Meet Alex Cussen, Middle School Humanities Teacher

Alex Cussen attended UC Berkeley as a history major—but he’d actually been a fixture on campus at a much earlier time. His parents, both originally from Santiago, Chile, were comparative literature grad students who passed Alex’s stroller to one another between classes.

Alex’s interest in literature blossomed during his time at Berkeley, when he found himself going to different novelists to see how they captured moments in history. After two years of teaching 5th grade in a bilingual classroom in Oakland, he was admitted into his dream writing program and earned his MFA at Columbia University.

After a four-year stint as the Head of Subtitles and Translation at Paramount Pictures and five years teaching at another independent school, he joined Wildwood in 2013.

Everyone talks about project-based learning,” says Alex. “What attracted me to Wildwood was the idea of student-led inquiry that empowers students to do research and formulate the questions that drive their search for answers.”

For example, one of Alex’s favorite Wildwood traditions is a yearly film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”

“My students first learn about censorship by taking a closer look at the history of book burning over the last two thousand years,” says Alex. “As we do a close reading of “Fahrenheit 451,” we study the Bill of Rights. Students ask: What happens to a society that ends individual freedoms? How can citizens help keep a democracy alive?”

Alex’s passion for lifelong learning is a perfect match for Wildwood’s commitment to faculty development, which enabled him to travel to Poland in 2015 and Sweden and Denmark in 2019. Funded by Wildwood’s Research Exploration and Advancement Program (REAP) and the Landis Green Innovation Fund, Alex initiated ongoing relationships and research with global educators seeking to give students agency around the issues they want to have an impact on in this fast-changing world.

Alex is very excited to see how Wildwood’s ongoing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) and Global Citizenship work will continue to energize the school’s curriculum. What excites him the most as a Wildwood teacher and parent is how the school constantly seeks to do better, do more, and expand this work.

“Inspiring and empowering students to become changemakers can only happen when they have a strong sense of self: Who am I? What have I experienced in my life?” Alex says. “Students all have their own identities and experiences that impact what they care about. It’s only by learning to value diversity and leaning into conversations around differences that we can help students to truly expand their worldview.”