Distance Learning
STUDY AT WISR FOR PERSONS LIVING OUTSIDE THE AREA
The majority of WISR’s students live in the San Francisco Bay Area. However, WISR also offers degree programs to students who live outside the area under special arrangements tailored to their specific learning needs and capabilities. Over the years, we have found that most students admitted from outside the Bay Area do exceedingly well in our programs.
Students living throughout the US, and even in other countries around the world, are able to pursue academic degrees at WISR through regular phone conferences with faculty, exchange of drafts through mail and e-mail, and occasional visits to WISR to participate in seminars and to meet with faculty and other students. In addition, effective August 2011, required seminars for our MA leading to the State of California’s MFT and LPCC licenses will be available by telephone conference call, as well as our core seminars in action-research and many of our optional interdisciplinary seminars. When helpful, these seminars are supplemented by web-based online sharing of documents and notes in real-time. Students who live too far from our Berkeley site to travel here may call into a phone conference line that will be connected with a speaker phone in our seminar room. Students and faculty on site at WISR and those students on their phone line, off site, will be able to interact and discuss issues, ideas and questions with one another. At a future date, some sharing by video conference may be also available from time to time. Students living outside the area are expected to attend some seminars on site at least once per year per year, unless there are substantial extenuating circumstances, in order to further develop their collegial relationships with faculty and fellow students.
Here are examples of some alumni and current students who have studied, or are studying, from great distances from the Bay Area . . .
• A recent WISR PhD alumnus is a tenured professor of law in Boston. As an Asian-American, he serves on community task forces which are fostering community dialogue to further multi-culturality in the greater Boston area. His PhD studies focused on his specialization in labor law and workplace bullying, as well as his special interest in the role of intellectuals in promoting progressive social change.
• A current PhD student is a Nigerian who is using his PhD studies at WISR to further social policy research aimed at redistributing the wealth from Nigerian oil resources to benefit impoverished communities there.
• Another current PhD student is originally from Cameroon, and now living in Bangladesh and working as Chair of the Department of Vocational and Technical Education at the Islamic University of Technology (IUT). His studies at WISR are focused on evaluating and improving the technical education skills and knowledge of IUT’s students who will be returning to one of the over 50 countries represented among IUT’s student body.
• A faculty member at the University of California, San Diego, who specialized in multi-cultural education, teaching reading and writing to young children, and the creation of support systems for minority teachers.
• A faculty member at Evergreen State College in Tacoma, Washington, who was doing interdisciplinary team teaching and innovative education in writing and study skills for adults re-entering college after years away from formal education.
• The historian for the Omaha tribe, who while living in Nebraska, successfully obtained his MA at WISR with his studies focusing on cultural preservation projects growing out of his work with his tribe and with anthropologists, educators, public officials and the general public. Subsequently, he and a colleague of his in a neighboring community, collaborated and completed their PhDs at WISR, while working on a number of projects including their dissertation which was an in-depth history of the Omaha people from an Omaha perspective.
• A professor of “English as a Foreign Language” in Japan who was very involved in a number of facets of cross-cultural education. His PhD studies at WISR furthered his professional writing, including a paper on “Ethnographies of Learning” presented at the 1997 TESOL Conference in Orlando, Florida. His dissertation was concerned with researching and articulating a critical approach to learning and teaching culture, based on the study of “English as a Foreign Language” classrooms in Japan.
• Several former and current PhD students are licensed therapists living in such locales as Colorado, Hawaii, Germany and Seattle, who have pursued advanced work in the treatment of a wide variety of trauma survivors, and in the training of therapists and other professionals who work with people recovering from various forms of trauma. These therapists have often studied the use of somatic and movement approaches to therapy in conjunction with verbal approaches. Some have been concerned with neurological and physiological, as well as spiritual, aspects of healing.
• A current MA student at WISR is an accountant living in Baltimore who is studying African culture and spirituality for insights that can be used by African Americans.