GSE's Kegan investigates adult development in the 'school of culture'

By Eileen K. McCluskey

Special to the Gazette

Anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by simultaneous yet conflicting demands, as if life were a juggling act and someone just tossed a fireball into the mix, would probably interpret the title of Robert Kegan's book, In Over Our Heads, precisely the way the author intends.

Called "foundation-shaking," "a formidable new theory of adult development," and "intellectually exciting and far-reaching" in a recently published review in Contemporary Psychology, the book looks at culture as a kind of school in which the challenges of our many roles -- as parents, partners, workers, learners, citizens in a diverse society -- make up the curriculum.

"Modern adult life, in all these roles, requires that we be more than well-socialized," says Kegan, chair of both the Learning and Teaching area and the Institute for the Management of Lifelong Education at the Graduate School of Education. "It requires that we develop the ability to look at and make judgments about the expectations and claims that bombard us from all directions -- as personal and blunt as our children insisting that 'everyone else's parents let them,' and as public and subtle as the messages of patriarchic entitlement that saturate the culture-at-large.

"Postmodern life presents an even more daunting challenge," says Kegan, whose Adult Development course has the largest enrollment at the School of Education this term. "Postmodernism calls on us to win some distance even from our own internal authority, so that we are not completely captive of our own theories, can recognize their incompleteness, even embrace contradictory systems. These mental demands show up in as private a context as our conflicted relationships, where we may or may not be able to hold the embattled sides internally, rather than projecting one side onto our opponents; and in as public a context as the higher education curriculum, where we may or may not be able to see that our intellectual disciplines are inevitably, to some extent, ideological procedures for creating and validating 'real knowledge.' "

Are we up to the demands of this challenging curriculum? Kegan's answer contains good news and bad news. In Over Our Heads, drawing on 15 years of longitudinal and cross-sectional research by Kegan and his colleagues, provides "impressive evidence," according to the Contemporary Psychology review, of the existence of qualitative psychological developments that only occur after adolescence. "Our research gives the lie to the unfortunate tendency to think of mental development in the same way we think of physical development, that we reach our full stature in adolescence," Kegan says. "We have discovered whole new mental continents that are as different from adolescent meaning-making, as adolescent meaning-making is from that of childhood." These new ways of constructing reality, Kegan says, enable us to master the demands of contemporary life and, Kegan believes, we are probably spurred on to developing them precisely because our curriculum is so challenging.

The bad news? "We have barely begun to understand what is required to support lifelong learning. While there is robust evidence for the existence of these more complex ways of making sense, the majority of even advantaged samples of adults do not construct reality in ways that would enable them to master the curriculum -- hence the title of my book."

But Kegan is also quite hopeful: "Intentional learning settings are obviously not the only place we can grow. But if you look across the many venues in which we do seek to educate adults -- from basic literacy programs to community colleges to in-house corporate training to professional education, and even continuing professional education -- you find an interesting convergence. The best programs in all these venues are moving away from a strictly technical, skills- oriented, information-downloading model, and asking what supports real transformation of mind."

Kegan is involved in many of these educational contexts. "I'm engaged in a variety of exciting projects with a number of very talented people," he says in the journal World Psychology. One project cited is a joint program between the Medical School and the Graduate School of Education: "With Elizabeth Armstrong and Daniel Federman . . . we have been working with midcareer medical school professors throughout the U.S. to bring principles of adult learning to the reform of medical education." The Macy Foundation recently announced a $2 million re-funding of this initiative.

In another project, Kegan is one of several research directors in a newly created National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy, established at the Graduate School of Education under the direction of John Comings and funded by a $12.5 million grant from the Office of Educational Research and Instruction. "The Center will be a home base for studies into ways of supporting the several million Americans who have basic learning needs," says Kegan.

In a third project, Kegan and Clifford Baden, the director of Programs for Professional Education at the Graduate School of Education, have collaborated in creating a network of over 1,000 community college and continuing education leaders who have enrolled in their intensive summer institutes over the past 13 years. "Community colleges," declares Kegan, "are unheralded national treasures! They are among our most democratizing institutions, often helping our citizens on the margins to better pursue and realize their dreams."

In Kegan's office in Longfellow Hall, a few artifacts of the Far East are on display: an elegantly simple tea set of black porcelain; a wooden statue of human figures; a lacquered-paper parasol. Connections among seemingly dissimilar disciplines abound in Kegan's work, and one of these bridges joins his Western-oriented work to the East: "A lot of Asian people have told me they see my theory as more Eastern than Western," Kegan says. "A Chinese person told me that if Buddhism were foolish enough to be interested in creating a psychology, it would sound a lot like my model of successive transcendence of oneself into higher orders of meaning-

making."