Change of Course: The Education of Jessie Adamson (review)

Margaret M. Blanchard, educator and author, modestly describes Change of Course as "a novel of ideas." While it undeniably is that, it is also much more. True, this novel is erudite and well researched, and draws upon theories from multiple disciplines and traditions both East and West as well as feminist thought and more traditional modes of thinking. But it is also an accomplished work of fiction—a "story within a story"—and even poetry. The novel spins a web of interconnected questions that grow out of the richness of these fields. First, it asks: what does progressive, holistic, collaborative, democratic, student-centered graduate education look like? Moreover, how should we think about "creativity" and its relationship to human growth and development? What is the place of subjectivity and intuition in research?

Blanchard is also interested in exploring how art functions not just aesthetically, but therapeutically, and examines how the expressive arts therapies differ from "talk therapies," and where they overlap. Can feelings be educated through the creative arts?

On a more abstract level, the novel asks whether we might 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?

The novel also engages larger questions of educational theory, asking how progressive education helps 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? What keeps educational institutions vital and growing? What convergence of factors leads to their decline? Finally, Blanchard theorizes educational systems more generally. She meditates on the utility of systems theory and how it might 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 practices 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. She is particularly moved by the non-judgmental 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 to transform her grief.

Yet, in spite of the positive depiction of innovative adult learning, Blanchard's novel also explores a darker side. Even as the novel applauds the powerful and positive transformations brought about by this form of education, Change of Course has a villain: the corporate mentality brought in by the new administrators of this fictional institution, who are incrementally dismantling the progressive program whose accomplishments Blanchard extols and whose dissolution she laments.

This aspect of the novel can be read as a kind of caveat for all progressive institutions that are...