Teaching, at least in the classroom sense, wasn’t Laura Hedin’s intention.
She liked the humanities and contemplated a career in creative writing, “but my dad kept telling me I’d never make any money.”
Plan B: Her older sister, Teresa, worked as a dietitian – and “I liked her. I also love the sciences, so I thought that would be a good fit for me.”
Hedin earned a bachelor’s degree in hospital dietetics at her hometown University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and began a job doing exactly that.
Yet it wasn’t as fulfilling as she expected.
“I always told people that I was an educator, but I was educating people as they went out the door of the hospital,” says Hedin, who will retire from the NIU College of Education at the end of March, “and you can’t change a person’s behavior, or their thinking, with a 30-minute or 20-minute interview at the end of their hospital stay.”
And so, with the birth of sons Gregory and Daniel, she chose to become a stay-at-home mom.
Within a few years, she says, “I became a paraprofessional at my sons’ school. I loved being in the schools, and the principal encouraged me to get my teaching certification. So I did.”
Entering the classroom – she taught middle school science and social studies – opened her eyes to yet another future.
“I found that all the students who had IEPs (Individualized Education Programs) were included in those subjects because there were a lot of small-group projects, and it was easy to include kids who had disabilities,” Hedin says. “That was the beginning of my transition into special education. I transitioned into being the resource teacher, and when I did my doctorate, it was completely focused on special education.”
Upon completion of that degree, Hedin realized that she “was done being a classroom teacher. I’m sure that anyone else would have thought I was still doing a great job, but I wasn’t meeting my own expectations. So I moved into higher ed, where I thought I could be a positive influence on new teachers.”
Moving from the K-12 world constituted a physical move as well – the first, and still only, of her life.
Before taking up residence in DeKalb in August of 2007, Urbana had always been home.
Robert Reuter, Hedin’s father, ran a grain elevator there for several years; when that business closed, he became a purchasing agent at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hedin’s mother, Barbara, also worked at UIUC as an office manager.
Life in a university community provided the Reuter family with a global immersion of sorts.
“We always had a lot of international students at our house,” Hedin says. “My parents kind of adopted international students who were far from home.”
The NIU Department of Special and Early Education (SEED), meanwhile, enriched her days with “a variety of tasks: teaching; scholarly activities; partnering with school districts to improve their programs.”
“It really appealed to me in terms of being able to do creative work, but also being able to do the writing and the scholarship,” she says. “Seeing the growth of students was always very rewarding for me.”
Her work in the classroom drew notice.
NIU nominated her for the Mid-American Conference’s inaugural Outstanding Faculty for Student Success award in 2020.
One year earlier, she received her department’s faculty award for Student and Community Engagement and was also the college’s nominee for the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.
“I learned from my students, and I learned this from my students when I was a classroom teacher as well, that there’s not just one way to do things. There are multiple ways that you can arrive at the same positive result, and just because I teach letter sounds this way doesn’t mean that it’s going to work for all students,” Hedin says.
“So when my students come into the college classroom, I need to be attentive to how they’re approaching these kinds of tasks,” she adds, “because what they’re doing might be the next ‘best new thing’ based on what they’ve experienced and how they’ve learned.”
Hedin became chair of her department July 1, 2020.
Under her leadership, SEED joined the college’s PLEDGE initiative – Partnering to Lead and Empower District-Grown Educators – by launching a cohort of B.S. in Early Childhood Education majors at Elgin Community College in 2022.
That same year, 35 paraprofessionals from School District U-46 began their employer-paid pursuit of NIU bachelor’s degrees in Special Education as part of the Licensed Educator Accelerated Pathway (LEAP) program, which also has expanded to the Rockford Public Schools.
Later that year, the department inked 2+2 seamless transfer pathways for students at Waubonsee Community College to earn degrees in Early Childhood Education and Special Education.
Most recently, Hedin guided the department’s entry into the state’s Early Childhood Access Consortium for Equity (ECACE) Program. The initiative provides funding for members of the early childhood incumbent workforce who have associate degrees from Illinois community colleges to complete their bachelor’s degrees.
“SEED is student-focused. They are committed as I am to student success,” Hedin says, “so I’m very proud of that tradition, and I’m very proud of the things we’ve been able to accomplish in terms of new programming.”
Hedin points to Jesse “Woody” Johnson’s shepherding of the Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBA) program, Natalie Andzik’s work to advance Toni Van Laarhoven’s focus on assistive technology and the enterprising spirit of Stacy Kelly and Molly Pasley in growing the Visual Disabilities program.
“I cannot image having worked in a better place in terms of the colleagues I had,” Hedin says. “Greg Conderman, Toni Van Laarhoven and Woody Johnson were on the search committee when I was coming to NIU, and they became lifelong friends. I couldn’t have gotten to where I am at today without their assistance. Their stalwart support really made my career possible.”
Last July, Hedin was named the college’s Morgridge Endowed Chair.
She strived to make the office a supportive resource for faculty, including with the restoration of accelerator grants to fund research that focuses on teacher advancement and instructional technology.
“I also did some of my own research, following up on the LEAP participants,” she says. “How are they doing in the first year? What kind of supports do they need as first-year teachers? How can we improve programs like LEAP?”
Retirement will bring Hedin an opportunity to finish some writing projects that relate to the mentoring and induction of LEAP graduates.
Meanwhile, travel is on the agenda.
Eldest son Gregory, a construction engineer with the U.S. Army and based in Atlanta, is being dispatched overseas in April: “I want to go and spend some quality time with him before he deploys,” she says.
Younger son Daniel, meanwhile, continues to live in Urbana and works as an underwriter for the U of I Community Credit Union.
Hedin’s husband, Paul Donohue, plays tuba and bass trombone in several bands gigging around DuPage and McHenry counties. Between them, they are grandparents to five.
And, true to her educational philosophy, she looks forward to discovering the next step beyond these.
“The bottom line,” Hedin says, “is that all students can learn, and I include myself in that as well. I’m always a learner. I’m always a student. I’m a lifelong learner, and I can learn from my students – maybe not as much as they learn from me, but I’m always open to new possibilities and new ways of doing things.”
