Dr. Marlee S. Bunch is an oral historian and teacher education scholar whose research examines how the knowledge and experiences of Black educators can strengthen culturally responsive teacher preparation and practice. She is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and recipient of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Freedom Scholar Award. She currently serves as a Senior Research Associate with the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity and Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Dr. Bunch has more than a decade of experience teaching across secondary and postsecondary settings. She has also held leadership roles in curriculum development, teacher preparation, professional learning, and community-based educational initiatives. In partnership with the University of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education, she created two state-approved microcredentials based on *The Magnitude of Us* and *Unlearning the Hush*. Both were designed to help educators translate culturally responsive principles into sustained, reflective practice.
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. She is also the author of Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era*] and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6–12, coauthored with Brittany R. Collins (Routledge).
Her scholarship has appeared in scholarly and public-facing venues including Radical Teacher, The Conversation, Black Perspectives, and NPR. Across her work, Dr. Bunch uses oral history to document educators’ knowledge, preserve intergenerational memory, and address the absence of Black educators’ voices from official records. She brings these histories into teacher preparation, curricula, and professional learning to help educators create practices grounded in humanity, historical understanding, and responsibility to students and communities.
Photo by: Reckless Robot Photography