Have you ever wanted to write your memoir or leave a legacy for your loved ones? This is your chance. This eight-week course includes activities and resources to help you write, share and preserve your life stories. Each week you’ll receive prompting questions to write two pages at home on a particular theme of your life history. You’ll bring your writing to class the following week to share with fellow storytellers and receive encouraging feedback. Sharing life stories is an ideal way to find new meaning in life and put past events into perspective. No writing experience is necessary, just an openness to appreciate and share the unique life that is yours.

Your Instructor: Pam Toal is a published writer, coach, and certified Guided Autobiography facilitator.  Her professional background in non-profits, higher education, and consulting led her to discover the rewards of writing and sharing life stories.

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Is there a place for the lives of extraordinary people in the traditional models of adult development? After all, the actions and cognitive capacities of extraordinary people like Gandhi, Leonardo or Madame Curie were qualitatively different from the average

person, yet there is no stage in individual development models that captures it.

For example, the great psychologist Jean Piaget has named four stages of cognitive development. The first four stages take place between birth and about 15 years of age. There is no new stage of cognitive development beyond this stage. This means

people’s thinking process remains qualitatively stagnant for 50 years. There is something wrong with this picture.

However, psychologist Robert Kegan has developed a visionary stage of adult development that not only makes sense of the lives of extraordinary people, but it provides the average individual with signposts for what it would take to become extraordinary. Kegan presents a new, dialectical spiral shape of adult development in which flux, conflict, crisis and improvisation are foundational, inevitable processes that all adults must face. He further suggests that there is a 5 th stage of cognitive development called dialectical thinking which matches the activities of extraordinary people. Our case study of an extraordinary adult will be the great Irish-American socialist and labor organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964).

We will consider three other dimensions of adult experience which are often not covered in traditional models of individual development. The first is the impact of world history on the constraints and possibilities of individual evolution. We will consider the individual as a micro-slice of world history in the making. The second is the extent to which socio-economic class both impedes and promotes individual development. Lastly is to understand the dynamics of that the fifth stage of cognitive development can transform how extraordinary adults live. An added bonus to this is that you can incorporate the six stages of Kegan’s model of individual development as a way to make sense of your own psychological development in new ways.

Your Instructor: Bruce Lerro has been a night-school college teacher for 27 years. He has taught in alternative college settings, in prisons, in the Air Force and in the Navy.  Bruce has taught in community colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bruce has written eight books, including three on the application of Russian Lev Vygotsky’s work on word history. Bruce is also a pen-and-ink- artist.

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