Departing Faculty Describe Their Fondest Riverdale Memories

Riverdale Review: What is a moment you will never forget from your years at Riverdale?

Dr. Elizabeth Pillsbury: I started the outdoor program and I started pushing for different kinds of trips, not just international trips but domestic ones...probably one of my favorite moments was...we used to do a social justice and urban studies trip to Detroit to understand that city, and the first time I ran that trip was really special. It’s wonderful what can happen amongst Riverdale students when you’re in a different location, and how community can be formed and how social barriers and assumptions about the world are more fluid and break down when you’re in a different place. I really love that. I love getting to engage with students out of the classroom. I loved the DC trip, but probably one of the most unforgettable experiences I’ve ever had was getting to sit in the dunes of Namibia and watch the sunset. I got to do that with two different groups of kids and it was amazing.

RR: Do you have any funny stories that occured at Riverdale that you’d like to share?

EP: In my second year of teaching, I had this kid Tanner. We had been into the new reader in History I, world history, and we needed to go back to a primary source that had been in the previous reader. So I asked the kids to bring back in the previous reader for the next class. And Tanner got up, as soon as I said this, and marched to the front of the room and dug into the recycling container where his annotated reader still existed from when he had thrown it out two days prior. We called him “tannotator” after that, though I’m not really sure where that came from. 

RR: What is your favorite class that you have taught and why?

EP: I mean, I love teaching urban studies; I love American food systems. Constructing America taught me so much about American history, about being a teacher as I am an environmental historian, I’m an urban historian, and I did not have the kind of fluency that I feel like Constructing gave me with cultural history.

RR: What will you be doing next?

EP: I am going to be the director of Maybeck High School in Berkeley, California. I’m definitely going to need to invest in some new hats.