Colleen Hildebrand

About Colleen

Colleen Hildebrand, a native and lifetime resident of Louisiana, attended the University of New Orleans on a scholarship for her undergraduate degree in secondary English education during the late 1980’s. Much later she earned her master’s degree in English and certification in gifted education at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Spending nearly all of her life in classrooms, Colleen has learned invaluable lessons, one of which is that no one can teach anyone anything. Learning, she believes, lies in the perception of the student, so she knows that as a "teacher," she is at best a presenter, a questioner, a facilitator, or a partner in conversation. If people can learn from her, she says, it is simply because they have become open to the ideas she offers, which prod them to discover their own meanings.

Three credit hours short of a minor in psychology, Colleen’s interest in the field has always informed her teaching, and she supposes that if reincarnation is real, she is one life closer to being smart enough to be a neuropsychologist when her soul grows up. As a teacher, however, she teases that she suffers from a common professional problem—vacillating between wanting the ability to say exactly the right thing to heal students’ psyches and wanting to set them on fire with her eyes. She attempts to say the right thing more often than the alternative.

Colleen tries to live a well-balanced life: physically, spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally. If she is not in her classroom, you might find her tapping away at the keys of her laptop, contemplating an image on her easel, literally running the streets with her dog, Opal, or just relaxing and binge watching the latest Netflix series with her more-than-patient husband, Scott.