CSW Announces Inaugural Grantees for The Alorie Parkhill Learning and Travel Fund for Teachers

CSW is thrilled to announce that English teachers Carmen Leahy and Samantha Simpson, and visual arts teacher Alison Safford have been awarded the inaugural grants from The Alorie Parkhill Learning and Travel Fund for Teachers. Established by Rebecca Parkhill ’85, P'17, and Robert Willett P'17 (parents of Oliver Willett ’17), the Alorie Parkhill Learning and Travel Fund for Teachers was created to honor former faculty member and assistant head of school Alorie Parkhill. This generous gift of $1 million speaks to the importance of teaching here at The Cambridge School of Weston, where faculty regularly engage in an innovative academic program, drawing on progressive pedagogy and teaching techniques. 

Grants from the fund may be used for travel, study, and any form of learning and exposure that follows the recipients’ scholarly interests, with a goal of allowing recipients to grow in their knowledge and background in disciplines and subject areas that excite and engage them, before bringing their learning back to students and colleagues at CSW.  

 

Carmen and Samantha, both members of the English Department, submitted a joint proposal entitled: Harlem/Paris: The African-American Expatriate Experience, 1900 – 1950. They propose to “immerse themselves in the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of some of the places important to African-American writers, musicians, and artists in the early to mid 20th century.” This trip is designed to provide additional context for CSW students studying the works of these writers and artists and to deepen the conversation about integrating the disciplines at CSW — inviting faculty to gather across departments to create “islands of overlap” for students. As their proposal explained, “The timing for this new kind of curriculum map is now. As we consider new ways to deliver our program, teachers will want to revise curriculum. By following in the footsteps of African-American literary expatriates, we will demonstrate how to pose challenging and expansive questions and practice using skills that we’ve learned across disciplines to discover answers and make connections.”

 

Alison, a member of the Visual Arts Department, proposes to study social design (design meant to solve or address issues of social justice — big or small, not just to sell a product) in the Netherlands and New York. Interested in the field since she was in the Netherlands for an artists’ residency in 2013, she seeks to develop a course with accompanying curriculum tailored to the CSW population. As her proposal described, “...this grant would enable me to introduce art forms that we have not recently taught to CSW students: design, architecture, urban planning, and more. In the past few years I have noticed more students interested in studying these fields in college. This course would help prepare students for these fields, and how they engage with communities on a personal and social level. Additionally, it would put us as the only high school in the country with such a course, to my knowledge.”