Background
The 2014 publication of Seven Stages: Story and the Human Experience (see attached) was meant to be an ongoing research project. And despite my having led some dozen or so workshops that used the curriculum as the basis of a writing process, I had not advanced that work. So last year I asked Janet Ferguson to join me in a process to create a step beyond that original curriculum, Signpost Stories. We ran two trial writing sessions in the Spring and Fall to road test the progression/approach, and felt prepared to launch this as a formal offering this year. Janet, along with colleagues Beth Jones and Brooke Hessler, intend to evolve the course into a new book/workbook in the coming year as a useful curriculum for those interested in supporting life writing, reflection and transformative learning processes.
The Seven Signpost Stories
We start with the idea of Seven themes:
Place And Belonging
Self Knowledge
Family/Primary Relationship/Connection To Others
Calling and Vocation
Purpose and Leadership
Seeking and Finding Wisdom
Transcending Mortality
In our evolving pedagogical theory, we view these as areas of fundamental narrative exploration, stories that touch on the specific developmental challenges of life that have been outlined by psychologists and developmentally minded educators over the last century. In our theory, making a narrative artifact of the stories that emerge from these areas, in our case, a digital story, acts as a marker object for deeper reflection. Put more simply, certain stories are signposts of the way you’ve worked through your life’s emotional challenges. They deserve re-visiting as you walk through your life, to retell, and re-create how they still hold power over your sense of self, and the ways you relate to others in the world around you.
Our goal in the workshop is to move through the process of writing, sharing and refining into the prompts connected to these themes as both a process of personal growth, but also as a way to expand and refine your creative voice. We also have the goal of you working through a progression of different visual expressive modes, drawing/visual expression, personal archive, media creation in photography and video, mixture of personal material (illustration, archive, self-created, stock).
The Prompts
Participants of the workshop were asked to respond to two prompts each week -see Signpost Prompts Spreadsheet .