the use of data for learning, and ethics in education. Her passion for fostering critical thinking further extended to Project Amplify, a Jesus College, Oxford-funded initiative that Samantha lead which encouraged young people in Jamaica to critically examine the ethics of the Metaverse.

She continues to be a visiting researcher at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford and has been an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Beyond research, she shapes conversations about AI and human identity as the co-editor of the Personhood Unit at Oxford University Press's AI in Society Intersections series. She also contributed to policy work through the USAID-LEARN to Read program, helping to develop Nigeria's National Reading Framework, officially launched in 2023.

Dr

Samantha-Kaye Johnston

McKenzie Post Doctoral Fellow

Faculty of Education

Dr

Samantha-Kaye Johnston

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