Change of Course

"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 Jessie’s 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 workshops, she is soon sorry she only signed up for one day and is particularly moved by the non-judgemental quality and safe atmosphere at the meeting.  In one workshop “free write,” she allows herself to express powerful feelings about a family tragedy which allows her transform grief.

        "Yet, in spite of the very positive depiction of innovative adult learning, Blanchard’s novel also has an underside.  Even as she applauds the powerful and positive transformations brought about by this form of education, she also exposes the heartless, corporate mentality brought in by the new administrators of this fictional institution who are incrementally dismantling the progressive program whose accomplishments Blanchard so proudly displays and whose dissolution she shows us with deep sadness. 
This aspect of the novel can be read as a kind of caveat for all progressive institutions that are seen as marginal in times of a conservative back-lash, but we must have hope that with the recent change of administration, we may be entering a different historical cycle in which educational innovations will be encouraged, not destroyed.  This novel is sure to provoke more questions than answers, which is what progressive education at its best intends.  The beautiful many-chambered nautilus on the cover of Change of Course offers a welcoming invitation for us to take heart and possibly to change our own course of living.