Emilie Lai

I am currently the Director of Instruction and Engagement at Notre Dame DeSion High School in Kansas City, Missouri, where I work with 9th through 12th grade students on a dual campus. I started teaching here going on 8 years ago, but I pretty quickly moved into the admin role and have been able to be a part of several initiatives. The one that is very exciting is that we were at the leading front of experiential education, thinking about how do we transform learning so that it is place-based, real-world, community-partnered and experiential, and what does it really mean to have a well-rounded education. My first year was actually when COVID happened, and that was also the time where we were starting a new strategic plan. Those two things aligning made us pause and think about what we want students to walk away with or graduate as. We have signature programs like a full-on conference where we invite over 50 community partners, and students create week-long interdisciplinary immersive courses where they could be exploring things like engineering or science, and some of them even travel internationally or domestically. One of our signature programs is called the Global Impacts Microschool, which ties in three different subjects: global health, AP Literature, and Environmental Theology together. It's a 3-hour-long course that's rooted in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and students work with community members who are working on those goals and do their own research and field study that goes over to Kenya so they can compare different perspectives on shared global challenges and learn from different approaches.