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9781579222710

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No one has carried the concept of 'self-authorship' forward more richly, or with greater use for the reader, than Marcia Baxter Magolda. Anyone interested in supporting their own, or others', adult development will benefit enormously from this book. --Robert Kegan, Meehan Professor of Adult Learning, Harvard University, and co-author of Immunity to Change (02/01/2009) Given today's complex and ever-changing life demands, Authoring Your Life offers a timely, crucial map of possibilities for helping ourselves and others to grow and to meet the implicit and explicit demands of post-modern life. In a highly accessible manner, Baxter Magolda consciously, thoughtfully, and gently teaches us about her robust 'cyclical model' for how to authentically grow from life's challenges and experiences through what she calls 'learning partnerships.' By sharing real life experiences from courageous adults, and how they made sense of and navigated their way through them, she illuminates the internal landscape of personal growth as a developmental process. This book, informed by constructive-developmental theory, will enable us to nurture adult development. --Ellie Drago-Severson, Associate Professor of Education Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of Helping Teachers Learn and Leading Adult Learning (02/01/2009) Learning how to listen to 'our own insides' and how to consciously and responsibly make meaningful sense of self and world is a kind of journey. This map will provide some confidence, comfort, and cues. Better yet, it generously and respectfully provides true stories of real and diverse people who have traveled through the same territory. The stories take you inside the stress of the kinds of real dilemmas and dramas that are similar to your own, and can serve as a flashlight--illumining your own path as they shine light on familiar feelings and boost your courage. Following this path, we discover that our journey--our life--is a part of a bigger story. That bigger story is the story of human becoming, a story that moves through uncertainty, pain, and shadowlands but doesn't have to stop in those places. The tension, bewilderment, and hurt of those places may be resolved within ourselves in ways we couldn't have expected. There is also a story within the story. That deeper story is about how we become one of the authors of our own story, our own life--how we become self-authoring. Like authoring a book, writing a play, or composing a song, authoring our own life requires learning and practice, practice, practice. It helps if we don't try to do it entirely alone. Marcia Baxter Magolda provides good company on the path of learning and practice, whether you are just setting out or have already been on this path for a while. In either case, this book will make the journey less lonely. It will assist you in finding learning partners, mentors, and guides--and help you become the same for others. But this is not simply a self-help book. We live in a time when we need more grown-ups. We need citizens who do not just 'go with the flow' and who can think for themselves about the questions of not only our individual lives but also the changing life of our society, our world, our planet. As we live in this hinge time of great cultural change, Marcia Baxter Magolda reminds us how much is at stake in the journey toward full adulthood--toward a more meaningful and purposeful life for each of us as individuals and for all of us together, as each of us is invited--called--to participate in the composing of a more sustainable, just, and prosperous world. This book matters for all of us. --Sharon Daloz Parks, author of Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose and Faith ; and Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World (02/01/2009)

Author Information

Marcia B. Baxter Magolda is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Miami University of Ohio and a nationally recognized author and speaker on student development and learning. She received the American College Personnel Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Research Achievement Award in 2007, for her outstanding contribution to advancing student learning. Her scholarship addresses the evolution of learning and development in college and subsequent adult life, and educational practice to promote self-authorship. Her seventh and eighth books respectively are Authoring Your Life and Development and Assessment of Self-Authorship. Sharon Daloz Parks is Associate Director, the Whidbey Institute. She was formerly an associate professor at the Harvard Divinity School and the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. She has also served in faculty and research positions in leadership and ethics at the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith (Jossey-Bass, 2000) and co-author of Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World (Beacon Press, 1996). Matthew Henry Hall is a cartoonist whose work appears in Readers Digest, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Adjunct Advocate, and many other publications, including the the ""Teachable Moments"" column of Inside Higher Ed.

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