"You can look at a piece of history, a piece of literature, and you can examine it just by looking at the words on the page. On the other hand, you can go deeper into it. Sometimes you have to bring up the issue of gender, or the issue of race in material that you read, otherwise it might not be brought up. I think that part of my role is to bring up those issues."

Walking through the front doors of the San Francisco private high school, The Urban School, you can immediately sense that the students and teachers are collaborators in the pursuit of higher learning. Most high school teachers must strain to channel the flood of adolescent energy that fills their hallways. At Urban, they may not have that energy under complete control but you have the distinct feeling, from the teacher/student and student/student interactions, that the teachers are instilling a foundation of safety and confidence in a community dedicated to all the ways that kids can acquire knowledge.

Fresh out of college, Deborah Dent-Samake moved to Africa, teaching English for the Peace Corps, in the country of Niger. She returned to the Bay Area two years later with her new husband, and pregnant with their soon-to-be born daughter, Amina. In search of more teaching work, she found a position teaching third graders at St. Paula's Lutheran Church in San Francisco. Before she began teaching at the Urban School, Ms. Dent-Samake taught at a school in Massachusetts and at an all-girls school, the Katherine Delmar Burke School in San Francisco for nine years.

When she began again to teach at a co-ed school, she brought with her an understanding of the crucial difference in the way girls learn. "Girls really cry over not getting something. I was very much in tune to the emotional aspects of teaching girls. If I could get them to do collaborative work, where they had to help each other out, to support each other, they tended to be more successful as individuals." One aspect of being a great teacher is this ability to become conscious of the individual personalities and talents of the students in a classroom. Ms. Dent-Samake is the embodiment of a teacher who gives her whole attention to her students.

Ms. Dent-Samake started teaching a class this year called the Peace Makers. The students study works and lives of three human rights activists: Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Malcolm X. In the class, the students also read Thoreau and watch the documentary "Eyes on the Prize," a series about the history of the civil rights movement. The project fosters a tangible connection between the students' lives and the issues represented by the Peace Makers.

This kind of teaching can't help but continue outside the classroom. Deborah Dent-Samake is a history teacher who has learned from this century's struggles with gender, race and identity. She not only teaches about important values, but she demonstrates them every day that she's in front of her class.

The Urban School Home Page is at http://www.urbanschool.org.