Posted on December 12, 2024 in Interviews
This TIE Talks features Dr. Marlee Bunch, an interdisciplinary educator, author, researcher, lifelong learner, and founder of the un/HUSH teaching framework. In this interview, Dr. Bunch delves into the origins of how she developed the un/HUSH framework, which emerged from her research into oral histories of Black female educators in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during the late twentieth century. Highlighting the importance of culturally responsive learning, she shares her plans for a pilot program featuring un/HUSH methods to reach a wider array of students and also discusses her upcoming book, which covers how AI can be used for human-centered learning. To close, she details how her pedagogical approach has impacted her own students, ending with a poem shared by one of her former students about the experience of learning in a culturally responsive classroom.
Be sure to also check out Marlee’s blog post for TIE about culturally responsive teaching, which delineates the un/HUSH framework in greater detail.
The un/HUSH framework was developed after my research with former educators who taught between 1954 and 1971 during desegregation and surveying both current educators and my former students. I wanted to create a blueprint, a North Star, for educators to create and/or assess existing curricula, lesson plans, or texts that they were using in learning spaces. The framework relies on five key principles:
The framework is intended to help guide educators or leaders to think through foundational aspects of creating and sustaining culturally responsive spaces.
My mother was born and raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She had a very close relationship with her sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Jemye Heath. I recall a conversation where she recounted the profound impact that Mrs. Heath had on her life and education—they sustained a relationship throughout my mother’s life. From sixth grade until Mrs. Heath recently passed away at ninety-eight years old, she was an integral part of my mother’s life, and she remained connected to the students and families she served as an educator. That is inspiring and embodies how foundational relationships are to education and culturally responsive teaching. Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch said:
That’s what memory does … It allows a living community to shape its past in profound ways.
This quote summaries the importance of this research and documenting these oral histories.
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was representative of what was happening in other parts of the world. Though segregated and faced with the realities of Jim Crow, Hattiesburg was a bit of an anomaly during that time, as it was not only the place where important movements and activism emerged (e.g., Freedom Day, Freedom Summer), it also had very educated Black teachers who worked to help the segregated schools thrive. Despite the systemic inequities, poverty, unequal schools, and so forth, Hattiesburg had a wealth of local people and others who worked to bring about justice and equality for everyone—people like Fannie Lou Hamer, local educators, Vernon and Ellie Dahmer, the Ladner sisters, Bob Moses, and so on, all worked to ensure voting rights, equal education, and other rights. It is a place where everyday people did extraordinary things, reminding us of our collective power and individual responsibilities to speak up and use our voices to enact positive change. My research sought to understand more about this history. More importantly, I wanted to understand the pedagogical practices, mentorship, and interior lives of the women who taught during this time and find a way to use the important lessons I had gained from these oral histories to see how the lessons of the past, might guide us in how we navigate classrooms and learning spaces today.
My research was not only inspiring, but also important, as my goal was to fill in the historical record and document the stories of the women who were foundational to this history and education. One characteristic of my research is that I will always try to include underrepresented voices and art (visual or poetry). The research process started during the pandemic, so my interviews occurred via Zoom or telephone. Oral histories were my primary source, and qualitative research included a minimum of two interviews per participant. I interviewed over twenty participants, including educators, the students of those educators, and historians. The un/HUSH framework was created by taking some of the lessons I had learned from my interviews and my research and using it to use the past as a guide for today. The participants I interviewed used their voices during unthinkable times and did so for the betterment of students and the community. The un/HUSH framework is a nod to not only unearthing histories and stories often overlooked but a reminder to follow the lead of those who came before us and worked to end erasure and inequality.
My current work with the University of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading (CRTL) standards is a project that will launch in 2025 and intends to help educators and leaders find ways to create and sustain culturally responsive spaces. Illinois’s CRTL state standards will ask educators and educational leaders to do the very things my research and framework speak about: building relationships, using self-reflection and self-assessment, continuously learning and growing professionally, centering students, creating culturally responsive curriculum, and so forth. The CRTL Team at the University of Illinois is working to build professional development opportunities, resources, and guidance for curricula. My long-term goal is to create a cohort that offers educators a space to discuss, connect, and support one another. Connecting educators and pre-service educators from across the country would be a great way to think through emerging best practices while also offering mentorship. I imagine that through engagement with educators and the need to support current and preservice educators in their journeys of culturally responsive teaching and leading, a cohort could become a real possibility that would allow educators an affinity and learning space to grow professionally and personally. I encourage everyone to be on the lookout for forthcoming information or to reach out if this is something of interest to you. I am seeking to bring my research to others through my writings, The Magnitude of Us: A Guidebook to Creating Culturally Responsive Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 2024), Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press, 2025), and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: A Practitioner’s Guide to Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classrooms (forthcoming, Routledge, 2025). I hope these books offer resources and ways for actionable implementation of practices that support and promote culturally responsive spaces. Finally, my focus on supporting preservice educators is evident in The Magnitude of Us. Improving and expanding teacher preparation is paramount if we want to recruit and retain educators. I hope to contribute to that very important task through mentoring, my publications, and future collaboration with schools and programs.
Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning (2025) is a co-authored book with my dear friend and colleague Brittany R. Collins. AI is something that has so many unknowns, but Brittany and I both understand the realities that surround it. AI is here, students are using it, and educators like us are concerned about what that will mean for classrooms, teaching, and learning. Though daunting, AI is important to understand so that we can find ways to leverage it as a tool and understand its perils and biases while also working to keep human-centered learning at the forefront of classrooms. Brittany’s area of expertise is social-emotional learning and grief-responsive teaching (as well as trauma-informed teaching), while my expertise is culturally responsive teaching. We both share a background in English Language Arts. Together, our backgrounds and perspectives offer helpful ways for educators to begin thinking about AI and how to integrate it into the classroom. As writers, scholars, and educators, we wanted to expand our learning about AI, build tools for ourselves and others, and extend our previous work by merging it with new salient topics that are important to classrooms. AI seemed like a very timely and important area that our expertise might be able to help other educators grapple with all the complexities AI entails.
I hope that readers, educators, librarians, youth advocates, and anyone in a position or organization working to create culturally responsive spaces find my research and publications to be accessible, user-friendly, and innovative, offering actionable ways to implement culturally responsive practices. The Magnitude of Us offers something for everyone, and I hope that readers appreciate the tools and resources, as well as the interactive and unique aspects of the text, such as the QR codes that will allow you to scan them and hear poets reading their poetry (p. 75). The goal is always that we discover and offer educators tools that lessen the load of what teachers are tasked to do—I certainly hope teachers see this as a book that makes them feel supported in the work they do. Most importantly, I hope that readers recognize the deep collaboration that the text was built on—the various educators who helped write lesson plans, the interdisciplinary aspect of the book, student feedback in one of the chapters, the lessons from past educators, the advice from notable poets for teaching poetry, and so forth. The Magnitude of Us truly is a book that emerged from a collaborative effort, and in that way, I hope it inspires others to do the same: collaborate, connect, and consider the perspectives of others. The Magnitude of Us is about building bridges to one another that help us recognize each other’s humanity. It is about dialogue, listening, reflection, celebrating others, uplifting, and a lifelong commitment to discovery and learning. Additionally, it is about listening to our students and showing them their vast potential and abilities.
My students would describe being in a culturally responsive classroom as a place that felt accepting and one where they could discover the best version of themselves. Being in a culturally responsive classroom offered them opportunities to not only know themselves but also to connect with their classrooms. It was a space built on relationships, empathy, and open-mindedness. I challenged my students to be creative, think critically, and support one another. They challenged me to find innovative ways to teach, find ways to make learning content relevant to their lives and the world, and to be a lifelong learner. The walls were covered in images and quotes that represented a variety of cultures and backgrounds, the texts I exposed them to were inclusive, and our activities were centered on discussion and inquiry. My students became writers, poets, and thinkers because we created and sustained a space that allowed for learning to matter deeply (both individually and collectively). My former student Will Adams recently shared a poem titled “The Magnitude of Us,” which he wrote to illustrate what our classroom felt like. I would love to share his poem and talent with readers. Literacy, learning, and connections can truly become lifelong if we invest in our students, communities, and families.
"The Magnitude of Us"
By Will Adams (former student)
(Written to celebrate The Magnitude of Us book and our time spent in the classroom together. Poem and recording shared with the author's permission.)
We sat in circles,
Strangers bound by schedules and seats,
Passing looks like fleeting moments,
Not knowing how close we’d become.
A place of public education turned parish for private pondering
Words spilled out like secrets long held in our throats—
Each voice cracked open,
Each heart peeled bare like pages we forgot to read.
This room, four walls, but it felt bigger—
Like the world shrank down and lived in here
Between desks and shared breaths,
Between thoughts left hanging and answers found
Not in textbooks, but in the eyes of the ones
We never thought we’d call friends.
In the silence after someone’s truth,
We learned to listen, not to respond, but to feel.
To feel what it means to be human,
To carry the weight of someone else’s story
Like it was our own,
And for a moment,
We were no longer a room full of individuals—
We were us.
The magnitude of us was in the vulnerability,
In the spaces between the words
Where we met each other’s wounds with understanding
And sewed stitches with shared respect.
We came in with masks,
Tied tight with strings of pride and pretense,
Thinking we knew ourselves,
But these Socratic circles—
We’re more like mirrors than glass.
Each question pulled at the seams of our silence,
Until we unraveled, thread by thread,
And there, in that unraveling, we were free.
It wasn’t just about the syllabus,
It was about the way we showed up, raw and real,
Trading small talk for big truths.
We were more than the roles we played
We shattered those molds when we spoke.
Young girls growing into women and boys to men
A chorus of voices that shouldn't have harmonized,
But somehow, in that space, we did.
That shift, that spark, when someone said something
That hit home,
And you realized we weren’t so different after all.
We were all searching,
Trying to figure out where we fit
In this chaotic, unplanned masterpiece of life.
We found pieces of ourselves
In the stories others were brave enough to share.
And with each revelation,
The walls we built outside this room crumbled,
Brick by brick, until what was left
Was something solid.
A foundation of respect,
Of trust.
When the final bell rang,
And when the desks were pushed back into rows
We carried it with us.
Not just the lessons from books,
But the lessons from each other.
The magnitude of us wasn’t something confined to that classroom—
It stretches far beyond those walls,
Echoing in the choices we make,
In the way we see and hear the world now.
We walked out different,
Not because we had all the answers,
But because we learned to ask the right questions.
We understood that empathy isn’t a quiet nod,
It’s a force,
That vulnerability isn’t weakness,
It’s the gravity that holds us together.
I still think about it sometimes—
How those moments shaped us,
How they taught us to step outside ourselves,
To look beyond what’s on the surface
And see the person standing next to us
Not just as a peer,
But as a story unfolding.
Now we’re scattered,
Each of us on different paths,
But there’s a thread that still binds us,
A thread woven in those moments,
In those shared truths and silent understandings.
The magnitude of us isn’t just in numbers,
It’s in the weight of the words we shared,
In the gravity of connection we formed.
The magnitude of us
Isn't measured by time spent together,
But by the space we created for one another—
A space that still lives within us,
Expanding,
Ever-growing,
An unmeasurable force.
Because the magnitude of us
Was never about how many we were,
But about how deeply we connected.
Dr. Marlee Bunch is an interdisciplinary educator, author, researcher, and lifelong learner. Her research examines the oral histories of Black female educators in Hattiesburg, Mississippi who taught between 1954 and 1971.
She received her doctoral degree from the University of Illinois in 2022 in Education/Policy/Organizational Leadership. Additionally, she has a Masters in Education (MEd), a Masters in Gifted Education (MS), a Bachelors in English, a certification in Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, and a certification in ESL (English as a Second Language).
Bunch has been an educator for 17+ years and is the founder of the un/Hush teaching framework. You can reach out or learn more about her work at https://www.marleebunch.com/
This interview was conducted by Fatima Mohie-Eldin. She is one of the social science editors at Choice.
This interview feature invites academics, librarians, teaching faculty, and higher education stakeholders to discuss their latest projects and research. Spotlighting both early and late career researchers, TIE Talks aims to sit down with fascinating individuals whose engaging and informative work inspires others in their fields and intersects with DEIA topics.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.
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