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Faculty Focus: Upper School History Teacher Phoebe Hall

By Amy Reynolds, Communications Specialist
This article appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of the Tower Hill Bulletin

After college, Phoebe Hall was looking for a way to not leave education. As a student, she loved the ability to do research, “nerd out” and explore a discipline she was really interested in.
 
Teaching gave her the opportunity to do that.
 
“Teaching really gives me the opportunity to share the things that I value,” said Hall, who teaches Upper School history. “It’s that combination of being able to be creative, share a discipline I love and continue learning in that discipline—and then also using it to challenge how people think.”
 
Hall’s academic focus is the Middle East, and while she was a student at Williams College, she took several years of Arabic and studied abroad in Egypt. There she took graduate and undergraduate courses at the American University in Cairo.
 
The trip gave her the opportunity to take a number of history courses with renowned professors and build her language skills. While there, she also traveled a bit, both in Egypt and throughout other parts of the Middle East, spending time in Lebanon, Oman, Morocco and Turkey.
 
“I just had the best time learning about places, visiting those places and also enjoying this ‘girl power’ solo trip,” she said. “It was great for my language acquisition, and I found that having Egyptian Arabic as the dialect that I speak opened up a lot of doors in terms of both research opportunities and the ability to travel and be understood.” 
 
Hall said she thinks it’s important for students to travel because it challenges them to communicate. One of the things she really took from being in Egypt was learning about how people interact with their past and how people interact with their identity through history. 
 
“I think that’s something that was really striking about my time in Egypt—seeing a moment of political transition and seeing moments of political transitions of the past reflected in that,” she said. “I also think that it can just be really powerful to engage in the discomfort of travel and to be challenged in that respect. That’s something that can be really positive, to get outside of your day-to-day life and to confront what other people may assume about you.”
 
This June, Hall will be teaching the Tower Term course “Introduction to the Arabic-Speaking World,” which will include a language component as well as a taste of literature, politics and art. She currently teaches ninth-grade world history and a section of U.S. history.
 
“I’m excited to be back into Arabic and sharing it with other people,” she said. “My hope is that it will draw in students who are excited to learn more about that region and students who are excited about language learning.”
 
Hall previously taught at an independent school in Brooklyn and joined the Tower Hill faculty in 2017. She said she was immediately drawn to Tower Hill because of the warm community, and she liked that the students are so well-rounded.
 
“I was coming from a really STEM-focused school, which can be challenging for someone who’s pretty firmly grounded in humanities and social sciences,” she said. “So I was excited about a place where all of these different disciplines are valued and students are encouraged to excel in a variety of different areas.”
 
Hall said she thinks it’s important to give students the experience of the practice of history, so she’ll often have her students look at documents in an analytical way and have them think about the complexity of the past through text. She also thinks it’s important to teach the total history, so she’ll sometimes focus on groups or voices that are not necessarily the focus of history classes, such as women, workers and those of lower socioeconomic statuses.
 
“I use history as a lens to teach compassion, to teach empathy and to challenge people’s assumptions about different parts of the world,” she said.
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