Rhiannon Boyd

Educator/Teacher

Rhiannon directs the JK-12 Capstone program and teaches courses within the Senior Capstone, a set of courses for 12th grade students at Collegiate School. The capstone program brings to life students’ classroom learning in a real-world context. Capstones in each division are guided by our school’s commitment to Responsible Citizenship. Responsible Citizenship at Collegiate empowers engaged, contributing citizens by nurturing students’ compassion, creativity and purpose. The Capstone programs in the final year of each division embody this vision – creating space, opportunity, and challenge for our students to help prepare them for their futures. The Capstones at each division share some common elements and have some distinct developmentally appropriate components: Responsible Citizenship Focus, Collaboration, Leadership, Design-Thinking, Experiential Learning, and Public Sharing. Such courses include Ethics and the Engaged Citizen, Sustainable Solutions to the Future of Food, Global Public Health, and The River City. She also teaches within the International Emerging Leaders Program as the course leader for the International Emerging Leaders Conference, which focuses on The Global Economy and the Environment. In the Conference, students from around the world gather to work collaboratively, hear from prominent scholars and business leaders on this topic, and design innovative solutions with a strong social entrepreneurial focus. Rhiannon works alongside a co-organizers with students to curate TEDxYouth@RVA, a youth partnership with students from the greater Richmond region to organize the event and build skills in all aspects of the planning: curation, production, event management, fundraising, design and marketing. She coordinates the Virginia High School Ethics Bowl, a statewide competition that serves as a qualifying event for the National High School Ethics Bowl in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In an Ethics Bowl, student teams compete by presenting a position in response to questions about real-world cases, with a heavy emphasis on the intersection of ethics with economics and public policy decision making. Rhiannon was one of 35 teachers across the nation to be awarded the National Association of Independent School’s “Teacher of the Future” for 2014-2015, and she previously taught philosophy at the college level for over ten years.

philosophy & the politics of food, engaged citizenship, education innovation, and raising an ethical kid w/ my musical man

The critical, philosophical mindset, coupled with a creative, collaborative skill set, provides students with the tools to do the meta-cognitive work that singularly focused, disciplinary teaching often misses.

collaboration, education, ethics, food, philosophy