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Fielding Graduate University

Course Information:

ODL-501 Organizational Behavior & Leadership
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 Organizational leadership requires a deep and nuanced understanding of how individuals behave in organizational settings. Effective leaders create environments that are consistent with the fundamentals of human behavior in organizations. This course examines the nature of individual and group behavior in work environments and how it affects organizational performance. Special emphasis is placed on psychological principles, how and why people act as they do, and the use of (leadership) theories as conceptual tools for analyzing and solving organizational problems.
ODL-502 Organizational Culture
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 It is essential to understand the relationship between organizational culture and behavior. This course examines the development, nature, classifications, and characteristics of organizational culture. Emphasis is placed on the investigation of behaviors and their relationship to organizational culture. The interaction of the individual, groups, the organization and environment are explored. Special emphasis is placed on conceptualizations of culture, theoretical perspectives linking culture to behavior, how culture affects psychological processes and organizational behaviors, including motivation, cognition, social networking, leadership, and teams.
ODL-503 Organizational Change
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Graduate		 Organizational culture influences the likelihood of success or failure for change strategies and initiatives. This course examines the factors that drive organizational change, focusing on change in organizational culture, structure, and communication. Special emphasis is placed on change resistance, dimensions of change, and approaches to the change management process. Students will analyze, evaluate, and apply change models to real-life organizational change and development initiatives.
ODL-504 Organizational Design
Credit-Bearinng
Graduate		 Organizational analysis, planning, implementation, and evaluation of social and technical systems are essential. This course examines the design, redesign, and implementation of effective organizations. There will be a focus on the external environment, technology, structure (and their interrelationship), organizational culture, and change management. Special emphasis is placed on the structural changes necessary to best ensure constructive organizational behaviors, quality of work life, productivity and achievement of overall organizational goals.
ODL-505 Organizational Consulting
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Graduate		 Developing and maintaining effective consultative approaches, consulting practices, and consultative engagements are essential program outcomes. This course examines consulting models, frameworks and fundamental steps in the consulting process from both a consultant and client perspective. Students will learn how to build their identity, develop a consulting practice, and position themselves as trusted advisors. Special emphasis is placed on examining consulting models for high impact outcomes, opportunities and challenges facing internal and external consultants, role of ethics, and professionalism.
ODL-506 OD&L Capstone Project
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Graduate		 Students will complete a multifaceted organizational intervention project that serves as a culminating academic, intellectual, and practical experience. The project will integrate and build on relevant models and practices across organizational behavior, culture, change, design, and consulting. The project will evince a range of outcomes and their implications, including a critical assessment of intended and potential unintended outcomes. The project proposal, implementation, and presentation will be rigorous in terms of theory, inquiry, reflection and action.
HOD-699 Foundations of Doctoral Study
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Graduate		 Foundations of Doctoral Study is required for all students entering Fielding’s doctoral programs in Human Development and in Organizational Development & Change. It consists of a New Student Orientation with both in-person and online components. Students are introduced to: Fielding’s doctoral faculty; the adult learning model; the degree’s curriculum, competencies, and learning outcomes; student support services; and in-person and online options for completing degree requirements. Each student develops a unique Learning Plan that is customized to meet the student’s scholar-practitioner interests and goals.
HOD-800 Doctoral Competencies and Scholarly Inquiry
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Graduate		 This seminar is designed to be the on-ramp to doctoral studies and the first of a series of courses exploring scholarly research. Students are introduced to the community of scholar-practitioners, understood as a profession defined by shared norms and values and specific expectations about what scholars should know and know how to do. The course builds awareness and capacity about the competencies needed to execute scholarly research.
HOD-803OD Practicum in Organization & Systems Change
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Graduate		 Students explore the relevance of scholarly concepts, theories and research to professional and personal problem solving. This course helps students become more insightful practitioners. Students demonstrate the essential skills of a scholar/practitioner by applying theory and scholarship to a significant project in their organization, community, or other human system. Students engage regularly with the faculty assessor to plan and implement the project and to reflect on project steps, intended and unintended outcomes of the project, their role in the project, and their personal and professional effectiveness. The practicum is intended to engage students in praxis, a cyclical process of critical reflection and action through which one engages in actions to create change, reflects on those actions, and in response may revise one’s conceptions and theories of change and plan new actions.
HOD-805 Foundations of Organization Studies
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Graduate		 In this course students acquire an overall familiarity with the multi-disciplinary aspects and multi-level fields of inquiry within organization studies. Students develop an appreciative understanding of the approaches to organizing from an historical perspective, critiquing the multiple traditions and paradigms in the field. Topics include decision-making and the limits of rationality, structural contingency theory and the determinants of organizational structures, institutional theory, sense making, organization identity, power, politics, organizational culture, and theories of organization environment and society.
HOD-806 Systems Approaches to Leadership, Organizations, and Society
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Graduate		 Cultivates systemic understanding as a holistic way of seeing and acting that stands in contrast with reductionist ways of knowing, focusing on interdependencies and interconnections. Develops systems concepts through investigation of patterns across human systems, human-environmental systems, and human-machine systems. Encourages a systemic practice addressing balancing stability/identity and change/transformation. Explores systemic leadership and systemic ethics in social systems ranging from organizational/community systems to ecological/world systems.
HOD-807 Social & Ecological Justice
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Graduate		 This foundational course in social and ecological justice is designed to enable students to develop the competencies they need to recognize and integrate social and ecological justice - at the interpersonal, organizational, societal and global levels - into their practice and scholarship. Students will develop understandings of how social, economic, and ecological justice is defined and manifested in various societies. Students analyze these concepts and consider actions that promote more just societies. In addition to its focus on cognitive and intellectual understanding, this course emphasizes effective use of self to prepare students to take meaningful action in a wide range of interpersonal, organizational, and societal contexts. Importantly, we will pay close attention to power and systemic sources of inequality throughout the semester.
HOD-822 Organization Development and Change
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Graduate		 Students explore theory and practice relating to change in social systems, including groups, organizations and communities. The focus is on planned, facilitated change to strengthen adaptation, quality of working life, and effectiveness within (and of) organizations. A range of organization development approaches will be studied, along with their attendant assumptions, values, processes, practices, and evaluation. Though planned change will be primary focus, the course will also explore unplanned, emergent, and continuous change in organizations.
Add to My Favorites (opens a new window) Share this Page Print (opens a new window) HOD-810 Portfolio Review
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 The Portfolio Review is designed to support student learning. Students to self-assess their progress in the program with a Portfolio Review Essay and a plan for advanced studies and a brief description of a preliminary dissertation concept. The student’s faculty mentor and a second faculty reader review the students’ work in both a formative and summative way, providing specific critique and feedback, and assess the students’ doctoral competencies and progress.
HOD-881 Qualitative Research Methods
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Graduate		 Students develop and demonstrate an understanding of the strategies for qualitative inquiry, including case study, ethnography, phenomenology, narrative, grounded theory, and critical genres, among others. Students study methodological topics, including the researcher’s stance, sampling, data collection, coding, thematic analysis, and procedures for assessing the trustworthiness of qualitative data, interpretation, and reporting. Students explore the range of qualitative approaches in application to their research interest, development of a research question, and creation of a qualitative, action research, or mixed methods research proposal.
HOD-882 Quantitative Research Methods
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Graduate		 Students are introduced to the range of quantitative inquiry methods, including survey, descriptive, quasi-experimental, correlational, and causal-comparative research. Students study the methodological topics, including structured data collection, sampling, design, basic data analysis strategies, procedures for assessing reliability and validity of quantitative studies, interpretation, and reporting. Students explore the range of quantitative approaches in application to their research interest, development of the research question, and creation of a quantitative proposal.
HOD-891 ODC Comprehensive Assessment
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Graduate		 This course demonstrates a student’s readiness to begin the dissertation and includes a critical analysis of academic literature in one or more Organizational Development & Change areas and/or in the area of a student’s concentration. Students demonstrate their ability to read, comprehend, summarize, and critique scholarly work. Students develop a comprehensive assessment plan/registration form that is reviewed and approved by the faculty mentor. The student submits the plan and a copy of the mentor’s approval to administration. The Comprehensive Assessment includes scholarly references, uses APA V.7 format, and is between 20 (minimum) and 25 (maximum) pages in length (excluding the reference list). Two faculty readers review the comprehensive essay with expertise in the area of the student’s essay. It must be completed and accepted before the student’s dissertation proposal approval can be posted.
HOD-883AO Advanced Research Methodologies: Appreciative Organizations
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Graduate		 Students engage in advanced studies and applied research projects, designed to develop skills in specific research methodologies and approaches. All the advanced research modules numbered 883XX are designed to enable students to learn a particular research method in depth. Most approaches to understanding organizations are embedded in a “problem solving” paradigm. This deficiency model of organizations calls for the development of techniques and tools to accurately identify and diagnose problems. In contrast to this clinical focus, appreciative inquiry focuses on what works in an organization. By exploring events when people are at their best, appreciative inquiry identifies the core values and finds ways to build on them to enhance organizational sustainability. This seminar will introduce students to the basic tenets of Appreciative Inquiry and help them gain the experience of using it in an organizational setting that they may undertake after the summer session. Students will work in small teams (or as individuals if teaming is not feasible) with the goal of learning to function as consultants to a selected list of organizations.
HOD-883AR Advanced Research Methodologies: Action Research
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Graduate		 Students engage in advanced studies and applied research projects, designed to develop skills in specific research methodologies and approaches. All the advanced research modules numbered 883XX are designed to enable students to learn a particular research method in depth. Action research is a methodology rooted in engagement, and has been characterized as offering a possibility and a strategy for “revitalizing the social sciences, the University, and the American City.” (Puckett and Harkavy, The Action Research Tradition in the United States, 1999). Action research has been defined as a “participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a participatory worldview (Reason and Bradbury, Handbook of Action Research, 2006). We can understand action research as seeking to bring together couplets of action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people, and more generally, the flourishing of individual persons and their communities.
HOD-883CH Advanced Research Methodologies: Methodologies for Studying Change
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Graduate		 This course includes advanced studies and applied research projects, designed to develop skills in specific research methodologies and approaches used to study change. All the advanced research modules numbered 883XX are designed to enable students to learn a particular research method in depth. This module focuses on understanding the theories and methodologies for studying change.
HOD-883CP Advanced Research Methodologies: Critical Participatory Action Research
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Graduate		 This course introduces the student to critical participatory action research (CPAR) approaches that foster deep collaborations between “community members” and “researchers.” Participants explore CPAR as a potentially powerful methodology for community empowerment and social change. Although the focus will be on the methods used to engage groups in collective inquiry, analysis, and action, exploration will be grounded in a foundational understanding of critical theories and of the social, political, and institutional contexts that shape CPAR projects.
HOD-883EH Advanced Research Methodologies: Ethnography
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Graduate		 This course includes advanced studies and applied research projects designed to develop skills in Ethnography and its approaches. Like the other advanced research modules numbered 883XX students will be expected to learn a particular research method in depth, in this case Ethnography. Students will experience Ethnography as a methodology, as a way of seeing, and as a way of engaging with social reality. Students will understand the skills that will need to be developed in order to successfully complete an Ethnography. Students will also learn if ethnography suits their intellectual projects and personal styles of academic engagement.
HOD-883GT Advanced Research Methodologies: Grounded Theory
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Graduate		 Grounded theory methodology is particularly appropriate for mapping out and understanding processes of change and development. The methodology aims to develop theory and explore hypotheses in the manner of empirical research. Grounded theory is particularly appropriate to inquiry about processes that are not well understood, and gaining insight about the ways in which dynamics are linked, resulting in important contribution to knowledge. The methodology can apply at various levels of inquiry, from the individual, to the group, to the organization, and even to the community. Grounded theory can be used to map out the pathways by which a spectrum of participants goes through a change from one stage of development or identity to another.
HOD-883LR Advanced Research Methodologies: Liberatory Research
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Graduate		 This advanced studies course examines the emancipatory potential of research and praxis, particularly within an ever-changing globalized world. The course is deeply rooted in social justice, and it underscores liberatory research as an approach to understanding knowledge production, ways of knowing, questions of epistemology, and methodological inquiry. With a strong emphasis on social change and transformation, the course engages a range of critical, multi-disciplinary, conceptual and theoretical perspectives for research as praxis. Some of these perspectives include: Feminist theory, queer theory, theories of race and ethnicity, among others.
HOD-883NI Advanced Research Methodologies: Narrative Inquiry
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Graduate		 This course will examine Narrative Inquiry’s (NI) epistemology, assumptions and aims. Informed by feminism and critical theory, NI counteracts a dominant paradigm that privileges only a few voices. Through narrative life voices of those marginalized emerge. Narratives provide coherence to human experience and have a central role to communicate this to others. Storytelling is a powerful tool to collect data and gather information. Narrative research studies the whole person in context and taps in to emotional material and memories to reveal patterns of making meaning Narrative inquiry, as a methodology, does not superimpose the majority paradigm on people’s stories. Students review narrative research, learn how to develop research questions, criteria for selecting participants, and methods for collecting and analyzing stories. They also complete a mini narrative research project, conducting a short literature review, methodology protocol, collecting interviews and analyzing them. Related methodologies such as organic and co-inquiry will be reviewed. Skill development, meaning-making, and stand-point in knowledge creation and development will be emphasized.
HOD-883PG Advanced Research Methodologies: Phenomenography and Variation
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Graduate		 This inquiry approach, originally developed in Sweden, captures, analyzes, and graphically represents variations in ways that people experience and make meaning of phenomena in education, social change, politics, health care, organizations, technology, and other areas where there is a need for positive change. This course integrates project-based learning with critical reading of classical literature (Marton, F., & Booth, S. (1997). Learning and awareness. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) and current research related to the student’s interests. Practitioners and academics use this approach to address today’s complex, often divisive, issues. It promotes new understandings and enables shared actions to promote positive change.
HOD-883PH Advanced Research Methodologies: Phenomenology
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Graduate		 This course includes advanced studies and applied research projects, designed to develop skills in specific research methodologies and approaches. All the advanced research modules numbered 883XX are designed to enable students to learn a particular research method in depth. This module introduces the domains of phenomenology and hermeneutics through experientially grounded activities that display the foundations and orientation of interpretive ways of knowing. Through understanding the epistemological promise of interpretive phenomenology, we aim to reveal the research potentialities and personal challenges of working within this culture of inquiry. By drawing upon insights from applied studies in the human, social, organizational and educational sciences, we hope to show the efficacy of approaching any phenomenon from a phenomenological perspective.
HOD-883QA Advanced Research Methodologies: Advanced Qualitative Methods
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Graduate		 This course includes advanced studies and applied research projects, designed to develop skills in specific research methodologies and approaches. All the advanced research modules numbered 883XX are designed to enable students to learn a particular research method in depth. This module is designed to provide skill development for students using qualitative data analysis at the dissertation level. It requires intensive training using conventional and innovative qualitative techniques as well as training in related software tools.
HOD-883ST Advanced Research Methodologies: Advanced Quantitative Methods
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Graduate		 This course includes advanced studies and applied research projects, designed to develop skills in specific research methodologies and approaches. All the advanced research modules numbered 883XX are designed to enable students to learn a particular research method in depth. This module includes an overview of quantitative research techniques, emphasizing experimental, quasi-experimental, descriptive, analytical and mix- methods designs. The concepts of sampling, normal distributions, and tests of significance will be dealt with in depth and will be introduced in November. Special emphasis will be placed on connecting research designs and statistical tests appropriate for each design. Included in the course is an overview of the planning, executing, and writing up of quantitative research studies. Students will also develop an ability to critically evaluate the generalizability of research studies for decision- making.
HOD-883WC Advanced Research Methodologies: World Cafe
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Graduate		 The World Café is a dialogic process that relies on creating a co-evolving network of conversations to foster collaborative learning and knowledge creation. With its focus on co- generative understanding around key questions that matter, it also has significant value as a research methodology. Focuses on design principles of World Cafés, with research questions at the core. Explores context setting for World Cafés together with the context- bound nature of knowledge generated, featuring research design for actionable knowledge. Develops an understanding of role relationships of the researcher in a World Café setting. Featuring a learning-by-doing approach, explores interpretation and sense-making of the resultant knowledge generated, together with other epistemological issues that recognize process understanding, and context setting for collaborative inquiry.
HOD-698 Special Topics in Academic Writing
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Graduate		 Entry into the course will be based on each student completing and submitting a writing assessment, identifying specific areas for further development. The course is designed to support those who need to enhance their readiness for doctoral scholarship.
HOD-804 Human Development
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Graduate		 This course presents original readings on human development traditions which can include psychoanalysis, depth psychology, behaviorism, cognitive, humanistic, feminist, or indigenous perspectives. In addition, students learn the assumptions and applications in a current area of research that they choose which could include constructivist, black feminist critical theory, post-colonial psychology, somatics, depth psychology, transpersonal psychology, consciousness, brain physiology, queer theory, and/or positive psychology. Students examine basic differences in theories including: the goal of development, stage theory vs nonlinear development, critical theory of societal oppression, and applications for individual, community and organization human development.
HOD-811 Advanced Human Development
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Graduate		 This seminar explores theories and research in Human Development and consciousness across the life span which can include: prenatal development, birth, infancy, early childhood, middle and late childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, maturity, old age, and death. Some of the key questions for this advanced seminar address: What are the roles of culture, genetics, and wisdom in Human Development? How do learning and contexts affect individuals and groups? How might we conceptualize “Becoming Human”? What roles do organizations and social interaction play in Human Development? These questions could be considered at many points in the lifespan, in terms of changing family/social structures; or as a process over a certain period of time.
HOD-812 Human Learning and Motivation
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Graduate		 Students examine environments that promote learning by looking at the roots of learning theory starting stimulus control and Thorndike’s research on instrumental learning. Malcolm Knowle’s work documenting learning resulting in the creation of andragogy combined with Bruner’s work on curriculum design are also reviewed. More recent theories of holistic learning, transformative learning and indigenous traditions of elder storytelling give students choices to focus their projects for the course. Current trends in organization learning also complete the course content.
HOD-830 Creativity and Innovation in Organization Design
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Graduate		 Considers creativity and innovation from disciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives. Explores issues of creativity in organizational settings, and individual and professional life. Focuses on design thinking while extending creativity and innovation to organization design, including spaces in which organizational life takes place. Explores links between paradox and creativity, and social bases of creativity, as well as ways new media shape landscapes and soundscapes of creativity and innovation. Cultivates both a theory and practice of creativity and innovation, including use of metaphors that invite creativity in organization design, and how an organization might foster creative confidence.
HOD-814 Gendered Identities
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Graduate		 Students examine the formation of gender identities and their expression and consequences in roles within families, work, and social organizations. In most cultures, gender is understood in binary terms (woman or man) tethered to the sex (male or female) one is often assigned at birth. However, in reality, the lives of many individuals are lived in the boundaries and overlaps of this binary. Scholars in various disciplines have acknowledged the ways in which gender is socially constructed. The notions of masculinity and femininity have changed over time, and thus have histories. Greater recognition of transgendered individuals combined with sexual orientation has led to important developments in this area of research.
HOD-815 Transformative Learning
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Graduate		 Transformative learning describes how we engage with our learning directly, reframing our perspectives, habits of mind, and judgements. The aim of Transformative Learning is to cultivate more inclusive and adaptive meanings to guide our reflective practice and critical action in the world. In the words of Jack Mezirow, one of the founders of the field, such an approach helps to make us “more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective.” Students explore research on the theory and practice of transformative learning, including constructive-developmental, cultural, cognitive-rational, spiritual, Jungian, ecological, and critical emancipatory approaches. Questions include: What is meant by transformation? How is it catalyzed? What are the ethical concerns? What are the relationships between individual and socio-cultural and systemic transformation? What are the educational dimensions and outcomes of Transformative Learning?
HOD-816 Post Traumatic Growth
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Graduate		 The notion of trauma has evolved over the past century with increased awareness of how people experience loss, and hurt in physical, social, economic, emotional, and spiritual parts of their lives. The course begins with a conceptual exploration of trauma and its historical construction, from its early focus on the experience of war among veterans and civilians, to more contemporary concerns with various forms of abuse, loss, illness, social violence, and destruction from natural disasters. Trauma is framed in terms of the “loss of assumptive” worlds, resulting in fundamental loss of meaning. After this introduction, the focus shifts to the process of questioning assumptions about life, values, ideals, and goals in life often resulting in shock, despair, depression and much more. Scholars and practitioners have studied how survivors of trauma react in different ways, from gaining coping strength to exploring transformational processes. Students critically analyze different approaches to trauma from changes in cognitive and phenomenological structures, to narrative and transformational reconstruction of meaning. Trauma becomes a paradoxical catalyst for personal growth and transformation. The readings include theoretical and empirical work by Richard Tedeschi, Lawrence Calhoun, Kenneth Doka, and Jeffrey Kauffman.
HOD-820 Advanced Organization Studies
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Graduate		 This course provides a structure for students to engage in learning beyond the foundational organization studies to explore the theory, practice, and research of specific issues or topics in organization studies. Examples of topics/issues may include organizational structure and design, organizational effectiveness, organizational learning, rationality and decision-making, organizational culture, compensation and reward systems, issues of diversity, power and conflict, population ecology, organizational fields, etc. Students may contract individually or as a group course.
HOD-821 Organization Development Practicum
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Graduate		 Students demonstrate the essential skills of a scholar/practitioner by applying theory and scholarship to a significant project in their workplace or another chosen worksite. Students engage regularly with the faculty assessor to plan and implement the project and to reflect on project steps. A complete professional write up of the steps of the project and the intended and unintended outcomes of the project will be developed. Students will also comment on their role in the project as well as reflect on their personal and professional effectiveness. The student and Fielding faculty member engage in regular debriefing discussions with the worksite project manager.
HOD-823 Leadership Theories and Methods
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Graduate		 This course critically explores theories and models of leadership and how these are reflected in the world and in students’ own leadership orientations and styles. Key topics include changing definitions and models of leadership, leadership as an individual vs a relational attribute, the contingent nature of leadership (relating to context, culture, and social identity), and leadership development. Students will compare traditional leadership models with more contemporary approaches that have evolved to address leadership in networked, virtual, social action, and global organizations. The course will balance theoretical, research, and practice aspects to help students deepen their knowledge, understanding and skills of leadership as a positive influence on individuals, organizations and communities.
HOD-824 Social Psychology
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Graduate		 In this course students examine effective decision-making in organizations, drawing on research in social psychology, interpersonal relations, and neuropsychology. Creating organizational change requires insight into both organizational dynamics and the social psychology of organizational stakeholders. Students address questions such as “How can the leaders of organizations engage most effectively with key stakeholders, in order to develop and engage in practices that promote social and ecological sustainability?”
HOD-825 Public Policy and Public Action
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Graduate		 This course is concerned with the institutional processes by which government responds to societal problems. Public Policy focuses on policy-making processes including problem definition; public input; policy formulation; policy implementation, and policy impacts. These processes are best understood via analysis of specific topical areas such as social welfare policy, health policy, educational policy, policies promoting social and ecological sustainability, and the like.
HOD-826 Social Change
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Graduate		 Students will examine theories of social change, and investigate historic and contemporary changes. Human and organization development occur within the context of social changes that in previous times were often slow, and that are usually rapid today. The purpose of this knowledge area course is to understand the meaning of social changes, to understand how and why such changes occur - not with the aim of adjusting to them, but rather of intervening proactively in the process.
HOD-829 Praxis II
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Graduate		 Praxis refers to the purposeful use of theoretical knowledge to inform action, in the form of a scholarly argument that targets real-life challenges in modern organizations or communities. One possible format is to develop a case study, to be presented at a conference or submitted to a journal for publication. For the modern scholar, there is no practice more vital to academic endeavor than the ability to present one’s research in a peer-reviewed journal, or at a peer-reviewed academic conference. Through the synthesis of scholarship and practice, the theoretically informed, reflective practitioner develops the skills to analyze current problems and suggest new and innovate ways to address and solve them.
HOD-831 Structural Inequality and Diversity
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Graduate		 This course involves understanding and respecting differences including those related to race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Demonstrating skill in interacting with diverse groups is a key part of one’s study of human and organization development. This course explores structural inequality, because it is important to know how inequality and inequity is designed as part of institutional structures and mechanisms. Honoring difference is not the same as understanding how inequality is produced in society. Thus, this course provides an important insight, especially for individuals who may have been granted great privilege in the context of current structures.
HOD-832 Advanced Systems
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Graduate		 Builds on Foundational Systems, emphasizing non-reductionist and nonlinear ways of knowing, Explores the relations and interconnections that allow any system to sustain itself, while adapting to and cohering with changing, often turbulent, environments. Develops deeper understanding of key systems concepts for systems ranging from organizations and communities, to world systems and entire ecosystems, focusing on whole systems design. Investigates second-order systems approaches - seeing ourselves as part of the systems we seek to understand. Topics include: ecological and system sustainability, adaptation and second-order change, sociotechnical systems, reflexivity, self-organization and self-regulation, levels and boundaries of systems and movement across them, whole systems design, and communication process.
HOD-833 Global Systems
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Graduate		 In this course we examine the global systems that in recent decades have transformed the world: economic globalization, driven by transnational corporations whose economic power transcends that of many countries; the transnational migration of labor; armed conflicts and militarization that are resulting in casualties and displacement of people in epic proportions; and decisions about the natural environment that have resulted in climate change and global warming that threatens many species, including our own. We will examine the theories - and suggested practices - that address these and related issues, in part through the lens of Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems theory.
HOD-834 Group Dynamics and Team Learning
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Graduate		 In this course students develop an understanding of group dynamics inherent in small group interaction in organizations. Using unstructured and structured learning environments students will reflect upon their learning, conflict management, decision making, and communication styles and the impact they may have on others. This course will also explore various aspects of group dynamics such as power, perception, motivation, leadership, and decision-making. Students will experiment with, and experience, the relevance of several concepts related to team learning and will develop their judgment, understanding, and competence to be better facilitators of their own and others’ learning in a variety of group situations in organizations.
HOD-835 Intervention Theories and Methods
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Graduate		 In this course the emphasis is on various change interventions and the assumptions underlying these approaches. The change methods may include sociotechnical systems, appreciative inquiry, large group interventions, open space, dialogic OD, survey feedback, process consultation, strategic planning, team building, job enrichment, participative management, and action research. Students may also critically evaluate various OD models such Weisbord’s Six-Box model, Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model, Tichy’s TPC framework, and Burke-Litwin model
HOD-836 Culture, Technology, and Social Change in the Digital Age
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Graduate		 Culture, technology, and social change issues in our digital age have become increasingly intertwined and complex. In order to understand the relationships and directions of today’s globally-connected societies, it will be important to examine those disruptions and interventions that have had significant impacts on societies. Using a case study approach, this course will focus on controversial issues of power and resource distribution as well as the deep interior workings of the internet and social media, and how these affect our modern society. Students will choose a particular topic of their choice to investigate how we are seeing phenomena and as a way of engaging with social reality.
HOD-837 Ethnography and Crossing Borders
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Graduate		 This course is an introduction to the rich and complex field of ethnography and its approaches. Of particular interest will be how studies utilizing ethnography cross borders between disciplines to produce research studies that are comprehensive and holistic. Students will experience ethnography as an approach to the study of human development, systems, and organizations that is of special interest in our scholar-practitioner world. The roots of ethnography and anthropology will be examined along with the relationship of ethnographic research with contemporary social and ecological justice issues.
HOD-838 Media, Technology and Disruptive Innovation
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Graduate		 One of the greatest threats to traditional organizations is the growing role of disruptive media and online technology. Web-based, on-demand business models are increasingly eliminating established enterprises and distribution networks. In this course, students will develop case study portfolios on examples of notable disruption and innovation phenomena in organizations, prompted by media and technology. The purpose is to extract empirical and theoretical findings towards an understanding of change dynamics wrought by modern online media. The principal methodology of this course is collaborative case study research. A key reference is: Clayton M. Christensen. (2013). The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Harvard Business Review Press.
HOD-840 Inclusive Leadership: Transforming Self and Systems
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Graduate		 Inclusive leadership involves the ability to co-create more inclusive organizations and communities. By leading in ways that enable all voices and stakeholders in specific settings and contexts to be fully heard and empowered, inclusive leadership provides an important means through which to create organizations and communities, and ultimately a society, in which people from all backgrounds feel fully welcome and included. Through integration of contemplative and transformative pedagogies, this course provides students with the foundation for system transformation in a wide variety of contexts at all levels of system by focusing on the relationship between transforming self and systems, and the ways in which we must learn to recognize and overcome our own biases as well as the structural barriers and differential power among those from various identity groups. The course uses scholarship, self-reflection, embodied practice, and creative expression for understanding self and others and crossing borders within ourselves, and between “us” and “them.”
HOD-841 Mindful Leadership
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Graduate		 This course examines the theoretical foundation and application of mindful leadership.
HOD-843 Ecological Studies
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Graduate		 This course reflects upon a central challenge of our times - the large scale human impact on the natural environment. The degradation of the natural environment is systemic and global and, as some scholars have argued, dire for all of humanity. As the environmental philosopher Wendell Berry has written, “The time has now come where we will listen to the earth or die. We must follow the guidance of the ecological systems upon which all life depends.” Written in the 1990s, these words press us with a moral imperative: One must help to create a new story, out of which we guide and inspire our future. This course turns to the literature and current knowledge in order to pursue a greater understanding of how human beings through organizations and systems can respond to this urgent challenge.
HOD-844 Leadership for Social and Ecological Sustainability
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 This course ties in concepts of social and ecological sustainability with organizational culture. It will focus on the systemic interrelations between such organizational capabilities as leadership, organizational culture, organizational change, and sustainability strategies. The focus of the knowledge area will be to integrate theoretical and practical understandings of organization strategy, leadership, and execution, emphasizing the importance of inclusive leadership. It will rely heavily on case studies to illustrate successes, failures, and the understanding that results from both. This knowledge area is addressed to those charged with the organizational implementation of social and ecological sustainability knowledge and practice. This includes not only sustainability professionals, but the senior leaders and top managers of business, non-profit (NGO), educational, and government organizations.
HOD-845 Social and Ecological Sustainability: Theory and Practice
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 Students examine concepts of sustainability, cultural differences in notions of sustainability, indigenous thinking about sustainability, and national and global efforts to come up with common standards. Topics include a critical and historical look at corporate social responsibility (CSR), the “triple bottom line,” ideas of “shared value,” and other sustainability efforts, using case studies to generate a hands-on understanding of what works, what hasn’t worked, and what can be done to improve existing approaches. Readings may include such scholars as Arne Naess, Thomas Hylland Erickson, and Richard Appelbaum. Based on availability, leading practitioners in the field will share their experiences in some online phone calls. Pre-requisites: Recommended that HOD-806 and HOD-833 be taken previously.
HOD-846 Intervening in Systems
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 Students critically examine the histories and development of a variety of approaches for intervening in systems and the strengths and limitations of these approaches, and their applicability in different types of systems.
HOD-847 Theoretical Foundations of Evidence Based Coaching
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 In this course, students examine, discuss and apply the key principles and strategies from eight groups of theories which underpin coaching practice and competence: theories from humanistic and transpersonal psychology, adult learning, adult development, behavioral change and neuroscience, cognitive-behavioral theories, intelligences, communication, gender and culture. Each theory set is aligned with specific coaching competencies as defined by the International Coach Federation. This course is not approved by ICF for continuing coach education units (CCEs).
HOD-848 Organizational and Leadership Coaching
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 Students examine, discuss and apply the key principles and theories associated with leadership and organizational coaching: organizations and organizational culture, using a multidimensional coaching framework, executive and leadership coaching, team and group coaching, internal coaches and managers as coaches, systems theories and coaching, gauging potential outcomes, assessments for organizational and group coaching. This course is not approved by ICF for continuing coach education units (CCEs).
HOD-849 Evidence Based Coaching Praxis
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 This course offers students an opportunity to engage in scholarly work by selecting and developing a fully conceptualized case directed at an individual coaching engagement or a consultation engagement for developing and managing an internal coaching program. Students developing an individual case will utilize assessments to collect data, identify needs, formulate process propositions based on evidence and theoretical formulations, engage in and document coaching interactions and outcomes. The case development process will be guided by principles of collaborative case conceptualization. The final case will include reflective learning. Students pursuing the consultation engagement will collect data to assess organizational needs and resources and, in collaboration with the client organization, develop a framework for designing, delivering and managing an internal coaching program. This course is not approved by ICF for continuing coach education units (CCEs).
HOD-850 Creative Longevity and Wisdom
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 This course aims to contribute to knowledge, policy, and practice addressing mid-life and older adults, which can encompass the unique developmental experiences and transitions of adulthood; the relationship between creativity, wisdom development, and spirituality; positive and conscious aging; successful aging; lifelong learning; end of life; organizations/policies to combat poverty and promote wellness in the later years of life; substance abuse, and recovery; caregiving; intergenerational engagement; the promotion of barrier-free, sustainable environments enhancing longevity; entrepreneurship; encore careers; and greater social and ecological justice worldwide for diverse aging populations and future generations.
HOD-851 Comparative Wisdom Traditions
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 Throughout history, different cultures have developed wisdom traditions and legacies that today form a spectrum of paths for personal growth, maturation, and leadership development. These wisdom traditions usually linked philosophy, religion, and ethical teachings that today represent resources in our collective histories that can be sources of inspiration and guidance for our time. The cultures of Asia, African, Indigenous American, and Western traditions, ancient and modern, provide resources for appreciative and comparative exploration and research across time and cultures. Selective exploration of different traditions and paradigms for personal growth and maturation.
HOD-854 Somatics in Human and Organization Development
Credit-Bearing
Graduate		 Over the past several decades, the various scholarly disciplines have turned their attention to the manner in which the body is an ever-present aspect of all we know. Somatics is about the body as experienced from within. What can and does our body tell us as? How do we integrate bodily knowing and being into textual forms of knowledge? How do we build this knowing into our scholarship and practice? This course reviews these literatures. We are investigating experience and learning as an embodied phenomenology and as such - the study of consciousness will be a key perspective. We cover somatics from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, social and human sciences, phenomenology and spirituality. Since we are attempting to interpret the meaning of texts about Somatics, hermeneutics is also a key discipline for our collaborative work.

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School of Human and Organizational Development
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Level		Title/
English Correspondence		SubjectCredit HoursWorking
Language		History
Master's in Organization Development and Leadership
Graduate		 The curriculum for the Master’s in Organization Development & Leadership (OD&L) was designed for professionals seeking to accelerate their career with courses of only seven weeks in length. This allows students to take one course at a time and still compl 36 English
PhD in Organizational Development and Leadership
Graduate		 Doctor of Philosophy Inclusive Leadership for Social Justice 84 English The PhD in Organizational Development and Change (OD & Change) is a multidisciplinary degree for scholar-practitioners who want to expand their capacities to bring about positive change in today’s organizations and communities.

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