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Change of Course: The Education of Jessie Adamson
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This novel of ideas describes change in the lives of a student, Jessie Adamson and her faculty, Dr. Sophie Green, as well as to their innovative graduate program. Moving through the program, Jessie overcomes obstacles and faces tragic life events to discover meaning and fulfillment. Sophie, facing retirement, reflects upon her long teaching career and mulls over the state of education in the United States. The program, designed to place students first in their own educational journeys and guided by committed, energetic but beleaguered faculty, is wrenched out of shape by self-serving administrators. While competing forces merge into a perfect storm of faculty conflict with administration, the program demonstrates its transformative power through the relationship between Jessie and Sophie, the power of their learning community, and the effects of the program's distinctive design on the lives of learners.
"Margaret M. Blanchard, educator, author, and NAPT board member, modestly describes Change of Course as a novel of ideas. While it undeniable is that, it is also so much more. True, this novel is an extremely erudite, well-researched book that not only references theories from multiple disciplines and traditions both East and West, feminist thought and traditional ways of thinking, delightful passages of fiction-- a story within the story, but also includes poetry. The novel spins a web of interconnected questions that grow out of the richness of these fields:1) What does progressive, holistic, collaborative, democratic, student-centered graduate education look like? 2) How shall we think about creativity and its relationship to human growth and development? What is the place of subjectivity and intuition in research? 3) How do the expressive arts therapies differ from talk therapies and where do they overlap? Can feelings be educated through the creative arts?4) Can we create a whole language therapy that would reconstitute the original unity between sound, gesture, image, movement and words? Might a unified arts therapy offer a medium for enhancing emotional intelligence? 5) How does progressive education help to guide the learner to want to cultivate larger worlds and to inhabit contexts more expansive than themselves? How does the process of innovative education transform both learners and mentors? 6) What keeps educational institutions vital and growing? What convergence of factors leads to their decline? 7) How does systems theory help us understand the impact of a given political moment on the collective and the individual within educational institutions?These questions should be of wide interest to all educators and learners. However, without the array of memorable characters whose lives we get to know from viewpoints inside and outside themselves, this novel would not hold our attention. Central to this book are the lives of Jessie Adamson, the adult learner, her mentor Dr. Sophie Green (who is struggling with the prospect of retiring), and Jessies field supervisor, Keyla Gold; their work together, which Blanchard records in detail, demonstrates the best practiced offered by the innovative, low-residency program from which Jessie graduates, transformed by the process into a confident knower who trusts herself. Blanchard creates a canvas which also includes memorable vignettes of other students and mentors who have dedicated their lives to building and preserving this program. "Blanchard allows us to see the strengths and vulnerabilities of her characters and convincingly shows the complex process of inquiry through which Jessie works with her mentors to develop her own ideas for her final project focusing on expressive arts therapies. The principles of learning embedded in this novel are also central to the philosophy and training programs of the National Association for Poetry Therapy, which gets a cameo appearance when Jessie is introduced to poetry therapy at a national conference. After attending only a few work
"Margaret M. Blanchard, educator, author, and NAPT board member, modestly describes Change of Course as a novel of ideas. While it undeniable is that, it is also so much more. True, this novel is an extremely erudite, well-researched book that not only references theories from multiple disciplines and traditions both East and West, feminist thought and traditional ways of thinking, delightful passages of fiction-- a story within the story, but also includes poetry. The novel spins a web of interconnected questions that grow out of the richness of these fields:1) What does progressive, holistic, collaborative, democratic, student-centered graduate education look like? 2) How shall we think about creativity and its relationship to human growth and development? What is the place of subjectivity and intuition in research? 3) How do the expressive arts therapies differ from talk therapies and where do they overlap? Can feelings be educated through the creative arts?4) Can we create a whole language therapy that would reconstitute the original unity between sound, gesture, image, movement and words? Might a unified arts therapy offer a medium for enhancing emotional intelligence? 5) How does progressive education help to guide the learner to want to cultivate larger worlds and to inhabit contexts more expansive than themselves? How does the process of innovative education transform both learners and mentors? 6) What keeps educational institutions vital and growing? What convergence of factors leads to their decline? 7) How does systems theory help us understand the impact of a given political moment on the collective and the individual within educational institutions?These questions should be of wide interest to all educators and learners. However, without the array of memorable characters whose lives we get to know from viewpoints inside and outside themselves, this novel would not hold our attention. Central to this book are the lives of Jessie Adamson, the adult learner, her mentor Dr. Sophie Green (who is struggling with the prospect of retiring), and Jessies field supervisor, Keyla Gold; their work together, which Blanchard records in detail, demonstrates the best practiced offered by the innovative, low-residency program from which Jessie graduates, transformed by the process into a confident knower who trusts herself. Blanchard creates a canvas which also includes memorable vignettes of other students and mentors who have dedicated their lives to building and preserving this program. "Blanchard allows us to see the strengths and vulnerabilities of her characters and convincingly shows the complex process of inquiry through which Jessie works with her mentors to develop her own ideas for her final project focusing on expressive arts therapies. The principles of learning embedded in this novel are also central to the philosophy and training programs of the National Association for Poetry Therapy, which gets a cameo appearance when Jessie is introduced to poetry therapy at a national conference. After attending only a few work
Author
Margaret M. Blanchard
A writer, educator and artist, Margaret Blanchard has published books on intuition and creativity as well as poetry and fiction. Retired from teaching in the M.A. program of Vermont College, she has lived in central Vermont for many years.
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Change of Course - Margaret M. Blanchard
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