Faculty spotlights

“The United States is the land of dreams.” 

A powerful declaration made by one of the United States' newest citizens — a hopeful, incredibly intelligent, new GFA faculty member. This fall, GFA welcomed Iman Rasti as the new Director of The Writing Center, seventh grade English teacher, and coach of the Middle School Boys Red soccer team. Just one week prior to the school year starting, Rasti was granted his citizenship.

In 2017 Ibarcena joined GFA and is now a Global Studies Teacher. From the beginning, she was drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of the school’s curriculum. In many ways, it reflected her own educational journey: when she started down one path, she discovered that it intersected with another, and another, and so on, until she realized that each path related to the ones that came before and after.

In sixth grade, Joe Steiner realized he loved math. It wasn’t that he hated the subject before — he had always been an enthusiastic student — but this was the first time that a teacher enabled him to connect with the subject in a completely new and meaningful way.

Visual Arts Teaching Fellow Sahar Al-Sawaf has an incredible story to tell. It’s so important to her that as a filmmaker and animator she is inspired to tell it again and again in different ways. But it wasn’t always a story she felt comfortable telling.