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Loeb fellows bring worldly experience to classroom

By Hope Green

To say that Lisa Loeb was an intrepid traveler is putting it mildly.

The Medford High School Spanish teacher once hiked solo across Nepal for two weeks, surviving on less than $20 a day. Relatives recall the summer she lived in a remote Guatemalan village, sharing rickety bus rides through the countryside with peasant farmers. At one time she was a volunteer interpreter with a doctors’ mission in Honduras.

Fluent in all the Romance languages, Loeb also lived for five years in Florence, Italy.

"Wherever she went, she loved walking and talking among the people," says Stephen Richmond, Loeb’s first cousin, who grew up with her in Newton, Mass. "She really felt that by living in a community and understanding its people, she could come back and make their language and culture come alive for her students."

Three alumni of Boston University’s School of Education are following Loeb’s example with support from a fund Richmond has established in her memory. This past summer, the Lisa P. Loeb Fellowship enabled each of them to spend six weeks in a foreign country.

To be eligible for the awards, which provide up to $15,000, fellowship applicants must be enrolled in the master’s program in modern foreign language education at SED, and must describe how their proposed travel plans would later contribute to their teaching.

For Melissa Tobey LaBelle (SED’00), staying with families in Senegal and Morocco was a chance to hear French outside a familiar Western context.

"My students need, and want, to know about the dimensions of the French-speaking world," she says. "There’s a false impression perpetuated by the textbooks that French is spoken only in Europe and Quebec, and people don’t understand how colonization spread it to places like Tahiti, Chad, Senegal, and Haiti. So one of my objectives, which I think I accomplished, was to get a feel for different ethnicities in the world that have this common thread."

When in Dakar . . .

In both of the African countries she visited, LaBelle saw Islamic men kneeling on prayer mats by the side of the road, bartered in open-air markets, and heard French spoken alternately with Arabic, sometimes within the same family. In Senegal, she went to a tailor to be fitted for a boubou, a traditional dress, and had her hands painted with intricate henna designs. One evening, a dinner host offered her a Senegalese delicacy: a piece of a goat’s head.

"It would have been impolite for me to refuse," she says. "I actually enjoyed it."

Returning to work at the Mountview Middle School in Holden, Mass., LaBelle set up a display of photographs and traditional West African carpets, drums, and dolls.

Another Loeb fellow, Katherine Eisner (SED’00), went on a six-city tour of Spain. In her travels, she gained new insight into the Franco regime as well as modern painters and Moorish architecture. She came back with a fresh supply of Picasso prints and other artifacts to exhibit in her classroom at North Quincy High.

Culture on canvas

In one interdisciplinary project, art students are painting and drawing landscapes from Eisner’s snapshots. The images, in turn, help her language students envision the geography they are reading about in Spanish novels and poems.

Eisner, who completed her student teaching at the high school last March and was then hired full-time, is delighted with the difference her travel-enhanced curriculum has made. "I have a quiet group of seniors," she says, "so when they started talking and debating critically about Franco and Spanish culture and religion, it surpassed my expectations."

The third fellow, Lisa Dembs (SED’00), stayed with a family in Quito, Ecuador. She attended Spanish conversation courses in a small school, exploring the rain forest with her instructor and picking up regional lingo. Her students back in Des Plains, Ill., "get so excited when I tell them how people in Ecuador say ‘cool,’ " she says. "You need the fluency and proficiency in classical Spanish, but this summer put me over the edge in my conversation skills. Learning about another culture helped me bring the real world into the classroom."

Family trust

Until she died of cancer in 1997, at age 53, Loeb lived in a Jamaica Plain condominium chock-full of antiques and rare collectibles. She also ran a catering business. Having no children of her own, she made Richmond, his wife, Alberta, and their son, Laurence, trustees of her estate, stipulating that it be sold and the proceeds donated either to charity or to an educational fund.

While none of the family had a previous connection to Boston University, Richmond says he approached SED with the fellowship idea "because the school has very high standards.

"This fund is an experiment rather than a gift in perpetuity," he adds. "We hope that this year’s fellows will inspire others to spend time abroad and come back better teachers."

2 March 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations