Lessons from The Fuller Life Man

Abstract

This paper discusses the teaching effectiveness of The Fuller Life Man, a short fictional account of a door-to-door salesman selling the necessary ingredients for living a good and purposeful life. The researchers pilot tested The Fuller Life Man in two college courses at the University of Utah, Leisure in Your Life, a general education course (n = 24), and Outdoor Recreation and Leadership, an honors college course (n = 21). Students from both courses generally “bought” what The Fuller Life Man was “selling,” with some exceptions related to the role of technology in their lives and their sense of self. After reading The Fuller Life Man, students were tasked with responding to its companion workbook and generating their own twenty-first century American Dream statement. Based on those responses, The Fuller Life Man appears to be a useful educational tool for engaging students in serious discussion and debate about life’s deeper meanings.

Keywords:

• Exhaustible resources
• inexhaustible resources
• human fulfillment

Notes

1 Digitizing the workbook has allowed us to begin building a database of student responses to The Fuller Life Man to reveal possible differences between genders, different academic majors, races and ethnicities, and other socio-economic factors that may influence thinking about a preferred future).