“We teach what we need to learn”
Kate Hanson was watching TV with some friends when a clip from the “Donna Reed Show” came on. “Donna Reed is standing in her kitchen, naturally, and she says, ‘Why can’t everyone just try to be nicer to each other?’
“Everyone laughed,” smiles Hanson,” but I think that’s what we need to do.
“Not that it’s easy. This ‘trying to be nicer’ involves challenging all the interpersonal, social, and political barriers that make our relationships so difficult.”
Hanson’s classes in human relations and social issues are working experiments in the application of this ideal. “I see each class as a microcosm of the larger society,” she explains. “We deal with differences, conflicts, a variety of values and beliefs—the on-going challenge is to apply the ‘book’ theories to the experiences we’re sharing in the classroom. If we can’t mirror what we’re learning about human behavior and social development in our work together, then the theories lose their relevance.”
Her emphasis is on process, on the means by which learning is accomplished. She quotes a phrase that’s stayed with her from an introductory drawing class taken many years ago: “’Form is the shape of content.’ How the class is structured, how student are encouraged to act, and the way material is presented all have a powerful impact on what students really learn,” she says. “Which is why I always try to teach in a circle, and why I insist, often to much moaning from my students, that it be a true circle—not a square, or an oval, or a Q.
“In the classes I teach, rows would mean that I have the answers and that the real conversations happen between me and the student speaking at the time. I want the people in the class to realize that we’re all teacher and all learners. I also want each student to realize that she or he is as important as anyone else in the room and as necessary to making the class really work.”
As an undergraduate at Connecticut College, Hanson studied English literature, she planned to enroll in the UNH master’s program in English. “But I realized that, although I love literature, my approach to it isn’t scholarly. It’s said in workshop lingo, ‘We teach what we need to learn.’ And I realized I needed to learn more about relationships. I’m fascinated with the complexities and possibilities of our interactions with each other.”
So she came to UNH to earn her M.Ed. through the counseling program, and worked with the Special Services Program, now part of the TASk (Training in Academic Skills) Center, conducting occasional workshops. She began teaching human behavior as part of the management programs of the Division of Continuing Education and the School for Lifelong Learning, and consulted with businesses on human relations.
“This background,” she explains, “gave me an applied approach to teaching: What difference does this lesson make in our lives as we live them now?”
She’s developed this applied approach through a commitment to women’s issues, teaching in the women’s studies program, and serving on the UNH President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which last year cited her efforts in promoting equity for women on campus. She was a member of the board of directors of A Safe Place, in Portsmouth, and a cofounder of The Collage, a learning center for women. She’s also a charter member of Sexual Support Services in Portsmouth.
Now, after ten years at UNH, Hanson is beginning her second full year at the Thompson School. “Since the school is relatively small and self-contained, there’s a chance to work more creatively as a teacher and to really get to know each student. Here, what happens in the class can be extended. The walls of the classroom can be moved.”
—Louis Mazzari, University Publications
