ABOUT US
The Triangle Classical Forum exists to foster community among and provide professional development for all classical educators in the Raleigh-Durham Triangle and surrounding areas.
We provide educators with opportunities to contemplate the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty as discovered in the classical education renewal—through both ideas and artifacts—so we can better educate ourselves and our students to meet classical education’s ends: the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.
We hope to see the classical model grow as a desired form of education in North Carolina. We are a community of teachers of all kinds—public, private, charter, and homeschool, religious and non-religious—as well as those teaching at all levels of education from preschool through university and adult learners as well.
We strongly believe that local teachers have wonderful insights, and we provide opportunities for them to share with each other from their areas of passion and expertise through formal discussions, casual conversations, speaking events, and one-on-one relationships.
LEADERSHIP
Kristen Rudd
Kristen homeschooled her two children for fifteen years. She teaches online literature and writing classes for high school students, leads the CiRCE Institute’s Atrium on Dante’s Divine Comedy, and works as an adjunct professor at Thales College. She is the founder and director of the Independent Classical Educator Fellowship, a convivial group of entrepreneuring classical teachers, and the Triangle Classical Forum. She holds an MAT in classical education from the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University and is a CiRCE-certified master classical teacher. When she has spare time, Kristen writes fiction and poetry, lifts heavy weights, eats tacos, reads a lot, and contemplates getting a Ph.D. She and her family have lived in the Triangle since 2014.
Amanda DeBlois
As a middle- and high-school student, Amanda benefited greatly from the faithful and passionate work of pioneers in the revival of classical education. As a mother of five children, her desire to pass on that tradition continued to grown and get more personal. Earning a B.Ed. and M.A. from McGill University, Amanda has implemented classical principles in a range of teaching situations, from homeschooling her own children to ESL tutoring to working in a classical Christian school.
Patrick Halbrook
Patrick is a humanities teacher at Cary Christian School, where he has taught a wide variety of classes over the past eighteen years. He studied the Bible and Great Books at Florida College and received his master’s degree in history from North Carolina State University. He has written for The Imaginative Conservative, FORMA Journal, The Classical Difference, and Cary Christian School’s blog, The Forum. His business, Paideia Graphic Design, provides print and web design services for schools. Patrick lives in Cary with his wife, Kaylie, and their four children.