Students who take “Close Relationships” learn the reasons why some relationships work out and others don’t. After taking the class we still might not always do the right thing. But at least we’ll know what went wrong.
The Instructor:
Foreign relations is a natural captivation for anyone growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Kari Adamsons was no exception. But when, in college, she volunteered helping mothers prevent child abuse, her focus zoomed in from relations between countries to relations between people. The organization asked her to search the literature for information on fathers and child abuse, and she found almost nothing. Much of Adamsons’ work since has focused on fathering and parent-child relationships.
“I’ve always been the type where if we don’t know something, I’m going to go find out,” Adamsons says. And unlike most areas where we know a lot about men and not as much about women, in parenting the opposite is true. At UConn, this led Adamsons to teach a Human Development and Family Sciences (HDFS) class called Men and Masculinity, as well as regularly taking on HDFS 1060 Close Relationships (this course is offered on four campuses by a range of faculty).
Class Description:
“It’s a very real class. Everybody has relationships. We might as well learn to be better at them,” Adamsons says.
Classified as general education and often fully enrolled with 350 students, it’s a survey course that touches on friendship, romance, parenting, attraction, communication, intradependence, lying, and betrayal — all the good stuff. There are plenty of multiple choice tests, but that doesn’t mean they don’t go deep. Adamsons gives several assignments in which the students must apply something they learned in class to their own life, and then write about it. And toward the end of the course she has them write a two- to three-page reflection on one specific thing they’ve learned.
She gets a lot of disclosures in those writing assignments. Sometimes she refers students to mental health services. Sometimes she offers to be available just to bounce ideas around. “I’m always struck by the number of young men who come to talk to me about their relationships. I assume they discuss stuff with me that’s not necessarily socially acceptable among male friends,” Adamsons says. “I’m not a therapist, I’m not a friend, I’m not their mom, but I do have some life experience and expertise to share.”
