UPDATE: 2:30 pm Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017 The Thomas Fire is now 270,000 acres and at 50% containment.  Today some evacuation zones have been lifted, including the voluntary zone nearest Fielding. While we intend to remain open until the close of business, Thursday, December 21st, things may change.  Please print this email so you have the information about alternative ways to connect to Fielding.  Do check our phone for any late breaking news (information below). Academic continuity Moodle can be directly accessed using the following address:  moodle2.fielding.edu.  This address works even if MyFielding is down. Senior Leadership I will be onsite [...]

  Since its creation this year, Fielding's Inclusion Council has been busy! The first order of business was identifying the council itself. Chair Placida Gallegos was thrilled to have 40 students and alumni apply for the Council’s eight student and alum positions. Rather than turn away enthusiastic volunteers, she created three more groups where everyone who applied could be involved in the effort: an Implementation team, Strategic Advisors team, and Action Learning team. All have begun meeting and will be inviting other members of the Fielding community to get involved as well. The Inclusion Council also includes faculty from across the university [...]

Dear staff and faculty colleagues, Over the last several weeks, many of our dear students, faculty, alumni, friends, and families find themselves within nature’s destructive path. Please hold them in your hearts as part of our enduring value to be in community with each other. As I mentioned in my weekly video from two weeks ago, Kristine Jacquin contacted all of our students and faculty who were affected by Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Louisiana, around 25 people. They all checked in and we are making sure that they treated compassionately in terms of their graduate work given that some of [...]

Dr. Fredriksen-Goldsen, left, and Dr. Corley Connie Corley, PhD, lead faculty of Fielding’s Creative Longevity and Wisdom doctoral concentration, recently presented an award to Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen, PhD, for her outstanding contributions to the field of positive aging. Dr. Fredriksen-Goldsen, professor and director of Healthy Generations Hartford Center of Excellence at the University of Washington, received the Creative Longevity and Wisdom Outstanding Scholar Practitioner Award during 2017 World Congress of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics (IAGG) in San Francisco last month, the largest-ever gathering of people in the field of aging. "Karen's groundbreaking work on the study 'Aging [...]

Fielding students and alumni enjoyed a three-day somatics intensive at La Casa De Maria in Santa Barbara this summer. The seventh annual somatics retreat focused on the body-mind-soul connection through Kundalini yoga, led by Human and Organizational Development (HOD) faculty member Valerie Bentz, head of Fielding's Somatics, Phenomenology, and Communicative Leadership concentration. Psychology alumna Evelyn Beck led sacred circle dancing from around the world, and participants were able to sit under a tree dedicated to the memory of Fielding faculty member Will McWhinney. Pictured above, from left to right: Fielding faculty member Connie Corley, alumna Martha Sherman, students Milly Mocodean, Susan Hoskinson, [...]

More than 20 Fielding faculty, students, and alumni from the School of Leadership Studies recently journeyed from Summer Session in Tucson to visit Biosphere 2, a science research facility in Oracle, Arizona.   More than three acres in size, the enclosed area houses five ecological systems or biomes, from a mini rainforest to a mini desert — with a mini-ocean in between. Constructed nearly 30 years ago at a cost of $200 million by a Texas oilman, Biosphere 2 was meant to be the second fully self-sufficient living system after Earth (Biosphere 1) and was inspired by the Apollo Space Program [...]

Patrice Rosenthal, PhD, a faculty member in Fielding’s Human and Organizational Development (HOD) program, takes over today as HOD Program Director in the School of Leadership Studies. She takes over for outgoing director Dorothy Agger-Gupta, PhD, who is returning to a core faculty position after four years of committed work in the role. Dr. Rosenthal joined Fielding six years ago as research faculty and quickly became known for her passion for research design. “I love to have conversations about research. It’s a great puzzle!” she says. “Research is just fun — in a nerdy kind of way.” She takes on her [...]

School of Leadership Studies faculty member Dr. Placida Gallegos has been named chair of Fielding's first Diversity & Inclusion Council, effective immediately. “In this critical role, Placida will bring her considerable experience to assist all of us in the organization to take responsibility for and leadership in developing a truly inclusive culture,” said President Katrina Rogers. “This is a strategic issue for us as our graduates are navigating in an increasingly diverse context that requires being able to move across differences.” As chair, Dr. Gallegos will lead the council in ensuring that the Fielding culture is inclusive, the curriculum topics reflect diversity, the faculty is competent [...]