When Amber Dunse was seven years old, her visually impaired father shared his braille books with her and her brother. For Amber it was an early immersion into considering people whose needs and perspectives were different.

That interest continued in college at University of Wisconsin-River Falls where she would “hang out with the international students” and go on study abroad the spring of her sophomore year. The study abroad program was called the ‘International traveling classroom’ and involved week-long stays in such cities as London, Paris, Prague, Vienna, Frankfort, Verona, and Florence. She even studied “Pinocchio” while in Italy.

The first person in her family to go to college, Amber graduated from UW-River Falls in 2012 with majors in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and international studies.

With a K-12 teacher certificate in hand, she worked as a substitute teacher in western Wisconsin for a year and a half, then in 2010 joined the Peace Corps. For just over two years, she was assigned to Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous, land-locked country in Central Asia, south of Kazakhstan and east of Uzbekistan, all former Soviet republics. Her training took place in-country.

Amber worked with a co-teacher at a local university to train English as a second language teachers. The teacher training took place in local villages. “I joined Peace Corp to live immersed in another culture and to develop professionally,” she said. “For me, Peace Corps was a good professional fit because teaching English was my assignment and not on the side, as it was for other volunteers.”

After her two years in the Peace Corps ended Amber wanted to get an MA in teaching English as a second language. She applied to various programs and was accepted at several, receiving the best financial aid offer from Illinois.

She said she thoroughly enjoyed grad school, completing her MATESL degree in 2014. Amber went to work at Illinois’ Intensive English Institute (IEI). She taught a variety of courses and skill levels, including reading, intermediate reading and writing, and advanced listening and speaking, plus pronunciation and discussion skills.

Amber’s contract with the IEI lasted two years, and as she finished her work there, a lecturer position in ESL in the Department of Linguistics came open. “It was just good timing,” she said. She was hired and began teaching in the fall of 2014.

Five years later Amber has taught all levels of undergraduate writing at Illinois. This semester she is teaching a business writing course online and an undergraduate writing class on campus. It’s her second time teaching online, something which, she says, presents different challenges from teaching in the classroom. She said she has to think about how to make interaction meaningful in an online class with students from many countries, predominately China.

When she’s not teaching ESL, Amber has expanded her horizons by volunteering for the Education Justice Project (EJP), an organization whose goal is to build a model college-in-prison program at the Danville (Ill.) Correctional Center. 

Amber volunteers there five hours a week as a coordinator. She works with teaching partners at the prison, developing courses while focusing on teacher training—similar to what she did in the Peace Corps. But in Danville the issues she, her co-workers, and the EJP students themselves deal with have to do with mass incarceration and gender or cultural factors pertaining to the fact that the majority of EJP students with whom they work are Latino. “Discussions of inclusion and diversity in any institutional spaces are areas most of us wrestle with,” she commented. Amber added that being involved in collaborative, cross-cultural work has challenged her assumptions. In these matters, and wider ones of social justice, she notes, “it’s something I care a lot about.”

For Amber, traveling, teaching and becoming involved in social justice outreach are all part of her continuing education—both formally and experientially. As she puts it, “You need to educate yourself so you can help other people.”