MA in Health Arts and Sciences

The low-residency Masters in Health Arts and Sciences Program: Bridging Nature, Culture, and Healing is a 48-credit graduate program, with a 36-credit program available to professional nurses. The program helps students gain new tools to actively restore wholeness and health to people and communities. Students build their self-directed curriculum through a synthesis of integrative health topics, holistic sciences, multi-cultural and social justice perspectives, and an active engagement with self-care and awareness practices. Students in the MA in Health Arts and Sciences Program challenge themselves to reflect deeply, create meaningful relationships, and develop the resources that are needed to foster healing through personal transformation and radical social change.

Throughout the process, students are encouraged to bring their own rich experiences, skills, and knowledge to their studies and to draw on multiple dimensions for learning—from intuition to the sciences, from reflective solitude to dynamic community dialogue, and from reading to direct experience. Graduates of the program work in their communities as health educators, counselors, consultants, coaches, writers and researchers, organizers and activists, holistic practitioners and guides, holistic nurses, teachers, movement and expressive arts facilitators, and entrepreneurs.

Students begin each semester with an eight-day intensive residency on the Goddard campus in central Vermont. Each residency functions as a supportive and expansive face-to-face social environment whose purpose is to define and support the work of the semester. Students work with their faculty advisor, network with fellow learners, attend workshops that address degree requirements, develop academic skills, and explore a range of health arts and sciences issues and practices.

Keynote presentations offered during residencies investigate the cultural and/or ecological contexts of healing. Topics have included “Embracing an Ethic of Care,” “Healing as if the Earth Mattered,” and “Healing with the Natural and Sacred World.” The residency also provides a place to share hidden aspirations within a positive learning climate where “we can think the world together.”

Experiential learning in the program integrates rigorous scholarship with direct action and rich contemplation. Students carry out their self-designed learning plans within their communities and in consultation with their faculty advisors throughout the semester. Studies might include teaching classes, developing health curricula, or engaging in outreach efforts in holistic centers, public schools, youth programs, hospitals, and other natural world environments. Some students develop Web sites, publish books or articles, or create organizations. At the culmination of their course of study, students synthesize their work in a final project that may take the form of a community outreach project or encompass traditional scholarship, depending on the interests of the student.

Faculty advisors in the MA in Health Arts and Sciences Program work with students one-on-one and in small groups to advise and facilitate each unique study process. Students work closely with their advisor and other faculty members during each eight-day residency and exchange detailed written packets with their advisor during the 15-week semester that follows. Offering progressive real world experience, dedicated support, and rich academic backgrounds, faculty members guide students to broaden and deepen their knowledge through regenerative discourse and to discover greater skills and self-expression through experiential learning and action.

The program’s faculty members are active in their fields, working as scholars, community health educators, international and public health workers, consultants, holistic practitioners and therapists, nurses, activists, organizers, artists, psychologists, and anthropologists. They provide an inspired learning environment in which students cultivate their vision and leadership abilities to transform their own lives while bringing their health arts work into their community.

“It is a joy to work at Goddard as a faculty member and witness the love, commitment, attention, and expertise devoted to nurturing students in their explorations built upon their questions. The students too bring with them remarkable skills, experience, curiosity, and creativity. The atmosphere at a residency vibrates with humor, play, companionship, critical thinking, searching, and concern for the world. There is a lively enthusiasm for each student as an individual, a scholar, and an actor in the process of transformation of self and the world. It is a community animated by shared passion and respect, a community of reflection and support toward students’ ideas, discoveries, and professional development. It is a community that earnestly strives to think, feel, and act out of the values it holds dear. As an eco-psychologist I am ever in search of models for healthier ways of living and perceiving that will help us to restore our deep connectedness with the rich, complex, living universe, which is the source of our vitality. I see such a model, as an ongoing co-creative process, at Goddard. I see it in the dynamic appreciation of difference, with the rich panoply of possibility that provides, and in the recognition that, while each is unique, we are all one. And I see it in the consciousness people carry to understanding conflict, with a determination to develop responses together--in our words, our works, our relationships, and our internal dialogue--that will help us to contribute to individual, social, and global health and evolution."  --- Health Arts and Sciences Faculty Member Susan Pearson

“Some adult learning theorists say that all learning is change. But, not all change is transformative. Those of us who have considerable experience in settings committed to meaningful, emancipatory education recognize that learning at Goddard is transformative. One of the primary reasons for this is the unusual nature of the mentoring relationships established between learners and advisors. These connections allow for deep immersion in specific areas of inquiry­--with reliable, supple and sturdy support.~ Witnessing a learner’s vision taking shape is such a deeply humane and hopeful venture that this kind of experience can be life changing for both parties. We, as faculty, guide our communities of learners, individually and together, to experiences of “moral relatedness”­--a “mutual and respectful dialogue” that honors lived experience, personally meaningful inquiries­--that are grounded in critical reflection and connected with the larger world. We invoke Dewey, Friere, Lindeman, Knowles, hooks, Lorde, Rich, Perez, Aragon--any number of influences­--for this kind of learning. And the result makes for internal and external events of such profound dynamism, creativity, compassion, rigor, and vitality­ that our graduates, our faculty, our staff, our administration and our trustees develop a loyalty that is evident to all who encounter us. And those who have such experiences begin to envision other places and situations that could benefit from a “moral relatedness” that can sustain social growth and global changes that are also just and humane.~ This is mentorship of the highest order; learners invite us into some of the richest work of their lives and we are all changed in profound and deeply meaningful ways." --- Health Arts and Sciences Faculty Member S.B. Sowbel