Why This Course?

In a few words—we are both students majoring in Marriage and Family Studies. Part of our practicum class on Family Life Education included a semester-long project to design a course with a partner.

A little more to the story—because this class required group and partner work, the first few weeks included introduction discussion boards and the need to select partners based on shared topics for the project. We’ll be honest and admit it felt a little bit like gym class hoping we’d get picked for the team, any team. Some class members were friends that had planned on taking the class together, others had narrow topics that matched. How did we get together? We both had an interest in middle to later-year marriage and family issues. We noticed many Family Life Education programs focused on relationship formation and the early years of married life, such as when a couple becomes first-time parents. We saw a need to address the changes middle-aged couples and families encounter after they’ve been married ten years or more. What else? Tamara W. noticed that I wrote books and she worked in a bookstore – and we were both named Tamara!

Some challenges—not having known each other prior to the class and living in different states made working together daunting at first. But scrambling to meet assignment deadlines had a way of bonding us quickly. Aside from the class requirements, our overriding desire was to create content that couples could use for real-life challenges. Between the two of us, we’d faced—and are still facing—our share of changes and challenges. Because many of the topics either applied to our lives, or would soon, searching for resources and combing through the research wasn’t as tedious as it might have been. We wanted to share what we were learning for ourselves.

As we point out in the course, challenges can bring opportunities. Tamara and I are putting into practice what we’ve learned from the research in our own family relationships. And we plan to continue our friendship after our class ends.

The goal—after all the work is done, we hope what we’ve created and the course we’ve designed can make a difference for couples and families. We know relationships can suffer when hard times hit, but we also know there are ways to grow closer and stronger together.