We have some fun news: Beginning at 8 a.m., January 6, both sides of lower State Street will be festooned with colorful Fielding flags! Fielding Graduate University has joined Downtown Santa Barbara’s State Street Flag Program with three brightly hued flags featuring artistically rendered images of actual Fielding graduates — in festive colors from Fielding’s new website. To celebrate this expression of university spirit, we’re holding a Fielding flag photo contest for Fielding staff, students, faculty, and alumni — with great prizes for the winners! Our 130 flags will fly through Thursday, Jan. 12. To take part in the contest, snap a [...]

A Statement of Support for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe We the Senate Leadership Committee of Fielding Graduate University stand in solidarity with Chairman Dave Archambault II, tribal members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and their allies against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a project of Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners. This project is a violation of treaty rights and federal law and threatens lives. As our colleagues at The New School for Social Research have written:  “The Dakota Access Pipeline is an imminent threat to those living on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, as well as those who [...]

Spirits were high at Pacific Lutheran University during the XII Annual International Transformative Learning Conference in Tacoma, WA, last month. A large Fielding contingent joined scholars and practitioners from 26 nations to “engage at the intersections” of transformative learning theory and to celebrate the warmth of an authentic community. The theme, Engaging at the Intersections, emerged as a result of the previous ITLC conference in 2014, where conference goers explored the spaces of transformation and the transformation of space. The 2016 conference picked up that thread and focused on the transformative potential at the intersections of those spaces. The conference featured traditional [...]

Dozens of faculty, alumni, staff, and local friends of Fielding gathered at the McCune house on Oct. 30 to celebrate the launch of A Passion for Adult Learning, the new book by longtime faculty member Keith Melville. (L-R) Keith Melville, Rebecca McLean and her husband, Faculty Fellow Roger Jahnke, faculty member Valerie Bentz, alumni Dennis German, and former staff member Anne Kratz Not only does the book trace Fielding's evolution from its founding generation through the four decades that followed, but it's the first official publication of the Fielding University Press. Dr. Melville signed copies of the book and spoke of our founders [...]

A substantial group of Fielding alumni and students had a strong presence at this year’s European Sociological Association (ESA) Conference on qualitative research and technologies in Krakow, Poland. Organized and led by faculty member Valerie Bentz, this group was the largest US contingent at the September, 2016, ESA conference. Their contributions included a pre-conference workshop along with nine individual presentations and a keynote address by Dr. Bentz on the transformative potential of combining phenomenology and somatics in conducting qualitative research in complex social systems. Participation in this conference served as a focal point for the relevance of the new Fielding concentration in Somatics, [...]

Four diverse and prominent institutions of higher education have joined forces to find a new approach to broadening STEM participation. With the generous support of a $2.9-million grant from the National Science Foundation, the University of the Virgin Islands and its partners Fielding Graduate University, North Carolina A&T University and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) have collaborated to launch the Center for Advancing STEM Leadership. The United States cannot remain a global leader in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) unless it broadens the participation of underrepresented minorities and women in STEM fields. While most efforts to do [...]