Students and Alumni

The Ph.D. in Transformative Studies program at CIIS taught me invaluable skills, such as cultivating community; taking the time to develop the right questions and to reflect before acting; identifying how systems behave and how they transform, and it heightened my awareness about my personal responsibility in ensuring that systems are inclusive and informed by a social justice foundation. More importantly, CIIS and my professors supported a deep exploration of my life's passion: researching the horse-human relationship from a transdisciplinary perspective and gaining invaluable insights that improved my ability to take my equine-assisted work to a new level.

As an Education Director at Yavapai Prescott Indian Tribe, my role is to provide bridge programs for tribal children K-12: After School, Tutoring, Education Scholarships, and College & Career Counseling.

Intelligent Horses: A Cybersemiotic Perspective

This dissertation is a theoretical study of horse-human relationship, addressing the topics of communication, learning and cognition in the context of the cybersemiotic model developed by philosopher of science Søren Brier. This study found significant gaps in the literature with respect to how horses and humans communicate and learn together, and is an attempt to develop an integral conceptual model grounded in communication and learning theory.