The Design Team is made up of seven in and out of school high school educators and two parsons faculty. The Design Team will meet monthly to share their experiences with portfolio development and give each other feedback on how they are implementing the learning portfolio process in their classroom.
Design Team
Anne Gaines
Anne Gaines, Dean for the School of Art, Media, and Technology, artist and educator, fosters a strong, collaborative academic culture within a large and complex school at Parsons which serves nine programs and over 1300 graduate and undergraduate students. During her experience overseeing art and design programs at Parsons, her focus is on building a strong, diverse community of students, faculty, staff and alumni and forging relationships with regional, national, and international partners. She has also worked to improve access to college for new and nontraditional student populations through her work with the ParsonsScholars program and the development of early college models.
Hillary Kolos
Hillary Kolos is the Director of Digital and Teen Programs at DreamYard. As a graduate student in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, she worked as a research assistant for New Media Literacies and researched gaming culture. In addition, she has consulted for the Pearson and Adobe Foundations, worked in documentary production, and taught after-school classes in New York City public schools.
Haymee Salas
Haymee is an art teacher at DreamYard Preparatory School. She enjoys working with young people and helping them to explore their ideas through a variety of media. Haymee believes that the arts are a direct portal to engaging with ones humanity. She is very excited about pursuing the portfolio as a living and breathing entity that students will engage with on a daily basis.
By doing blogs in class it made me more comfortable with teaching other technology. If it wasn’t for this portfolio project I would not have found other tech resources or had the confidence to bring them into my class.
Emily McLaughlin
Science Teacher
Jason Duchin
I am the Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of the DreamYard Project. I received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Political Science from Duke University. As a senior in College I had every intention of becoming a labor lawyer, but as fortune would have it I met Ariel Dorfman and worked with him on the play Widows and realized that through the Arts you could effect meaningful change. Before starting DreamYard in 1994, I worked as a legal aide, a journalist, a community organizer and an actor.
Jessica Canon
Jessica Cannon is an Assistant Professor at Parsons The New School for Design where she teaches in the First Year Program, the School of Art and Design History and Theory, and SPACE. Cannon has worked to research and implement online Learning Portfolios in various courses as part of a wider initiative at Parsons. She is delighted to be collaborating with DreamYard Prep and has a particular interest in discovering ways that the Learning Portfolio can be applied more broadly outside of visual art and design curricula. Cannon received her B.A. in Psychology and English from Tufts University and an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design.
Carla Repice
Carla Repice is a visual artist living in the New York City area. She has exhibited at The deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, The San Diego Museum of Art and The New York Historical Society, where her project Goatscape is a part of the permanent collection of 9-11 related artwork. Her work has been featured in The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, Art Fag City, The Huffington Post and NPR. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has studied with Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky since 1995. She has worked in the education sector in the New York City area for the past 15 years with The DreamYard Project, The City College of New York, Urban Arts Partnership, New York City Opera, and The NYC Department of Education.
Jessica Walker
Jessica Walker directs the Summer and Pre-College Programs at Parsons The New School for Design. In this role she collaborates with faculty and community partners to develop workshops, classes and other opportunities for students to engage with art and design, portfolio development and college readiness. Jessica also teaches drawing and digital media within the undergraduate program at Parsons and is a practicing artist and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the overlap between creative practice and social science. Jessica’s latest project, “366” is a documentary film in which she meets with New Yorkers on their birthday to document how this day is spent across different age groups and cultures.
Rudy Blanco
Rudy Blanco worked as a Special Education teacher at the Dreamyard Preparatory School for 3 years before taking on the role of Digital Learning Coordinator at the school through the Dreamyard Project. As Digital Learning Coordinator, Rudy is responsible for coordinating, integrating and implementing digital and technological initiatives at DYP. By collaborating with teachers across all grades and departments,Rudy has a unique opportunity to see what the technological needs of the teachers and of the students are. Currently, Rudy is collaborating on a Learning Portfolio project with Dreamyard Project, Dreamyard Preparatory School and Parsons The New School for Design where he serves as the Liason between the educators and the Portfolio design team.
Progress in school (and life) is often intangible. We get a sense of how things are going but we often lack concrete evidence of our trajectory. Digital student portfolios that chronicled their high school years would enable students to see the growth they've made.
Terrence Burke
History Teacher