by tim harrington ’73
FACES OF WMA: FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
Faculty, English
Meg Lenihan Hutcheson: ‘Be creative. Be innovative. See what works.’
T
he first thing you see when you walk into Meg Lenihan Hutcheson’s classroom in the upstairs corner of Old Academy is a very large table with 16 chairs around it. The visual message to students is obvious: everyone sits in the front row. This is the quintessential Harkness table—the seminar approach that has guided most New England private schools (and many American colleges and universities) in their collective approach to teaching literature. We all read the literature and then we all sit around the table and discuss it. The teacher is at the same level (tabletop) as the students. The Harkness table approach is at the core of Meg’s teaching philosophy—read wonderful novels, short stories, poems and even occasionally literary analysis; ask good questions and dig into those questions as a group. Go beyond the narrative. Engage the material. Explore the language and the layers. From its inception at Phillips Exeter in the 1930s, this has been the traditional way that literature has been taught at schools like Wilbraham & Monson for nearly a century. But at closer inspection, the table is actually five small tables pushed together. Like everything in Meg’s approach to teaching, this is not accidental.
The traditional approach is good—sometimes great. But it is not always best for a class or for a particular student. Some students are more comfortable in smaller groups. Some exercises will not work with 15 students around one table. You can get more accomplished and actively engage more students in a class period if they are put in smaller groups and given different questions. Put them in charge and see what they come up with and then give them the responsibility of teaching their peers. Be creative. Be innovative. See what works. That is also Meg’s approach. Meg’s classroom tells you immediately that students are doing remarkable things in this place. On the walls are tributes to authors such as Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Julia Alvarez and Toni Morrison and there is also plenty of student work. Each student piece on the walls represents an individual student’s artful, thoughtful effort to “say” something important about a novel or poem—most use images but a few use their words in poems or in framing the work. These include student cutouts of characters, watercolor and color crayon drawings of scenes in novels and short stories, and a few examples from children’s literature (one of Meg’s go-to
Meg Lenihan Hutcheson directing AP Capstone presentations in Shenkman Trading Center.
