Teaching

Over the last 15 years, Catherine has worked as classroom teacher, museum guide, and outdoor educator. In all of these contexts, she strives to make learning active, collaborative, and based in the real world. She works to center students’ experiences and questions, and she believes that great learning happens in environments that are both challenging and supportive.

Catherine received her Massachusetts Teaching Certification from the New Teachers Collaborative. For 8 years, she taught Humanities at Meridian Academy, a small project-based school where students undertake in-depth and complex investigations in all areas of their learning. In addition to teaching Humanities, she also directed Meridian's theater program, led their 11th grade research seminar, and co-founded their peer mentoring program.

She now works as an Educator with Boxerwood Nature Center & Woodland Garden, where she leads field trips, after-school programs, and summer camps that encourage environmental stewardship. She is also a Writing Consultant at Washington & Lee University.

Humanities

Throughout Catherine’s time leading project-based Humanities classes, her students have produced podcasts, designed museum exhibits, generated multimedia artwork, performed their own original plays, and learned a variety of writing styles including the analytical essay, the research paper, the personal narrative, and poetry.

Awards & Honors

National Endowment for the Humanities Institute

Catherine was selected to participate in a weeklong summer professional development institute for teachers, titled “Social Movements and Reform in Industrializing America: The Lowell Experience Institute.”

Margot Stern Strom Innovation Grant

Catherine created and co-founded The Correspondence Project, which fosters students’ civic engagement across political divides through writing monthly letters. She collaborated closely with her colleague Cherese Smith in Ozark, Arkansas – and experts at Essential Partners, who specialize in dialogue across difference – to develop a curriculum that supports connection, reflection, and honest dialogue between students from diverse political backgrounds.

Theater & Playwriting

Catherine love making plays with young people. She strives to create rehearsal rooms where – regardless of their experience level – students can learn the delights and challenges of collaboration and harness the singular joy of theater.

She began directing in college and has since directed theater in a wide variety of settings and styles. She has also been thrilled to serve as a mentor for high school directors working on their first productions.

Selected Productions

  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

  • Bernhardt/Hamlet by Theresa Rebeck

  • Our Town by Thornton Wilder

  • Men On Boats by Jaclyn Backhaus

  • Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer

  • The Actor’s Nightmare by Christopher Durang

  • Macbeth by William Shakespeare

  • The Crucible by Arthur Miller

In addition to directing, Catherine has also taught playwriting classes. At the high school level, each course culminated in the submission of 10-minute plays to the Massachusetts Young Playwrights' Project, a four-day festival in which student plays are given readings by professional directors and actors.

Beyond the Classroom

In addition to traditional school settings, Catherine has worked with students in several contexts outside of the classroom. When students are welcomed into a new space and invited to engage with the world in ways they haven’t before, they often tap into new forms of inquiry, creativity, and collaboration.

Boxerwood Nature Center & Woodland Garden
Lexington, Virginia

As an educator with Boxerwood, Catherine leads field trips, after-school programs, internships, and summer camps that educate students about sustainability, create authentic and service-based learning experiences, and encourage environmental stewardship. She also leads Boxerwood’s annual compost challenge and co-created an environmental internship for high school students.

Mindfulness Meditation
Community and school-based programs

Catherine is a certified Mindfulness Meditation Teacher through the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, based out of the UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. Catherine strives to teach meditation in a grounded style that is accessible to everyone. She teaches mindfulness to college classes at Washington & Lee, and to adult groups both in person and online.

The Museum of the Moving Image
Queens, New York

From 2010-2012, Catherine led educational tours at MoMI through exhibits on film history, television, video games, editing, effects, and cinema culture. She also taught workshops in stop-motion animation, video game design, political ads, shadow puppetry, and optical illusions.