Dov Stucker
2Rev Coach
Dov Stucker is a teacher, community organizer, and innovator. He is a co-founder and Lead Teacher of the Burlington City & Lake Semester (BCL), a place-based experiential program in which Burlington (VT) High School students use the city as both classroom and curriculum. He also supports district-wide efforts to expand opportunities for deeper learning and flexible pathways.
In the years before the founding of BCL, Dov taught middle and high school Social Studies, including courses in which students directly engaged in the complex work of school redesign. He has been a college professor, a content-creator, and a Community-Based Learning Fellow to support district-level systems change. In a formative chapter prior to his work in public schools, he earned an M.A. in Intercultural Management at the School for International Training, and worked for nine years coordinating community-based learning and service-learning projects in Burlington and the French West Indies.
If there is a through-line, it is his passion for authentic experience, sustainable and equitable community-building, and the centering of those at the margins–including the young people with whom he is lucky enough to learn.
When he’s not designing meaning-making activities or thinking too hard about knotty systems, Dov can be found playing music with his daughters, cooking elaborate meals, or birding the city’s urban wilds.
In 2017, when the idea of the Burlington City & Lake Semester [BCL] was first evolving, the program’s founders crafted a mission statement: To empower young people as citizens, students, and community members through authentic, collaborative real-world learning experiences in and around the city of Burlington. For years, this has been our north star. The heart of any mission statement, of course, is its predicate. Verbs embody action; they clarify what is happening. But in our case, we chose a doozy of a verb. What does it mean to empower young people?