About me

I’m Deborah March, an English teacher and Academic Director at Loudoun School for the Gifted, a small private school in Northern Virginia founded to show what’s possible when teachers and students are empowered.

As an educator, I am passionate about student-driven inquiry. I want kids to actively participate in the construction of knowledge; I want them to find ways to make these texts and ideas their own. I try to do this in my courses and outside the traditional academic setting: I have helped found and direct a high school writing center (based on the university model) and advised students who ran school newspapers, broadcast journalism teams, and literary magazines.

I earned a Ph.D. in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University in 2012 and received a B.A. in English literature from what is now the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2006. I maintain a Virginia Postgraduate Professional teaching license with endorsements in English and English as a Second Language.

Here are some videos, and below them, some more information about my work.

From a May 2018 information session with my colleagues from LSG:

A bit about my life, my teaching philosophy, and my commitment to teachers on That Anita Live (the section on my teaching starts at 18:34):

How free public college saved my life:

And some thoughts on teacher autonomy, Loudoun School for the Gifted, and Cardi B “Live from the Minivan” with Leesburg Town Councilwoman Vanessa Maddox:

#LiveFromtheMinivan: The Interviews w/ Deborah M. March #TeamMaddox

Posted by Vanessa Maddox on Saturday, August 12, 2017

 

My ultimate pedagogical goal is to equip my students to form and pursue their own questions within and beyond my classroom.

My courses are rooted in both historical context and an appreciation of literary form. All my courses are designed to ask: what can stories do for people, and how have they worked to frame or structure our knowledge?  At LSG, I’ve taught the following courses so far:

  • Literature and the Boundaries of Empathy
  • Existentialism in World Literature and Film
  • Psychology and Literature
  • Philosophy Wars: Poststructuralism versus Enlightenment Rationality
  • World Literature
  • Critical Literary Analysis
  • Great Books and the Problem of the Western Canon
  • The Arc of Justice in American History and Literature (co-taught with history teacher)
  • Truth in Media: A Seminar on American Nonfiction
  • Psychology and Literature: Narrating Human Consciousness
  • Reading and Writing the American Short Story (Creative Writing)
  • Middle School Writing Lab
  • Hamlet: Text, Performances, Adaptations
  • Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Philosophy Wars: Enlightenment Positivism vs. Poststructuralism (co-taught)
  • AP Language
  • AP Literature
  • Sixth Grade English Fundamentals
  • World Literature and Composition
  • The Power and Beauty of Poetry in Performance
  • Nature Writing
  • Independent Study Mentor: Sigmund Freud and American Culture
  • Independent Study Mentor: Sociolinguistics
  • Independent Study Mentor: Happiness in Western Philosophy and Culture
  • Independent Study Mentor: Fan Fiction and the Evolving Role of the Reader