Areas of Expertise:

Applied Social Studies.

Ecological System.

Curriculum Decolonization.

About Leann:

Dr. Leann Fay obtained a Master of Science in Applied Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Stout (UW-Stout), with concentrations in Evaluation Research and Health Promotion & Disease Prevention. Her Master thesis is titled, “Demographic Factors and Expressions of Environmentalism” (Fay, 2013). She went on to earn a Doctorate in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and wrote her dissertation on “Human Connections with the Ocean Represented in African and Japanese Oral Narratives: Ecopsychological Perspectives” (Fay, 2018).

Leann served as the Human Research Review Committee Coordinator at CIIS for almost four years. For a month, she was a guest instructor at a primary and high school in Lagos, Nigeria; then she volunteered two years for the International Institute of the Bengal and Himalayan Water Basins to collect and disseminate information on clean water projects, and volunteered three months at a local ryokan (hot spring inn) in Japan, learning traditional practices and family customs around special care for water in the sacred springs. She also instructed Psychology Research Methods Labs at UW-Stout for two years.

Leann in her own words: “I am from Higgins Lake, a small town in northern Michigan where you can find me making maple syrup in the spring! Other times of the year, I may be traveling by land, water, or air to different corners of the world to meet new people and places, and to share stories, food, and friendships. My personal experiences, work, and graduate studies in psychology have focused in applied social science strategies, theoretical considerations of relationships humans have with our ecological system, non-colonizing multicultural approaches in psychology, and building sustainable, harmonious, and healthy communities.”