Writer’s Block: An Interview with Ms. Dunbridge

Writer’s Block: An Interview with Mrs. Dunbridge

By Cotton Strong ’23

Mrs. Dunbridge is Hebron’s new Director of Academic Guidance. I sat down with her to discuss her history and what led her to Hebron Academy, as well as what drives her passion to pursue academic guidance as a field. This is what she had to say:

"I began my career in nursing, and then transitioned to education. I continued my education and got a degree in interdisciplinary education, which means teaching from early childhood through eighth grade, and then I expanded into secondary education.

I'm very much about valuing the voice of students and that we learn best through collaboration, and not a hierarchical experience. I think that teaching and learning flow best when they run down the same stream, they share the same water and the same obstacles.

I discovered a place called Regio Amelia, in Italy, along the way in 1992. In Italy they allowed each providence a certain amount of funds to do something with their township or their community. So in Regio Amelia they built a school block by block from the demolished buildings left in World War II. During the time of Mussolini education was stifled. Thinking for yourself was never accepted. It was a time of regurgitating knowledge. So no one ever advanced.

And the part of this pedagogy they use in Regio that resonated with me was- the moment you're born, you are a citizen of the country. If you're an immigrant, you're a citizen of the country. Your rights are the same as any adult. You had the right to education. You had the right to speak your mind. You had the right to imagine, the right to discover. These were innate rights, they weren't something that were offered as privileges or gifts. My time there gave me a little bit of an experience to relate to some of our ESL students, because I went there with almost no Italian.

After that, I got accepted into grad school for sciences of learning, curriculum and instruction, and was hired by Upper Iowa University to start teaching educational methods classes. Also, around that time, I found out through diagnosis that I have ADHD.

It made a lot of sense because I could hyper focus and became a master at many things I wanted to know, right? So as I was in grad school, I found that. There's an underrepresentation of neurodivergent students in schools. It's like having to learn another language because your language isn't okay for others to speak.

You know, all brains have to be able to learn in a way that they can feel confident, you know? And I mean I think everyone knows what it feels like to get stuck. What does it feel like when your writer's block? It’s frustrating. Incredibly. And you get fixated on that frustration. You're just having so many thoughts. How do we get into one thought and move it forward ? Well, we do that by using different strategies. So I may actually bring a sheet to you and say, Hey, you have all of these things in your brain. Let's write them all out. Now that you have all of them, find a theme.

Which one of these feels right? Awesome. Write three more words that connect to that theme. Great. Now you have three paragraphs right there that are ready to go. Now that flow of writing is going to happen, and it's not going to be forced. It's going to be authentic. Why? Because you could see how capable you are. You already knew you could do it. Something up here was stopping it, but once we found what that communication was, it was okay. That is basically what I do.

My thesis was on supporting neurodivergent learners in the inclusive classroom because inclusion is important. Why is inclusion important? We all learn best when we learn together, right? Your experiences are different from mine, but mine aren't any better than yours. Bringing inclusion into the classroom is something I have dreamed about.

What I really want for AGC is for it to be more about academic growth and development and being aware of the kind of learner you are so that you can tell your teachers, “I learn best this way””