Anne Bladen has spent her career supporting families, children and students. After earning her BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, she worked as a bilingual Welfare Caseworker in Willimantic, CT, during a time period marked by the AIDS crisis, opioid epidemic, and severe cuts to social programs. Seeing the challenges her clients faced, Anne decided to shift gears and focus on making an impact earlier in people’s lives. Reflecting on her volunteer work with young children in high school and college, she applied to UConn’s Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates.

Anne completed her MA in special education, focusing on children with special needs and implementing Alternative and Augmentative Communication with bilingual preschool children. Her teaching journey began in Hartford’s public preschools, where she discovered the power of early intervention. After leaving Hartford, Anne taught special education for preschoolers and their typically developing peers as well as resource room support for students in grades K-4.

In 1996, Anne joined the UConn Child Development Labs (CDL) as a kindergarten teacher, later becoming the Special Needs Coordinator and then the Executive Director of the Child Labs, a position she held until 2021. Some of the highlights of these years included building a more nature-based program, working with teachers on play-based curriculum, teaching pre-service teachers in Early Childhood Specializations and developing collaborative relationships with other UConn departments such as Kinesiology, Communication Sciences, and Psychology to support both children at the Child Labs and UConn students.

In 2021, Anne transitioned to a full-time teaching faculty role in HDFS. This change has offered new opportunities, such as teaching different (and bigger!) classes but also keeps her deeply connected with the Child Labs and the incredible teachers who have been her community for so many years. In conjunction with the CDL teachers, Anne developed and started teaching HDFS 2142E: Exploring Conservation and Sustainability with Preschoolers in 2022, allowing her to continue to share her passion for nature with children and students. Anne has also had the opportunity to return to her Windham roots, building a partnership with the Head Start and Early Head Start programs so that students in HDFS 3192 (supervised fieldwork) now have placements in those programs, deeply enriching their experiences.

At home, in the Mansfield Hollow Historic District, Anne enjoys gardening, quilting, biking, and watching clouds and birds from the hammock. Her son, a UConn grad, works for the Conservation Fund and her daughter is an incoming member of the UConn class of 2029!