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Chair Christine Brooks spotlights CIIS’ fully online M.A. in Expressive Arts Coaching and Community Building—a transformative program that blends creativity, connection, and empowerment.
In a time when many seek deeper connection, creative purpose, and meaningful community, the Expressive Arts Coaching and Community Building team is helping to create a new pathway that blends art, coaching, and social transformation. With over 20 years of experience as a professor and scholar—and a rich professional background in the arts, publishing, and clinical psychology—Dr. Christine Brooks chairs the groundbreaking online Master of Arts in Expressive Arts Coaching and Community Building, the first program of its kind in the United States. In this conversation, she explores how the arts unlock nonverbal pathways to growth, why coaching differs fundamentally from therapy, and how the innovative program prepares graduates to launch their own practices while contributing to a growing movement that views creativity as essential to individual healing and collective change.
The arts are a direct pathway to transformation. Through expressive arts coaching, we help people remember who they are—and who they are becoming.
Dr. Christine Brooks, Chair and Professor, Expressive Arts Coaching and Community Building
For those called to creative service, meaningful connection, and collective change, this movement begins now.
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This is a groundbreaking master’s degree tailored for adults balancing work and life commitments who are seeking advanced training in coaching and community engagement through the expressive arts. While it’s primarily asynchronous, the program is highly interactive and experiential. Students participate in group work, dyads, and expressive arts practices that integrate video, sound, and creative media, going beyond typical online learning to include hands-on artistic engagement.
The program will include twice-yearly, four-day virtual intensives – once in the first spring semester and again in the fall. The first two days function as a community retreat with keynote speakers, workshops, and panels on coaching and community building. The final two days provide a deep dive into modalities such as drama therapy, dance/movement therapy, visual arts, or digital media—tools students will integrate into their coaching practice.
In motivational interviewing, there’s a powerful idea: people change for their own meaningful reasons. However, sometimes they aren’t fully aware of what those reasons truly are because their own inner processes may be blocking that understanding. By cultivating coaching skills that encourage self-reflection and awareness, we help individuals and groups connect with their authentic motivations for change and transformation.
The expressive arts open up new, expansive ways for people to explore their experiences – beyond just cognitive thinking – helping them better understand themselves, their communities, and their relationships. This creative exploration fosters greater clarity around personal and communal priorities, deepens self-awareness and enhances emotional and social intelligence. All of these support individuals in moving forward with more confidence and a clearer sense of what transformation means for them.
One of the most exciting features of the EXCC program is its yearlong practicum. Unlike many certificate programs, our master’s offers an extended, supported space for students to develop and refine their coaching practice as they prepare to launch their offerings fully into the world. During the final two semesters, students work directly with clients in their communities under faculty supervision. This includes a dedicated course where students engage in arts-based reflective practices, share experiences and receive real-time support and feedback.
This practicum environment is a collaborative space where students explore how to integrate the arts into coaching with individuals, groups and communities. Peer and faculty support helps them navigate challenges, refine skills, and deepen their professional identity. We are proud to offer this unique and vital component to our students’ learning journey.
Additionally, the program emphasizes professional development from the start. By the end of the program, students will have developed a foundational business plan that clearly articulates their coaching services. They will also create promotional materials – such as websites or videos – that effectively communicate their offerings to potential clients.
This professional focus is woven throughout the curriculum, culminating in a dedicated Skills Lab during the second semester. There, students brainstorm, envision, and shape the future practice they want to build—setting a strong foundation before entering the practicum in semesters three and four. We see this as a truly special opportunity: a chance for students to both look inward and clarify their vision for their work, while receiving invaluable feedback from peers and faculty. This helps them identify their strengths, recognize areas for growth, and develop the practical skills needed to thrive as coaches and community builders in their chosen fields.
A key feature is that you design and launch your own coaching practice as your career after graduation. Professional coaching organizations have recently called for advanced degrees, and we answered with a program that integrates the arts – because the arts are a powerful pathway to growth and transformation. This program encourages taking that creative power into your community and workplace, sharing these gifts through coaching and facilitation practices.
Rooted in a rich tradition of expressive arts in psychotherapy and healing, the Expressive Arts Coaching and Community Building program adopts an intermodal approach – exploring multiple art forms rather than focusing on one. Even if you have a preferred art, you’ll explore new modalities. Our philosophy, inspired by the dancer Anna Halprin, includes “low skill, high sensitivity,” which emphasizes that the focus is on the experience, not producing perfect art.
We also center growth through relationships, grounding the program in relational cultural and liberation theories that recognize our interconnectedness and cultural context. Throughout, students engage in poetry, visual art, movement, storytelling, drama, and digital media – all taught with empathy, cultural awareness, and curiosity.
My professional background is in the arts as well as clinical psychology, and I later transitioned into the world of coaching. Naturally, people often ask me: What’s the difference between therapy and coaching? The truth is, while they share some similarities, they are distinct practices — and understanding that difference is essential. It’s something we emphasize deeply in EXCC.
Therapy is a healing profession. It often involves looking back – exploring past experiences and emotional wounds in order to do reparative work. The focus is on healing, processing and gaining the support needed to move forward. Therapy typically addresses pain, trauma, or disruptions that are affecting someone’s present life.
Coaching, on the other hand, operates through a different set of lenses. It’s more present- and future-oriented. People come to coaching when they’re on the edge of something new – they might feel stuck or sense that change is needed, but they’re not sure how to move forward. Coaching asks: Where are you now? What’s working? What’s not? It’s solution-focused, goal-driven, and rooted in the belief that people are resourceful and capable of growth.
In coaching, we work from a context that helps individuals, groups or organizations get clear about their strengths, name the changes they want to make, and move forward in a transformative way. While we may explore the past, it’s not for the exclusive sake of healing per se – it’s to uncover the stories and beliefs that might be holding us back. Our past shapes us, but in coaching, we use it as insight to inform intentional change. So coaching doesn't ignore what came before – it integrates it, thoughtfully and strategically, in service of moving toward what’s next.
The curriculum develops core skills for coaching, facilitation, community organizing and art activism. You’ll build deep listening, reflective and counseling skills essential for working with individuals and groups. Simultaneously, you’ll learn expressive arts methods that foster transformative change, such as poetry therapy or bilateral drawing. These tools help clients recognize and strategize changing real-world barriers to growth as well as moving beyond limiting beliefs and mental noise to connect with what truly matters in their growth.
One of the things I value most about California Institute of Integral Studies is its deep commitment to the whole person — mind, body, spirit and community. The EXCC program was founded on those same core principles. We believe that learning is not a one-way process; it’s a shared journey. As a program and as a community, we see ourselves as co-learners.
CIIS fosters this kind of education by recognizing that learning is developmental – it unfolds over time, layer by layer. The EXCC program is designed as a scaffolded experience that embraces a growth mindset. We don't expect learners to have all the answers on day one. Instead, we move forward together, learning, reflecting and growing as a collective.
We also recognize that our students bring a wealth of knowledge, lived experience and professional insight. As adult learners, they are not starting from scratch — they are building on rich personal and professional foundations. That’s why we approach professional training in EXCC from a developmental lens, honoring both individual growth and collective wisdom.
The strong sense of community at CIIS is something we hold as central in the program. It’s not just about what we learn — it’s about how we learn, and with whom. That relational, co-creative aspect of the learning experience is part of what makes this program so meaningful.
We view our faculty as an ensemble — a highly collaborative group of professionals who bring diverse strengths and shared purpose to the work. Each of us has come to this program with deep training in our chosen expressive arts modalities, along with professional experience in coaching, facilitation and community building. Many of us maintain private practices or work in community-based settings, using the arts to support individuals and groups through processes of transformation and change.
This collaborative spirit isn’t just something we teach — it’s how we operate. We support one another in faculty meetings, co-develop projects, initiate research together and often guest-teach in each other’s classes. We regularly contribute materials and perspectives across the curriculum so that students are not learning from isolated instructors, but from a collective of practitioners committed to co-creating a rich, interdisciplinary learning experience.
We don’t see ourselves as siloed educators. We see ourselves as a living, evolving community of professionals dedicated to growing and shaping the expressive arts coaching field — together.
Over the past several decades, the coaching profession has become increasingly formalized, with a wide range of offerings now available — from certificate and online training programs to master’s degrees from various institutions. Among these, the EXCC program stands out as a truly unique offering for several important reasons.
First, the arts-based foundation of EXCC makes it unlike any other program in the United States. This is the only coaching master's program in the country grounded in expressive arts — a highly experiential, creatively driven approach to coaching and facilitation. This integration of the arts into the coaching process not only enriches personal and professional growth but also supports deeper transformation for those you will serve.
Second, while certificate programs can offer valuable training — often over a few weeks or months — they typically provide a limited credential. In contrast, a master’s degree allows for a much deeper and more comprehensive immersion into the field. In EXCC, you’ll engage in sustained practice, receive real-time feedback, and refine your coaching approach within a supportive, developmental learning environment.
Our program follows what we call the scholar-artist-practitioner model. This means you won’t just be learning coaching techniques — you’ll also be cultivating your own creative practice, developing the skills to apply expressive arts in client work, and building your capacity as a reflective scholar. You’ll learn how to conduct research, contribute to the knowledge base of the profession and create original work — whether through program development, assessment or field-based inquiry.
A master’s degree program like EXCC is ideal for those who feel called to engage at a deeper level — not just as practitioners, but as contributors to the evolution of the field. Whether you’re launching a new practice or refining an existing one, EXCC offers a rigorous, imaginative and community-centered path toward becoming an artist, scholar and practitioner of transformative coaching.
A master's degree in expressive arts coaching and community building can be applied in many different settings. For example, an educator who wants to bring the arts more fully into the classroom or into a school district would have an amazing ability to transfer these skills right after graduation. Human resources professionals find that these skills can be wonderful support systems when they are working with change management within organizations. Clergy might be bringing this into a spiritual community, spiritual directors as well.
Some people in our program are going to be very interested in developing a private practice model when they leave the program. That requires an entrepreneurial spirit that we will support and resource to the best of everyone's ability to get that business plan together and to help them launch with success once they graduate.
This master’s degree balances experiential learning with academic rigor. Students engage in scholarship, research, and a capstone, embodying the “scholar-artist-practitioner” ideal to contribute thoughtfully through practice and inquiry.
Assignments combine academic content with creative responses — using poetry, movement, drawing and more. Dyads and small-group projects, which require coordination between and virtual real-time meetings among students, are one example of the ways we foster relational learning even asynchronously, encouraging embodied reflection and collaboration.
In my coaching practice, I focus extensively on career counseling and executive coaching, working with individuals who are often standing at the threshold of significant change. A fact many don’t realize is that the average person in the United States follows about six distinct career paths over their lifetime — myself included. Before entering academia, where I’ve spent the last 20 years as a professor, program chair and scholar, I had a varied career journey in the arts, publishing, book editing, and even the film industry. This diverse professional experience enriches my academic work and informs my coaching.
I am deeply interested in the intersection of scholarship and practice — that crucial nexus where theory meets real-world application. When mentoring emerging practitioners – whether psychotherapists, coaches or others eager to support people through change – I ask: How does scholarship shape what you do in the moment, in real time? This question guides much of my work and research.
I’m particularly passionate about integrating the Enneagram as a developmental tool in coaching. Alongside this, I emphasize emotional intelligence, recognizing it as a foundational element for success in relationships, professional life and learning. Our program incorporates extensive work on emotional and social intelligence to support students’ growth.
My academic background is in transpersonal psychology, which shapes my holistic approach. I believe in engaging the whole person — cognitively, emotionally, spiritually and culturally. I invite people to explore their life stories from multiple perspectives, including family and cultural contexts.
At the core, I take a narrative approach. Storytelling is fundamental to human experience. Much of my work involves narrative practices — autoethnography, self-narrative and creative processes that help individuals tell the story of who they have been, who they are now, and who they envision becoming. This ongoing story-shaping is central to personal growth and transformation.
The inaugural cohort begins January 2026, with applications opening August 2025. Scholarships will be available. EXCC aims to build a hub of student-led scholarship, creative lab, and coaching research to advance the field.
Co-creating brighter futures through the power of expressive arts and the strength of community
At Human + Tech Week in San Francisco, Bruce Alderman of the Blue Sky Leaders program revealed how human wisdom and presence redefine leadership in the AI era.
A look inside a Blue Sky Leaders program weekend workshop, led by Greg Thomas of the Jazz Leadership Project.
Professor Emerita Shoshana Simons, who retired from Expressive Arts Therapy this year, delivered the address to graduating students at CIIS’ 57th Commencement.
