Dr. Alexandra ("Alexa") Overby is in her third year as the photography and Advanced Placement art history teacher at East High School, and she absolutely loves her job. Several years ago, she moved from Huntsville, Alabama, where she was a university professor at Alabama A&M, to be closer to her family and was immediately intrigued by the prospect of being part of Denver Public Schools.
"DPS seemed like a really interesting place to work," she said, "especially given the student diversity and the district's goals."
Alexa has a deep passion for the arts and sharing them with her students. She especially
loves the immediacy of photography and how it helps students communicate their own ideas and feelings.
"We live in a visual world and this is the language that students speak; and to be able to help them to speak it better is really exciting," she said.
Connecting art with literature and history: "You see that light bulb go off"
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Alexa displays students' art in her classroom. |
Her AP art history class -- one of the few offered in DPS -- approaches art from a more academic and analytical perspective, but has been no less inspiring for her to teach. Alexa shared how amazing it is to watch students make connections between the art they are studying and what they are learning in other classes like literature and history.
"When we're talking about an art piece, it's incredible to see them connect the dots with what was happening in the world at the time, why this artwork was created and what the response was," she said. "All of a sudden, you see that light bulb go off."
Throughout her years teaching art at multiple levels, Alexa has learned how critical the subject is for student development and growth.
"The arts are extremely important for kids -- it's part of the
whole child," she said. "
We know that many kids come to school because of their arts or physical education experiences -- it's just such an essential part of being human."
Collaborating with arts teachers across DPS to "push our programs even further"
This strong conviction about the power of arts education is one of the reasons Alexa is so invested in her
Teacher Leadership & Collaboration
role as a regional team specialist. In this role, she meets with a group of art teachers from across the district on blue/green days several times a year for the purpose of collaborating and developing their practice as specials teachers in a way that may not be available to them in their own buildings.
"Our job is to get the visual arts teachers together and dig deep into our content area so the pedagogy of teaching art and the possibilities of instruction are fully explored," she said. "We talk about the patterns that we're noticing with student work and how to push our programs even further. It's also a time for us to take all the DPS initiatives and put it into our language."
