Integral Education: The CIIS Blog

Courses Only Taught at CIIS: Part II

By ZACK ROGOW, senior editor at CIIS. His writings include a recent book of poems, "My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers," from Kattywompus Press. 

Read Courses Only Taught at CIIS: Part I

California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) has a unique curriculum, partly because of its distinctive academic programs, including Asian and Comparative Studies, Women’s Spirituality, Somatic Psychology, and many others.  The one-of-a-kind courses also reflect the interests of the CIIS faculty, who have deep expertise in research areas that most other universities don’t even touch on.

In academic year 2011–12, CIIS is featuring a number of courses that you can only find at the Institute. Professor Renée Emunah is teaching a class that doesn’t seem that unusual from its title—Integrative Seminar—but the content is completely singular. The class is offered by the Drama Therapy program at CIIS, one of only two accredited and approved programs in this field in the entire U.S. Professor Emunah’s class focuses on a method in drama therapy that she herself pioneered: the self-revelatory performance. Students have the option of creating and performing a 35- to 40-minute self-revelatory performance as their capstone project. The pieces are performed in a theatre for an audience composed of students and graduates of the program, as well as invited guests. The CIIS community also receives an invite.

Women’s Spirituality Thrives at CIIS

By ZACK ROGOW, senior editor at CIIS. His writings include a recent book of poems, "My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers," from Kattywompus Press. 

CIIS offers the only PhD program in the world in Women’s Spirituality. The program was established in 1992 and also features an MA degree. Both options include the possibility of taking half of the courses online, and both culminate in degrees in Philosophy and Religion, with a concentration in Women’s Spirituality. Current faculty in Women’s Spirituality include many of the founders and leading thinkers in the field: Carol P. Christ, Susan Griffin, Mara Lynn Keller, Charlene Spretnak, Starhawk, and Luisah Teish. Courses are organized in three areas: Women and World Religions; Feminist and Ecofeminist Philosophy and Activism; and Women’s Mysteries, Sacred Arts, and Healing.

Program Chair Arisika Razak describes some of the unique aspects of the Women’s Spirituality program at CIIS: “We have the ability not only to teach about the goddess and other sacred ancestors and female divinities but to take students to sites and create environments on campus where students can immerse themselves in their traditions.” Recent trips have included a visit to Ggantija on the island of Gozo in Malta, a temple in the shape of a woman’s body that is one of the  most ancient structures in Europe, dating back more than 5,500 years. “We actually got to touch The Sleeping Lady of Malta, a statue linked to woman-centered spirituality in the Neolithic Era, when we were in the Malta Museum,” Razak recalls. Other study tours have visited sites of significance to women’s spirituality in Turkey, Italy, Hawaii, and Greece.

The arts are an important component of the Women’s Spirituality program. “We are a rigorous academic program,” says Razak, “and we also have a strong artistic emphasis. We honor singing, dancing, movement, and the body.” A class taught by the Bay Area musician and composer Jennifer Berezan, for instance, culminates in a ritual concert that the students co-create, and in which they perform. Berezan invites a diverse array of world-class musicians and drummers to participate in this class.

Courses Only Taught at CIIS: Part I

By ZACK ROGOW, senior editor at CIIS. His writings include a recent book of poems, "My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers," from Kattywompus Press. 

Read Courses Only Taught at CIIS: Part II

CIIS has a unique curriculum, partly because of its distinctive academic programs, including Asian and Comparative Studies, Women’s Spirituality, Somatic Psychology, and many others. The singular course offerings also reflect the interests of the CIIS faculty, who have deep expertise in research areas that most other universities don’t even touch on.

In summer and fall 2011, CIIS has featured a number of courses that you can only find at the Institute. They include Professor Don Hanlon Johnson’s class on The Body Experienced, Conceptualized, and Verbalized, part of the curriculum of the Somatic Psychology program. Johnson is a cofounder of somatic psychology, which emphasizes the study of the body, somatic experience, and the embodied self. According to Johnson, “This course represents the core of the somatics field. That core consists of a deep transformation of self-experience in which cultural distinctions among body, mind, and spirit are dissolved in awareness of breath, joints, movement, touching. In that transformation, somatics is more akin to older spiritual practices than to alternative medical and psychotherapeutic practices.”

Johnson’s course syllabus explains this further: “Religious, philosophical, medical and scientific languages shape both our bodies and our experiences. The range of our experiences—ordinary body usage, accidents, illnesses, sexual encounters, etc.—generate and support certain ideas of the body and call others into question.…This course will be an introduction to methods for wending one’s way through the labyrinthine complexities of these relationships among experiences, concepts, and language. It is a basic introduction to the methodological path of embodiment and to ways of nurturing the body’s authentic voice, allowing its ancient intelligences to speak forth their wisdom.”