Ann Coble

High School Homeroom and Social Studies Teacher

Ann is passionate about humans, and always eager to learn and share their experiences. This fascination with people and their stories led Ann to pursue a B.A. in World History and an M.A. in European History at the University of Montana in her home state. Outside of her formal education, Ann has also gravitated toward people-oriented work in her professional life. Ann’s first years of experience with educational leadership were as a camp counselor, hiking guide and outdoor educator in Montana, Maine, and France. She loves nothing more than to educate herself about the people of the world, an effort that has included far-flung travel and several sessions of living and working abroad. Hoping to be both a life long student AND a life long educator, Ann completed a teacher education program at North Carolina State University, earning her NC professional teacher’s license in Social Studies in 2013.

Ann’s experience working with children and adults in traditional and natural classrooms has convinced her that people learn best by doing, and that in the end, students truly educate themselves. She feels priveleged, however, to be able to offer the insightful guidance, logistical coordination, and supportive learning community that will aid and nurture students in their intellectual growth. Her overarching goals for the classroom are for students to become more globally aware as well as more meaningfully oriented within their own national culture. She hopes for students to understand how and why our current American demographics, culture, landscape, government, and economy came to be, and to imagine how these things might have evolved differently under other circumstances. She also hopes that her students will develop a wide and varied knowledge of other cultures’ alternative approaches to things like government, economic regulation, education, religion, and community. In her history lessons, she is particularly committed to using primary source accounts that help students develop a crucial sense of empathy and compassion as well as a discerning eye for bias. All of her classes will also include a strong dose of geography, which, while fading in the public school curriculum, is essential for a deeper understanding of cultural development and diffusion, violent conflict, economic development, and personalidentity. This, she believes, is a strong foundation for young people in developing solutions to the problems of the 21rst century, which are increasingly global in nature.

Ann’s interests include architecture, story telling, vintage fashion, geology, flowers, and fancy cheeses, but her biggest passions in life remain history and mountains. She believes that cooperative education is not unlike the basic ethos of mountain climbing : we work, onward and upward, sometimes with ease and sometimes with struggle, so that we can be rewarded with the beauty and satisfaction of a broad perspective.