Chapter 16: The Pursuit of Lifelong Learning

As a fledgling scholar, for the past 18 months I have been inundated with text after text full of theories, theorists, and theses. When choosing a text to explore for the curriculum project, I was immediately attracted to Norm Overly’s Lifelong Learning—a Human Agenda. Although written as the 1979 Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) Yearbook, this was not your typical ASCD curriculum yearbook. Overly’s inimitable approach to addressing curriculum of lifelong learning in the 1970s piqued my interest and stole my soul from the very first page.

The first narrative, “Grandma’s Search,” instantly lured me in. A grandma’s girl myself, I was anxious to read what this grandma’s search was for and what it had to do with curriculum. It took only two pages for me to decide that this was the curriculum book for me. After reading four pages, I was grappling with this assembly of thoughts, narratives, poems, and news briefs (to name just a few of the genres in the book). Before long, I no longer felt like I was reading a curriculum book from the 1970s. I began to feel like I was watching a film, a film of many different frames, each extracting a different experience from a different perspective. Wanting to delve completely into each infinitesimal experience, I sat back, put on my three-dimensional glasses and prepared to partake in these transitory moments of uncertainty for the actors and actresses in each frame.