Dedicated. Analytical. Problem Solver.

These are just a few of the words the Westridge community has used to describe Dr. Melanie Arias, our new director of Upper School. 

Arias brings with her a passion for learning and history as well as a deep regard for diversity and inclusion work and support for girls’ programs; she has 19 years of teaching and school leadership experience, most recently as the associate director of the Prep Division (grades 9-10) at the Windward School in West Los Angeles.

Even beyond Windward, Arias is no stranger to independent schools; she attended The Logan School for Creative Learning in Colorado where she learned at a young age that education should be about opening doors and unfurling space for kids’ curiosity. She earned a bachelor’s in history from Carleton College, followed soon after by a Ph.D. in U.S. history from UCLA and the rest is, well, history.

For Arias, coming to Westridge was a natural next step. From being surrounded by a family of women who engaged the world in ways beyond the norms of their eras to building programs to foster belonging and championing the local Angel City women’s soccer club, a flame built inside Arias centered around girls and women and community that—to Westridge’s fortune—brought her to Madeline Drive.

This is your first time working at a girls' school. Tell me what it’s like so far!
It absolutely lives up to my imagination and expectation in terms of the authenticity of the girls and their spirit. There's something really special about the [grades] 4-12-ness of this space. There is a joy of childhood that is everywhere on campus—whether it's a couple of girls from the Lower School who started stopping by my office to share their enthusiasm for fidget toys or the mass excitement around the Greeks and Romans tradition. Also, in spaces like the library, seeing students collaborate and engage deeply with questions raised in classrooms even after class has ended, and the way that girlhood just fills the room, is delightful. 

How does your love of and interest in history inform who you are as a person?
Being a historian has shaped me as a person; I know that change can happen and that the human agency required to make change matters. It isn't just fate, it isn't just destiny, it isn't just geological formations—those things, too, have an influence. But I think human agency is the determining factor, which means that if there are changes that you want to happen or changes that have happened that you want to preserve, you have to continue to apply your human agency to them or you will lose them. That’s something empowering to know: your actions do shape the world. And it's wonderful to be able to share that with students.

What does great learning look like?
For me, great learning comes down to an adage about being more curious than certain [and] supporting students in believing that the things that they want to know about the world matter. That’s supported by a lot of educational research … an understanding of how learning works in the brain relates to this idea of mattering and of meaning. It's very difficult to learn things and to remember things that don't matter or take on meaning for you. The other part is that great learning is open-ended enough that—whatever the particulars, whatever the specifics of the content are—students walk away with an ability to call up those skills, apply that content, or infer further in a different context. Learning is not the endpoint; it's about what you take away and can apply beyond.

What is exciting to you about the state of education today?
One of the things that excites me right now is this externality that has come to our work with students in the form of artificial intelligence (AI). With my teacher hat on, I understand deeply the ways in which AI can feel invasive and undermining. But I feel it presents an incredible opportunity to hold a mirror up to ourselves as educators and to return to that which feels most core to teaching and learning—because those are the things that we should hold onto and recenter our educational practice around. The ability to recognize truth in multiple perspectives held by historical figures—and growing our capacity for empathy in the process, for example, is one of those things which is unthreatened in the face of AI. When there are so many demands on our time in the world, especially as educators, that opportunity to think about what is core versus what we might be able to let go of doesn't come along often.