FACULTY – LEADERSHIP & CULTURE
Reynaldo Macías
Reynaldo Macías is an educator and school leader with over three decades of experience helping raise good people within just, inclusive school communities. Since 2005, he has served St. Matthew’s Parish School in Pacific Palisades, CA. As Dean for Student Life and Culture, he champions students inside and beyond the classroom, while also partnering with families and faculty. A longtime middle school history teacher, Macías designs curricula that center multiple perspectives, challenge dominant narratives, and develop students’ critical thinking, voice, and civic consciousness. His leadership extends to school-wide justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) programming, experiential learning, theater arts, athletics, international service, and faculty mentorship. A graduate of UCLA (B.A. History) and Brown University (M.A.T.), Macías brings intellectual rigor, moral clarity, and thunderous enthusiasm everywhere on campus from classrooms to sidelines.
My Courses
The Hero’s Journey
Everyone is a legend in their own mind, and the hero of their own journey. We will break down Joseph Campbell’s heroes’ journey into it’s individual stages, witnessing it through a milenia of oral histories, written stories, and movie and cartoon adaptations. After peeling the layers off our onion (Yes, Shrek is a hero, too!) REACHers (and Discoverers?) will then exercise their creative muscles to create their own hero and tell the story of their journey, leaving class with a stronger sense of self, their own heroic traits, and the tools they need to complete their own journeys.
His Story Through Film
“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
- Chinua Achebe
I love movies. I love history. Movies and history love each other! But every historical movie is being told from someone’s perspective. Every story from history is advocating for one narrative by choosing what is put out front, and what is not put in at all. Over the course of this class REACHers will watch and dissect some historical films, learning the historical facts and comparing them with what they see on screen. As an exercise they will then begin to think about the history of REACH 2026, and create their own story of experience to share.
How The Word Is Passed
Using Sonja Cherry-Paul’s adaptation of Clint Smith’s book of the same name, REACHers will peal back the myths of American history to investigate and elucidate what those stories were designed to obscure. We will ask questions of the past to explain the present, comparing the cultural and racial and political stories we’ve been told with the ones we have uncovered. Like a good detective novel, “history is a mystery that never ends.” It’s time to go sleuthing.