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IGI Global contributor Dennis Keefe describes his journeys in education

From China to Chautauqua via the Florida Roadmap

By IGI Global on Sep 8, 2015
IGI Global Editor Travels To MyanmarBy Dennis Keefe, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA

A little over two years ago my wife and I were living in a small, 14th-story condo, directly overlooking the Yangtze River in Nanjing, China, where I taught for the University of Nanjing and for the Johns Hopkins Center. With teaching and nonprofit entrepreneurship as the twin columns of my career, I had always considered getting a PhD in something, but my first attempt at the University of Illinois in the 1980s, in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), did not seem to give me the generalist background that I wanted in education, and SLA was too much focused on language, syntax, morphology and phonology rather than on leadership and management. For this reason I followed up my MA in language teaching with an MBA.

Some 30 years later, when I discovered that there was an opportunity to enroll in the PhD program in Educational Leadership and Research at Florida Atlantic University, and the then housing prices in southern Florida were very modest compared to a few years earlier, I decided to seize the opportunity and take the plunge, moving to Florida and fulfilling a lifelong family dream, geographically and academically.

I took a first course in Adult Education at FAU just to see whether I really wanted to go into the field. Dr. Victor C. X. Wang was the professor, and I was very happy because he also was from China, and it was his voluminous work in the field of AE that also attracted me, along with FAU's stellar Lifelong Learning Center to Boca Raton. In Professor Wang's introductory course, I began reading all I could about the history of Adult Education, and there I found an adult education institution named Chautauqua. At the same time, working with the adult learner typologies and theories of adult motivation (Houle, Marstain, Boshier and others), I began to wonder if I could combine a little bit of history from Chautauqua with the motivations for adult learning.

IGI Global Editor Travels To Myanmar Thus, for my class paper in Dr. Wang's Educational Leadership class, I wrote about adult motivation and Chautauqua, and, to my surprise, the paper was accepted, after a blind review, for publication in the Handbook of Research on Education and Technology in a Changing Society! During my research, I had contacted the archives director of Chautauqua, Jon Schmitz (pictured right, far right), and when it was announced that my paper would be published, he requested a copy. Well, one thing led to another, and I was invited to participate in the Chautauqua Heritage Lecture Series with Dr. Jeremy Genovese (pictured right, middle) of Cleveland State University, for a historical presentation on Esperanto and the History of Chautauqua. I was also scheduled to give a full week of courses – Introduction to Esperanto.

Since the Heritage Lectures is a fundamental part of the culture of Chautauqua, I was housed in the Hagen-Wensley House, across from the Athenaeum Hotel and right on Lake Chautauqua. When I first arrived at Hagen-Wensley, Rachel, the house manager, gave me a tour (not a long one as there are only eight rooms), and my first remark was: “Great to find so many interesting books here.” “Those books,” Rachel clarified, “were all written by the guests this year of the Hagen-Wensley House!”

It was quite intellectually stimulating to be a guest there. Roger Cohen, columnist of the New York Times had the room next to mine, and other guests that week included the photography director of the Obama administration, a musician who played 20 instruments from the baroque period, and two experts on the European Union (the theme of my week at Chautauqua was Europe). But conversations with visiting dignitaries and scholars was only one part of that amazing historical home of adult education that explosively developed in the mid-1870s, and is still going strong with thousands of visitors weekly.

Chautauqua is an amazing place for adult education: thought-provoking lectures from distinguished authors, concerts large and small every day, discussion groups dealing with historical and contemporary themes, religious services from 18 different denominations. The panoply of courses during the ten-week summer session includes hundreds of courses ranging from archival preservation to yoga to sailing.

American presidents, from Ulysses S. Grant to Bill Clinton participated in Chautauquan events. The list of famous participants and speakers is a Who's Who of American intellectual history: Alexander Graham Bell, William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, John Dewey, Melville Dewey, Jane Addams, Thomas Edison (married to the daughter of Chautauqua co-founder Lewis Miller), Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Sandra Day O'Connor. And even Amelia Earhart, who flew in with her plane in the 1920s.

Chautauqua with its archives, activities and history can be an excellent venue for studying and researching adults who past the retirement age are constantly striving to learn and to improve themselves and the society they live in. Chautauquans with a passion for lifelong learning, and lessons at Chautauqua for us all.


Dennis Keefe's IGI Global contributions include:

- Andragogy in the Appalachians: Myles Horton, the Highlander Folk School, and Education for Social and Economic Justice

- The Boshier's Education Participation Scale Factors Reflected in History: Adult Motivations to Learn in the 19th American Chautauquan Movement compared to those of the 21st Century Boshier Education Participation Scale

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