About Kim
I'm both an academic and a creative--I am passionate about teaching and learning, as well as creativity and the arts, and I believe that they each help the other to flourish. My academic courses provide a strong foundation for the importance of creative process--offering substantial evidence of its importance for adult learning and cultural change. Some of these courses include Psychology of Metaphor, Psychology of Creativity, Psychology of Transformative Learning, The Purpose and Power of Image and Imaginal Ways of Knowing. The arts dwell in that "in-between" place that I call "third space." In our culture, if there is not a clear word or definition for something, it is presumed that it doesn't exist. On the contrary however, images and imagination are at the center of creative transformation, both individually and collectively.
Kim Hermanson currently serves as adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute and the Sophia Center at Holy Names University. She has led workshops at Esalen Institute and is the Arts Education Writer for the San Francisco Examiner.com. Previous teaching engagements include Core Faculty at Meridian University, as well as faculty positions at the Chaplaincy Institute, Book Passage, Berkeley City College, Flathead Valley Community College, University of California Berkeley Extension, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.
Adult learning, group transformation, and the creative process have been continual themes in Kim’s classes and published work. Her most recent book is Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination for Teachers, Trainers, Coaches and Mentors. Her first book, Sky’s the Limit: The Art of Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey, received an Honorable Mention in 2006 from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Other noteworthy publications include a popular article and book chapter on learning in museums "Intrinsic Motivation in Museums: What Makes Visitors Want to Learn?" with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the classic Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience; and an article/book chapter on educational indicators Review of Research in Education, Volume 19 with Tony Bryk, the current President of the Carnegie Foundation.
For her doctoral work at the University of Chicago, Kim studied how adults learn in everyday life. An early version of her doctoral dissertation received an Outstanding Research Award from the Holistic Education sub-group of the American Educational Research Association.
Kim is an exceptionally smart, thoughtful, and well put-together person. Her doctoral dissertation of how and what adults learn in informal settings was a pioneering study with all sorts of immediate implications for creativity and adult learning. The field needs the information she has collected and her insights about it. Personally, I feel proud to have been the supervisor of her thesis.
-- Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and other books.
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/kimhermanson
