Our Staff
Caroline Chavasse is the mother of two children and was a Professor of Video Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art for 7 years. She has presented master classes in Digital Video and Media Production at the Gilman School and has taught theatre workshops at University of Michigan, Middlebury College and Meredith College in Raleigh, NC. Caroline cofounded and operated, along with some terrific parents, the Free School Preschool and a community play group in Hamilton that ran for 5 years. Before moving to Baltimore in 2000, Caroline worked with LeVar Burton at his film company at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, helping to develop family-friendly entertainment for television and film and also on his Emmy award-winning PBS educational series, Reading Rainbow. Caroline has an extensive background in theatre and television performing in New York City for ten years Off-Off Broadway and regionally in Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Richmond, North Carolina and Vermont. She's enjoyed working with such luminaries as Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Mary-Louise Parker. Her one-woman show, a blend of monologue, comedy and dance, received critical acclaim and was developed into a short independent film. Caroline has appeared in numerous television commercials nationally and locally, as well as on "The Wire." Some of her favorite things are history, vocabulary, cartooning, dog training, choreography and dance, video making and editing, reading stories aloud, camping and hiking, and working and playing with the exquisite young people at Arts & Ideas.
Brooke Pazoles Brooke Pazoles Brooke is a recent graduate from the University of Delaware, where she studied elementary and middle school education. Even though she has a teacher’s certificate on paper, her experience at UD was not like any other up and coming teacher’s. After spending time in real classrooms during her early college career, Brooke soon became aware of the atrocities taking place in public school systems today. She almost dropped her major to pursue a totally different career, but was steered to research Sudbury education by a professor who specialized in alternative education models. Brooke was hooked immediately, and spent the rest of her time at college pushing the University to support her in her quest to complete her student teaching placement – and eventually become a full-time staff member – at a Sudbury school. Brooke was able to fulfill her student teaching requirement at The Philadelphia Free School, a Sudbury school in South Philly. While at PFS, Brooke’s passion for Sudbury education blossomed and grew. Her time as an intern there solidified her dream to pursue staffing at a Sudbury school as her career. Brooke is originally from Bainbridge Island, a tiny island off of Seattle. She spent most of her childhood outside, building tree forts, picking blackberries, and getting intro trouble with her cohort of neighborhood friends. Brooke enjoys biking and walking through Baltimore's neighborhoods with her husband, writing, practicing yoga, and snuggling with her three cats. She also cares deeply about community service and giving her time and resources to those in need. She spent much of her time at college volunteering for organizations like Habitat for Humanity, and spent her final spring break rebuilding homes that were destroyed by hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Brooke is a type 1 diabetic and is a active member and advocate within the worldwide diabetes community, spending much of her free time mentoring others with the disease, scouring research papers, and attending and speaking at diabetes conferences.
Phil Glaser was born and raised in Olney, MD, a suburb of Washington DC. His father, a public high school math teacher, and his mother, an IT administrator at a major corporation, fostered his gravitation towards things technical early on. His childhood fascination with technology and subsequent public high school engineering education led him to attend the University of Maryland school of engineering, where he immediately felt like he was missing out. Having been exposed to a variety of places and ways of life through travel as a young child and teenager, he also became aware of and interested in the foreign and unknown. His curiosity led him to leave the fields of engineering and computer science in favor of studying linguistics and Germanic Studies, for which he earned his Bachelor's in 2011. Phil's college decisions provided him the opportunity to study abroad in Germany, which, in turn, led him to pursue further travel opportunities. In search of a sustainable and meaningful career after college, he spent two years living and working as a homesteader in northern California and western North Carolina, and as an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher in Harbin, China. After teaching English in China, he enrolled in a Master's of Education program (in ESOL) at University of Maryland. During his time spent student-teaching and wrestling with the realities of public schools, he discovered the Sudbury model and Arts & Ideas in particular with the help of a couple of free-thinking professors. Though he does not wish to teach in public schools, he is grateful to have been in the Master's program, if only for the fact that he discovered alternative models through it. As staff at Arts & Ideas, Phil hopes to bring his continued interest in computers and technology to help provide the tech facilities required to keep up with the school community's ever-expanding curiosity and imagination. As well, he hopes to one day establish an exchange program of some sort with other Sudbury schools, both American and international.
James Taylor is a proud father, credentialed mathematician, heretical physicist, and passionate (web) programmer. While he has had a life-long dislike of traditional schooling, it was not until Arts & Ideas moved into his backyard that he first heard about the Sudbury way. He became an immediate advocate for the school in the neighborhood and proceeded to learn more about it. Having finally seen the solution as to how to let children live their life with respect, he just had to join up. James has a PhD in mathematics from Rutgers University. His specialty is in the mathematics of quantum mechanics on curved space. With over a decade of teaching mathematics, he has met many students whose traditional mathematical education left them ignorant and fearful of mathematics. For the past few years, James has had the very rewarding experience, while teaching online for Johns Hopkins University, of converting math phobics into math geeks. He has done this by encouraging his students to explore their life using mathematics, asking and answering their own relevant questions. James has learned quite a lot from his daughter. She taught him that even at a very early age, children are quite capable of handling their own learning needs. He has watched with amazement how she continually tries to do as much as she can on her own while she happily acknowledges that some stuff will have to wait until she is "a big girl". He loves spending time with his daughter, marveling at the sheer wonder and joy she has for the world, never knowing what new delight awaits around the next corner. He is relieved to have found an educational model that will nurture that joy instead of squashing it.
