Coursework

There is growing recognition supported by new legislation in the United States that schools and communities need to move away from suspending, expelling or incarcerating children, youth and adults as the first effort to change behavior. Today there is a determined effort to move towards more restorative ways of responding to people who are in crisis and whose behavior negatively affects others. This course will focus on the history, concepts, principles and theory of restorative practices. This course will compare retributive and restorative ways of working and support professionals in developing a trauma-informed lens in working with youth, families, communities, and colleagues. Students will explore the effectiveness of restorative practices and conflict transformation in schools and their community. This course will focus on restorative tools to engage people in building strong relationships and empathy for one another. Students will learn the main restorative structures including community-building circles, restorative conferences to address high level incidences, and effective communication techniques. This course will explore different types of restorative circle processes and the psychology behind the circle. Attention will be paid to the role of caring for ourselves while providing support for others. Skill-building activities will include practicing non-violent communication, building consensus, creating a safe space, and identifying barriers to connection and healing.

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“Trauma” has recently become a familiar term in our social rhetoric. It has become important for professionals and para-professionals working in our communities to understand the impact of trauma in relation to the biopsychosocial well-being of an individual. In addition, it is essential to understand the complex ripple effects of trauma on children, adolescents, the family unit and educators in the schools and in our wider community. Due to the high rates of trauma occurring on a macro-level scale within national and international contexts as well as the continued high rates of micro-level conflicts and interpersonal trauma experiences, it has become critical for those working in the front lines to understand what trauma is, what kind of impact it has on multiple levels of our lives, and how to identify and effectively respond. This course is designed to lay the foundation for understanding trauma and its complexities and to start a dialogue of learning, understanding, and recovering as trauma-informed restorative practitioners.Back to Top

Mental health recovery is a new field driven by the needs of the consumer, rather than the expectations and recommendations of mental health professionals. This emerging, consumer-led movement has profound effects on how effective mental health services are delivered and demands a completely new approach for how mental health professionals engage with people suffering from severe mental illness. The practice of mental health recovery is creating a new context for understanding the relational power dynamics between client and mental health specialist. Through the evaluation of these contexts, students will be able to explore the tools of mental health professionals as social constructs, such as the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual (DSM), and the power that is given to these tools within our society and mental health communities. This course is aimed to understand the etiology of mental health treatment, the role of the DSM-V, and the effects on identity that these systems engender in consumers of mental health treatment.

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This course will review the ethical standards and legal mandates of the counseling profession. Students will apply code of ethics and legal mandates to specific counseling situations in diverse contexts such as schools and social service agencies. Students will identify and employ professional guidelines for a variety of positions such as: clinical counselors, community mental health case workers, marriage & family therapists and guidance/school counselors. Multicultural perspectives, diversity issues, and awareness of personal values in decision making will inform the context of class discussions and activities.

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This course begins with the assumption that our personal lives, inclusive of our histories, culture, language, and experiences, shape our everyday interactions as well as our professional behavior. Students will review foundational ideas about interpersonal communications and relational ethics that are relevant in the counseling profession. They will examine their lives and stories, including their cultural contexts, values, beliefs, and emotional experiences, and consider how they may constrain or enhance relationships and therapeutic practices.Back to Top

This course is designed to be the lab practice component of the CSP 600 course. Students will be given the opportunity during lab to explore key concepts and skills that support a social constructionist approach to counseling. These concepts and skills are culturally informed and support a socially responsible approach to beginning counseling practice. Over the 3 day intensive, students will review a range of client-centered relational practices and counseling skills and will have an opportunity to practice them with their peers during the face-to-face experience.Back to Top

This course explores the sociopolitical and policy considerations of the counseling field. The course aims to engage students to critically evaluate the impacts of public and private policy on service providers, clients, and the larger community. This course reviews the role of public and private policy in delivery of counseling services, the role of counselors as advocates in public policy issues impacting their field and/or clients, and empowering clients to influence and form public policy as a counseling intervention. Furthermore, this course explores the role of social justice, activism, and community involvement in empowering clients towards preferred changes. 

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This course examines social constructionist, Foucauldian and intersectional feminist approaches to multidisciplinary group facilitation in counseling and educational contexts. Students will explore multiple perspectives on team-based knowledge production, collaborative leadership, and on how organizations conceptualize and practice interprofessional collaboration across a variety of settings such as educational systems, mental health settings, social services and health care. Moreover, the systematic and discursive effects of race-ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and culture on counseling and educational professional teams and their effects on community development will be examined.

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This course offers a critical review of contemporary counseling theories through the lens of social constructionist and postmodern philosophies. Students will gain a foundational understanding of Humanistic, Experiential, Cognitive-Behavioral, Intergenerational, and Family Systems therapy. Students will analyze the historical and social contexts from which theories were developed, and the implications for how practitioners conceptualize identity, change, and family systems posited by these theories. This course draws upon theories developed within the discipline of Marriage and Family Therapy and explores their relevancy within multicultural contexts.

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This course prepares students to work from a theoretical framework and systemic, strength-based, culturally competent, and socially conscious position. Building on CSP 637, Counseling and MFT Theories I, this course concentrates on social constructionist theories and multicultural counseling theories including theoretical models from the Marriage and Family field. These include but are not limited to Solution Focused, Narrative, Postmodern Feminist, and Collaborative theories. Students will learn to compare and contrast four main theoretical models and critically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the models as they relate to their application to families, children, diverse populations and settings.

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This course is designed to provide graduate students an introduction to educational and psychological-relational research. It is intended to enable students to become critical evaluators of educational and psychological-relational research and provides an overview of (a) the historical and philosophical context of research, (b) library literature searches/reviews, (c) quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods, (d) basic concepts in research design, analyses, and interpretation, (e), basic descriptive and inferential statistics and (f) the influence of culture on the design, implementation and evaluation of applied research.

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This course provides students with an integrated learning experience in which coursework taken throughout the program of study (e.g. research coursework, theories and techniques of counseling, etc.) is synthesized and culminates in the completion of a final project that demonstrates graduate level research, writing, and scholarship skills. Students will complete a Capstone Project which demonstrates their learnings throughout the entire MA program.

The objective of this course is to facilitate the synthesis of learning by directly applying understandings to professional practice. Students will reflect, write, research and imagine their future professional plans. This process will include asking critical questions about the student’s theoretical orientation, case conceptualization, assessing counseling practices, reviewing academic literature, analyzing and generating meaning from data, and moving from consumer to creator of new knowledge.

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