Sarah Brady | April 12, 2017
World View welcomes our new assistant director, Holly Loranger, who began work on March 20. As World View’s Assistant Director, Holly leads professional development programs across the state of North Carolina to inspire global educators and to enhance global curricula.
Holly received her B.A. in anthropology and sociology from the University of Notre Dame and her Master’s in teaching secondary social studies from UNC-Chapel Hill. Holly worked in adult education at several community colleges before joining Chapel Hill High School as a social studies teacher for 16 years. She earned National Board Certification in secondary social studies and history in 2013. In 2012, she was named Chapel Hill High School Teacher of the Year and Chapel Hill–Carrboro City Schools Honor Teacher.
As someone committed to global education throughout her educational career, Holly has continually built global connections into the social studies curriculum through her work in the classroom and as a teacher leader. Her interests include social justice and equity, arts integration and access for all students. She cultivated a community in the social studies classroom by working with diverse community members to foster diverse dialogue and relationships as well as to deepen the curriculum. From combat veterans and local musicians to religious leaders and survivors of genocide, from visits to temples and mosques and local farms, Holly’s students continually expanded their mindsets by engaging with the world beyond their classroom.
Holly partnered with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center in Chapel Hill to create a dynamic Civil Rights curriculum highlighting local histories of the Civil Rights Movement, and she created and facilitated walking tours for her students based on local Civil Rights history and the historically black neighborhoods of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. Her students created original artistic responses in conjunction with oral histories they worked to archive with the Southern Oral History Program. Holly also developed engaging, project-based course curriculums for modern global conflicts and comparative religions at Chapel Hill High School.
She served in a variety of leadership roles at Chapel Hill High School, including as chair of the social studies department, as a lead proficiency teacher, as a member of the equity and technology teams and as a cooperating teacher for MAT students from UNC-Chapel Hill and NCCU for over a decade. While at Chapel Hill High School, she was a teacher advisory committee member with UNC-Chapel Hill’s Global Navigators program. Holly also served on the Instructional Planning Team and as K-12 Lead Social Studies Teacher in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.
As a participant in the Governor’s Teacher Network Professional Development Pathway in 2014–15, Holly developed a project focused on global competency skills in the secondary social studies classroom. She was named an Art21 Educators Program Fellow at NYU in 2011-12 and she is an alum of the 2016 Centropa Summer Academy (Vienna, Prague, Terezin and Berlin). She was chosen as a National Endowment for the Humanities Teacher Scholar with the “Most Southern Place on Earth” program in the Mississippi Delta in 2016 and she was a Global Islam and the Arts Teacher Fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill during the 2016–17 academic year.
Holly has participated in teaching exchanges and programs abroad. In 2010, she traveled to Turkey with the Turkish Cultural Foundation’s Teacher Study Tour. In 2012, she participated in a teaching exchange in Amman, Jordan, through the US State Department’s Teaching Excellence and Achievement program. In this capacity, she taught and led professional development workshops for English teachers in United Nations Relief and Works Agency schools in the Amman area.
Holly embraces the global mindset, personally and professionally, as a lifelong work in progress that is continually shaped by new experiences. She is committed to helping teachers promote equity, empathy and engagement in their classrooms through globally competent and multicultural teaching practices.
You can reach Holly at 919/843-7793 or via email at hloranger@unc.edu. Welcome to World View, Holly!