What our faculty members have been learning, doing and presenting

Humanities Teachers Alysa Auriemma

’03, Katrina Council and Chris Doyle attended Teaching Native American History in the Classroom and Beyond, a conference held last year by the Association for the Study of Connecticut History. The event focused on Indigenous-related scholarship and teaching strategies for K-12 teachers, students and scholars.

Last August, the Hartford Courant published an op-ed, “Dementia and a Historian Confronting Forgetting,” written by Humanities Teacher

Chris Doyle

Rebecca Plona P’26, director of the Teaching and Learning Center and curriculum coordinator for 9th- and 10th-grade students, has been invited to join the board of trustees at Buxton School, a private coeducational college preparatory school in Massachusetts.

“It’s a great way for me to be of service, and they are excited about my experience with progressive education and nontraditional learners,” Plona says.

Last fall, Chief Academic Officer Tim Quinn published two articles, “Educators Aren’t Always Asking the Right Questions About AI” in Intrepid Ed News, and “Assessing Student Learning: Beyond Cumulative Exams” in Open Doors Blog, which is published by One Schoolhouse.

Science Teacher Cate Rigoulot began a yearlong course titled Four Seasons of Indigenous Learning in order to add more Indigenous perspectives to her classes.

Latin Teacher Kelly Woodbury attended What We Do Matters: Rediscovering the Joy of World Languages at the Connecticut Council of Language Teachers’ fall conference. She also participated in the Differentiation in the Latin Classroom: Latin for Everyone workshop.

As a Black woman who has worked in a high-tech role, Zoë Olivia Barnswell ’16 distinctly understands the challenges of working in a field still dominated by white men. At JP Morgan Chase & Co., where she worked for three years as a software engineer, she noticed the number of racially diverse women in her unit was small.

But Barnswell says being a minority in the workplace did not hold her back, because of how supported she felt in exploring technology as a student at Miss Porter’s School. She specifically credits the engaging teaching styles and encouragement of former teachers Susan Martell Jenkin now the school’s chief equity and inclusion officer and Matthew Poage with igniting and nurturing her passion for computer science.

“At Porter’s, I learned just how exciting technology could be [and] that you can use technology as a means to find a solution for many different problems,” Barnswell says. “In an industry that typically isn’t filled with women and people of color, it was so important to be encouraged to pursue my interests.”

After graduating from Porter’s, Barnswell completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science at Princeton University. Last year, she paused her career to attend the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she is completing a Master of Business Administration with a specialization in entrepreneurship and innovation.

All along, Barnswell has purposefully stayed connected to her alma mater. In 2021, she served as the moderator of a discussion panel in which three Ancients with