Profile 

Rita received her bachelor’s degree in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, where she focused her studies on education and literature.  While working on her degree, she also became certified to teach secondary language arts.  After graduating, she returned to her home state of Maryland and settled in Baltimore.  She spent two years teaching English at a public high school in western Baltimore City, where she learned a great deal about the challenges facing underprivileged students and urban school systems.

Rita wanted to learn new and better approaches for developing respect, compassion, agency and voice through education, so she returned to her studies.  She obtained her master’s degree in liberal arts from Johns Hopkins University, studying the history of ideas.  For her graduate project, she designed an interdisciplinary curriculum intended to formulate a more sustainable relationship with the world, using text, dialogue and writing in an effort to deepen students’ empathy and awareness for the other, the community, and the ecosystem.

As a student in the LLC Program, Rita hopes to continue pursuing her goal of finding ways to use education to help cultivate environmental and social consciousness. She plans to develop additional curricula that challenge our cultural perceptions of the human and non-human other and which generate qualities of empathy, respect and a sense of interconnection.  Her ultimate goal is to start a secondary school in Baltimore City organized around a focus of sustainability and environmental and social consciousness.

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