The Program for Adult College Education (PACE) at the University of Missouri at Kansas City offers a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree. PACE faculty believe in writing as a learning tool. One course in the program is "Culture of the Working Class," which uses a variety of sources to examine how working people have lived from the turn of the century to the present. The course seems to work on several levels: validating students' families' pasts, making students aware of the changing culture of working people and of the connections between various eras, and requiring them to examine their own lives and cultures in order to define today's "working class" and to realize what media create those images and definitions. As a writing intensive course, it requires journal entries that help students think about what they read and view, comparisons of various cultures, sharing views with peers, critiquing peers' development of ideas, and synthesizing multiple sources including their own and their families' lives. Because the students are working adults, the theme has even more relevance; they can all relate to it and draw upon the special insights and experience that adult students bring to the classroom. In teaching adults, it is important to relate the classroom to their lives, for a variety of reasons; thematic courses with writing assignments that require connections to their own experiences are an excellent avenue for this. (SR)