Today’s conversation is with Marlee S. Bunch, an interdisciplinary educator, scholar, and author whose work centers oral histories of Black educators, African American educational history, and culturally responsive teaching and leadership. She is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and currently serves as a Senior Research Associate with the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Bunch has over a decade of experience teaching across secondary and postsecondary contexts and has held leadership roles in curriculum development, educator preparation, and community-based educational initiatives. In partnership with the University of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education, she also created two state-approved micro-credentials—one based on The Magnitude of Us and the other on Unlearning the Hush, designed to support educators’ culturally responsive practice through sustained, reflective learning.

Dr. Bunch is the author of The Magnitude of Us (Teachers College Press), which received the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award, and the National Council of Teachers of English David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research, Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press), and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6-12, co-authored with Brittany R. Collins (Routledge).