Riding a Mobius strip of learning and teaching, Marian Dodds has been a secondary school teacher, university lecturer and teacher education faculty associate, high school counsellor, union coordinator of feminist and social justice programs, facilitator, trainer, conference organizer and international development consultant. She’s written proposals and professional articles, consulted on curriculum design, served on professional and international cooperation boards and coordinated CIDA funded Global Classroom Initiatives. Over her career, Marian’s passion for learning across cultures led to short term work/study experiences in Kenya, Belize, Sierra Leone, Japan, Thailand, Tanzania, Oman, France, Australia and the United Arab Emirates. 

     From 2010—2013 she ‘unretired’ to volunteer in Ethiopia, first leading a diploma program for instructors at a rural teachers’ college and then working as a Gender Advisor for the Federal Ministry of Education in Addis Ababa. In 2015, she returned to Ethiopia as a Program Development Advisor as part of a Cuso International team establishing a maternal and child health program. In 2016 she self-published her blog about her time in Ethiopia as a limited edition 238-page book. Spider Webs Unite—My Volunteer Experience in Ethiopia includes 1700 photos and ninety stories. 

     The third time Marian ‘unretired’ she spent eighteen months as acting editor for Teacher, the flagship magazine of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation. In 2018, she returned to school to study narrative nonfiction at Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio. This led to explorations of the existential underbelly of both her recent Ethiopian life and her Arctic childhood in the context of colonialism, feminism, and cultural learning. Her memoir, Tizita—A Memoir of Perseverance and Enchantment, was published in 2025. 

     For her next project, Marian intends to re-visit her parents’ Arctic stories, and her own late 50’s and early 60’s childhood memories of growing up in Canada’s North, and connect dots to the impact of rapid change in the Canadian Arctic.

     Marian feels fortunate to have lived and learned on unceded Indigenous territories on the Toronto Islands, and in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and Arctic Quebec, Alberta, the West Kootenays and the city of Vancouver. Despite current global circumstances, she clings to optimism.