We all had that one teacher who lit the fuse of our curiosity. On Saturday at Saratoga’s Montalvo Art Center, a collection of specialists are uniting to light that fuse for teachers.

And one of those experts surmises she’s been teaching long before she entered a classroom.

“I used to set up little classrooms in the living room,” Ashley David said on the patio of Sue’s Gallery Cafe in Saratoga last week. “My sister was my student, my mom’s nanny who became a family friend, also my student.”

But a teaching career wasn’t where she expected to land after earning degrees in cultural anthropology and media from University of Georgia, University of Michigan, New York University and Stanford University.

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“I was in a college classroom, frustrated with the higher education objectification and thinking to myself, we could teach this to nine-year-olds” David explained.

Which is precisely what she’s been doing at Hillbrook School in Los Gatos. For the last two years Dr. D, as her students call her, has been teaching English to 5th and 6th grades with an approach that encourages independent thought and expression, nurturing democratic participation. It’s the kind of thinking she brought to a project called the “ExquisiteKnowing Challenge,” a 2017 summit that encourages underprivileged students from schools in Greenville County, South Carolina to the Bay Area to write about and find artistic ways to discuss poverty and privilege in equal measure.

And it’s these experiences that caught the attention of people like Charlee Wagner, director of education at Montalvo Art Center.

“Learning through creative inquiry gives students concrete means to conceptually master abstract thought,” Wagner explained by email. “That allows one to better understand the self, the world, and relationships between, looking critically at pathways toward innovative thought and compassionate global citizenship.”

David was invited to Saturday’s Arts In Your Classroom day-long conference to present “Exquisite Knowing – Catalyzing Conscious Democratic Participation in Classrooms and Communities.”

“So much of what we do in our lives is assign certainty,” David explained. “Most everyone finds discomfort in uncertainty but it’s in facing that where we find out about ourselves.”

And she’s witnessed the transformation of students as they blossom when they push through those fears.

“I had one student who was resisting almost every form of self-expression until I asked him to write about the one burning question that was meaningful to him,” David said. “When he delivered that and discovered that he couldn’t fail, he came alive.”

But changes to teaching models don’t come easy and while shifting the tried-and-true curriculum can move with the speed of cold molasses, some feel their time has come.

“We need to recognize that our world is ever evolving, and that as educators and artists, we both respond to and foster this societal progression,” Wagner said.

Ilsa Dohman agrees. As director of learning at Hillbrook, Dohmen has seen the value of David’s innovation in the educational models.

“Education was built to serve a type of student entering a type of workforce that doesn’t exist anymore,” Dohman said by phone. “Children true to their voices can accomplish anything.”

“Ashley’s work looks critically at the practice of literacy and how one reads their world and how deeper literacy can act as a vehicle for fostering connections among communities,” Wagner added.

As for the kid who never expected to grow up to be a teacher, “I know I’m only in my students’ lives for a very short time and all I hope is to instill a little independent thought that they carry with them through their lives.”

David’s session is one of five workshops along with a keynote address from Jeff Chang, executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.

For full details on the conference, go to: montalvoarts.org/events/aiyc_2018.