Joanne Gozawa

Joanne Gozawa received her Ph.D. in Integral Studies with a concentration in Learning and Change in Human Systems from CIIS in 2000. Prior to making teaching and academics her career, she was an organizational consultant focused on conflict and transformation.

Joanne’s contribution to teaching and learning includes her transdisciplinary approach to inquiry. She asks about the dynamic synergy of the unconscious and the cultural and transpersonal dimensions of being that constitute the affective qualities of learning environments, including online ones. Joanne imagines these environments as subjects who are indifferent or who are caring about whether all who inhabit them actually learn. Learning environments that care, compel a deep listening attitude as a normative way to be. Learners take creative risks, engage diverse others, critically question personal beliefs and assumptions and are less discomforted by uncertainty when engaged in environments that care.

It is with sensitivity to the affective attributes of learning environments that Joanne is able to teach potentially provocative courses including “”Diversity in Action” and “Goodness, Evil, Politics, and Change.”

Joanne’s overarching research question is, Why are both individual and systems unable to “reach across the aisle” to engage mutually in the throes of triggered emotions and conflict? She theorizes that adversaries’ mutual vulnerability to existential dread is a contributing factor. Some of the ideas brought to bear on her inquiry are from the fields of consciousness studies, transformative learning, contemplative pedagogy, cultural epistemologies, religion and evolution, Jungian psychology, moral psychology, myth and story, and Shin Buddhist thought. In addition she asks, How does computer mediated communication help or hinder provocation in learning? For this question she puts the aforementioned discourses in conversation with the field of online learning.

Publications and Presentations, Recent and In Press:

Presence and Deep Learning and Online Learning Research

Contemplative Pedagogy and Compassionate Presence

Contemplative Pedagogy & Diversity: Learning Environments—Safe or Caring?

Epistemological Presence and the Clash of Cosmic Heroes—A reading about the “monstrous” in spaces of learning

The Cultural Complex and the Ecology of Transformative Learning Venues

Aggressive and Violent Fantasies in Online Contexts