The Dan Murphy Fund

Science teacher Mary Murphy’s Advanced Biology - Infectious Disease classroom comes alive as students learn to study disease through the perspective of many different communities. The final project for the class is a mock international conference where students are required to research and represent a country and explain what the needs are in that country.

This summer, four of Mary's former students, inspired by their experience in her class, have been accepted to work as volunteers for the 2018 International Aids Conference in Amsterdam.

Thank you for supporting the passions of Urban teachers like Mary who inspire their students to make a difference in the world around them.

Thank you to all our alums and Urban friends for supporting our hard working faculty! Urban's commitment to professional growth impacts the entire Urban community as illustrated by young alum and saxophone player Fiona O'Connor ('18) in the video she created below about Performing Arts Department Chair Scott Foster's trip to Cuba with Horns to Havana last summer. Scott shared that the trip changed how he teaches his students, like Fiona, to think about rhythm. 

School is out but the work continues as our teachers participate in collaborative curriculum development for which they receive stipends. In addition to developing existing classes, our teachers prepare the curriculum for new classes such as next year’s Globalization, Race in Latin America, Rethinking Poverty, Toni Morrison and Global Migration.

English teacher Amanda Moore attended Sun Magazine's Into the Fire conference in 2014 which helped her to shape Urban's popular Creative Nonfiction course. Amanda used her work at the conference to develop student writing prompts, create effective strategies for peer editing, and to develop several key assignments for the course, including weekly Readers Writes, some of which students eventually saw published in The Sun Magazine.

Thank you for supporting the continued learning of our talented faculty!

Last summer, English teacher Courtney Rein attended an NEH seminar in the Mississippi Delta which was invaluable for the planning of Urban's recent Mississippi trip. 

Thank you to Urban students Fiona O ('18) and Imogen B ('18) for putting together this video about their experience.

Science teacher Matthew Casey attended the Robotic Telescopes in Research and Education conference last summer, and integrated his experience into the Astronomy class final project. Students were challenged to perform real science by using remote-controlled telescopes to collect and analyze their own astronomical images. 

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