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TeacherJonathan2019-03-15T22:17:01-04:00
  • Overview

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  • Community and NGO

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  • Overview

Photo: Skip Schiel

It wasn’t easy to know how to be a good teacher, with all the models from my own schooling floating around in my head. With help from the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s and my students in the 1970s and the Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire, I learned not to lecture but to listen and create dialogue between my ideas and what my students thought and said. I learned to pay attention to the emerging moment in whatever groups I worked with—from elite University classrooms and boardrooms to community gatherings as far away as South Africa. I became a teacher who helps people find the power of voice to speak their most difficult truths. Click here to see my CV.

  • Current

After moving back to the West Coast in 2009, I started two small, diverse and intimate writing groups that meet monthly. Here we explore how to get beyond the judges in our minds and find our way into the language of the heart. All of us share an intergenerational perspective, a concern for the earth and for healing the damage of colonizer mind in its various forms. Once we held a celebratory reading night and shared our work with friends. These groups aren’t open, but if you contact me, we can think about other options once my own book is out.

Group Reading and Celebration

Click images to enlarge — Photos: John Cary

Writing Group Reading, November 2015
Writing Group Reading, November 2015
Writing Group Reading, November 2015
Writing Group Reading, November 2015
Writing Group Reading, November 2015
Writing Group Reading, November 2015
  • Community and NGO

Theme Tags

In the 1980s and 90s, I began to reach out to community, labor, and environmental groups where grassroots people struggled to make a difference with the written word. In Boston I helped plan an annual Management and Community Development Institute, where non-profit leaders from all over the country gathered to study popular education, Community Land Trusts, undoing racism, and writing for social change. I found myself offering workshops as far away as South Africa and Ethiopia, often set up by friends who had been in my classes at MIT, Tufts, or this Institute. Some of those same friends—experienced community organizers long before I met them—are now teaching the power and liberation of writing to grassroots people in their home countries. Shamim Meer, based in Johannesburg, South Africa, teaches workshops all over the country that have published their own books. Also based in Johannesburg, Bobby Marie offers trainings, where writing is tied to organizing.

  • University

Louise Teaching

I began my life as a teacher while a graduate student at the University of California, surrounded by the life-changing insights of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964. When I saw in my first classroom that joining with others to change oppressive systems sharpened critical thinking and nourished the power of voice, I shifted my focus from medieval literature to teaching writing. When I moved to the Boston area, my initial jobs were with amazing students, the first in their families to go to college. I later worked with grad students from all over the world who had come to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to learn about changing unjust social and environmental systems. All of us struggled with writing about ideas and worked together to develop the tools that became Undoing the Silence. Alongside this work, I taught a community yoga class and became interested in healing. What I wrote in this milieu about the silencing of student voice became well known in the field I was teaching in. I spoke at many conferences and visited departments of urban and environmental planning around the country. See my academic CV here. A version of the course I developed at MIT is now being taught at Tufts University by Grace Talusan.

Louise Dunlap, Ph.D.

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University teaching

Tufts University, Medford MA, 1983–2016

Lecturer, Urban and Environmental Policy & Planning: Graduate course in Writing and Public Communication; team writing, client reports; faculty development in writing and teaching.

University of California at Los Angeles, 2007–2008

Visiting Lecturer, Urban Studies & Planning

Brandeis University, Waltham MA, 2001

Lecturer, Environmental Studies: Course on Writing About the Environment

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 1979 –1994

Senior Lecturer, Urban Studies and Planning: Graduate course in Writing for Public Policy and Planning; writing curriculum within graduate Planning program; thesis seminars; multicultural workshops; writing consultations with faculty, students, and practitioners.

University of California, Berkeley (UCB), 1982-1987

Visiting Lecturer, City and Regional Planning: Course in Professional Writing; faculty, graduate student, and practitioner workshops; faculty women’s writing group.

Bentley College, Waltham MA, 1978-1982

Assistant Professor, Director of English Learning Center: Evaluation and tutorials for business college students; accountants trained as writing tutors; writing workshops in Organizational Behavior, History, and Public Administration.

University of Massachusetts, Boston, 1968-1978

Assistant Professor, English: Introductory, intermediate, advanced, and ESL writing and literature courses; Myth and Literature; Director of English Tutoring.

Other writing, literature, and women’s studies courses from 1962 forward: Univ. of Minnesota; Springfield College of Human Services; Boston Univ.; Wheelock College; Univ. of California at Berkeley, Bucknell Univ. (2009), Villanova (2009) U Conn, Hartford (2009), Yale School of Forestry (2009), Univ of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign (2009), Hubert Humphrey Institute (2009).

Workshops for academic faculty on writing, teaching and learning:

  • Journal of Planning Education & Research New Scholars Seminar, 2005–2008;
  • Associated Collegiate Schools of Planning, Summer Institute on Writing in the Professional
  • Degree Curriculum, at MIT, 1984 (convener/instructor);
  • Virginia Polytechnic Institute;
  • Episcopal Divinity School;
  • Bay Area Writing Project;
  • University of Massachusetts, College of Public & Community Service;
  • Mass. Bay Community College;
  • Universities of the Witswatersrand and Natal, South Africa;
  • Bucknell Univ.

Public, community, and non-profit teaching

Workshops and program development: Action Aid International (2010), Oxfam/Canada (2009); Action Aid International (2008); City Life/Vida Urbana (2008); Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Housing & Community Development (2008); Third Sector New England (2003); City of Cambridge Community Development (2000-01); The San Francisco Foundation, Haas, Jr. Fund, and S.H. Cowell Foundation (1997-03); Boston LISC AmeriCorps and MACDC Vista Programs (1996-99); WATCH CDC (1998); Management and Community Development Institute (1986-01); Haymarket People’s Fund (1997-99); National Union of Metalworkers, Ditsela, Women’s Health Project, and other South African NGOs (1995-99); La Alianza Hispana youth program; International Association of Machinists (Dist. 91); Cambridge Eviction Free Zone; Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Women’s Institute for Leadership Development; Immigrant Workers Resource Center.

Community empowerment programs within universities: Community Fellows Program (MIT); Community Planning (Pratt Institute); In South Africa: Gender Equity Program (Cape Town University) & Sociology of Work Program (University of the Witswatersrand)

Publications

  • UNDOING THE SILENCE: Six Tools for Social Change Writing. New Village Press, 2007.
  • “How My Settler Ancestors Set Us Up for Uncontrollable Wildfires, “Yes! Magazine, November 28, 2018.
  • “We Can’t Move Forward Without Looking Back,” with Courtney Martin, OnBeing, January 27, 2017.
  • “Advocacy and Neutrality: A Contradiction in the Discourse of Urban Planners,” in Writing, Teaching and Learning in the Disciplines, ed. A. Herrington and C. Moran, The Modern Language Association of America, New York, 1992.
  • “Language and Power: Teaching Third World Graduate Students in U.S. Planning Schools,” in Breaking the Boundaries; A One-World Approach to Planning Education, ed. B. Sanyal, Plenum, 1990.
  • Other writing in Environmental Impact Assessment Review (with L. Susskind); Berkeley Planning Journal; Planners Network; Mediaevalia, Peacework: A New England Peace and Social Justice Newsletter of the American Friends Service Committee; Turning Wheel; Fellowship; Harvest Times; Survival News; Spare Change; Community Voice; Women’s Theological Center Newsletter; The Thistle, Changing Cities, & other MIT publications; The Napa Register; Cambridge Tab, & Cambridge Chronicle, Yes! Magazine.

Consultations with community media

Publications committee Peace and Freedom (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom); trainings with Catalyst: A Journal of Social Workers for Social Change; CommonSense; Radical America; Local 66 Laundry workers Union (multilingual newsletter); visiting editor Peacework (American Friends Service Committee).

Presentations on language and social change

US Social Forum (2007); Boston Social Forum (2004); Cambridge Multi-Cultural Arts Center; SHOWA Institute (Boston); Grafton Peace Pagoda; Holy Names College (Oakland); Wellfleet Public Library; Belmont Against Racism; Cambridge Adult Education; Berkeley/Oukasie Sister City Project; The Yoga Studio (New Haven); Buddhist Peace Fellowship (New York, Berkeley, Boston); Harbin Hotsprings (CA).

Conference presentations: College Composition and Communication; Associated Collegiate Schools of Planning, including joint international conference in Britain (1991); Exploring Whiteness to End Racism (1997).

Education

BA (1960), MA (1963), Ph.D. (1976) in English Literature, University of California, Berkeley. Dissertation: “Word Play in Pearl: Figures of Sound and Figures of Sense” (about language in a transformative 14th century visionary poem.)

Awards, grants, and honors

Phi Beta Kappa; UC Berkeley Graduate Fellowship; faculty writing prize (Bentley); faculty development grants (Bentley and MIT); Community Fellows award (MIT); Peace and Justice Award (Cambridge Peace Commission) and other community service awards.

Related activities

Environmental Policy Co-coordinator, Mel King for Congress (1986); slide shows on centennial of Wounded Knee Massacre (1990) & pilgrimage to heal the history of slavery (1998). Member Cambridge Peace Commission; Struggles Against Racism Photography Collective; Popular Education Network; Planners Network; National Writers Union; ParkView Cooperative (self-managed apartment building in MA); Temescal Commons Co-housing in Oakland CA); Member Sierra Club, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Order of Interbeing, and many other peace and justice organizations.

© 2016– Louise Dunlap | louise@louisedunlap.net | Photos by Louise Dunlap unless otherwise noted.
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