Dr. Corri Alayne Johanson (she/her) is a psychology instructor at the University of West Georgia. She earned a Master of Arts degree in criminology and a doctorate degree in psychology, both from the University of West Georgia. She is an NB-HWC eligible life coach.

Dr. Johanson’s teaching philosophy is simple (although not always easy): Be approachable and available for student learning engagement. This means each student is invited to explore their personal, academic, and professional purposes, values, and passions. Corri’s philosophy is to avoid the banking model of learning and increase curiosity.  This provides a structured framework in her classes that offers functionality with a freedom for students to learn and produce meaningful course work. 

 Dr. Johanson’s area of study explores a variety of group and individual transitory and transformative experiences. Her research tends to concentrate on the aesthetics of these experiences for people in stages of recovery who are participating in some kind of active creative process during various stages of therapeutic recovery.

Her masters thesis in criminology, A qualitative examination of autobiographical narratives among recovering female substance abusers (2016), explored the life-course experiences of people in substance abuse recovery. Participants described their prior lives in active substance addiction and a variety of  innovated approaches they feel helped increase the length and stability of their sobriety.

Dr. Johanson’s psychology doctoral dissertation, Participatory Aesthetics: A Phenomenological Exploration of Aesthetic Experiences of Persons in Substance Abuse Recovery (2022), further explored practices of recovery specific to aesthetic experiences and creative activities. This phenomenological study, using Giorgi's (2009) method, explored the lived experiences of people in long-term sobriety. Specifically, participants reported that by incorporating creativity, in a variety of expressions, they had transformative experiences that motivated the prevention of relapse and exponentially enriched the quality of their sober lives.