Graduate Counselling and Applied Psychology (GCAP) 633

Overview

This course examines the sociocultural influences on psychosocial and cultural identity development and management, with particular attention to the social determinants of health, the impact of cultural oppression on nondominant populations, and the importance applying a contextualized and systemic perspective to case conceptualization. Culture is defined broadly to emphasize diversity across ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, gender identity, age, ability, sexual orientation, religion, spirituality, and social class. A multicultural and social justice lens is applied to understanding within- and between-group differences, dominant and nondominant sociocultural discourses, life and cross-cultural transitions, as well as cultural and worldview differences in perspectives on development, health, and healing. Students will enhance their competencies for culturally responsive and socially just counselling. Critical, feminist, multicultural, and constructivist metatheoretical lenses will be applied to analyses of the influences of cultural identities and social locations on the counsellor, the client(s), the therapeutic relationship, and the counselling process.

Outline

Domain I: Ubiquitous Nature of Culture

• Week 1 Culturally Responsive and Socially Just (CRSJ) Counselling: Personal Cultural Identities
• Week 2 Respecting Multiple Worldviews: Intersectionality, Subjectivity, and Dignity

Domain II: Attending to Social Location

• Week 3 Social Determinants of Health: Power, Privilege, and Marginalization
• Week 4 Cultural Identity Development: Cross-Cultural Transitioning, Internalized Oppression, and Trauma

Domain III: Professional Identity

• Week 5 Ethical and Competency Practice: Anti-Oppression and Justice-Doing
• Week 6 Values-Based Practice: Personal–Profession–Political

Domain IV: Counselling as Relationship

• Week 7 Transformative Relationships: Connection, Mutuality, and an Ethic of Care
• Week 8 Just Conversations: Culture Inquiry, Client-Centred Practice, and Constructive Collaboration

Domain V: Case Conceptualization

• Week 9 Theoretical and Metatheoretical Lenses: Ways of Knowing
• Week 10 Views of Health and Healing: Anti-Pathologizing and Contextualized/Systemic Lenses

Domain VI: Enacting Multilevel Change

• Week 11 Co-Construction Change at the Microlevel: Theoretical Flexibility and Cultural Responsivity
• Week 12 Envisioning Meso and Macrolevel Interventions: Systems Level Change and Socially Just Practice

Endings as Beginnings

• Week 13 Continuing Competency, Cultural Auditing, and Professional Identity Development

Course Evaluation

To receive credit for GCAP 633, students must submit all of the course assignments. The passing grade for the course is B- (70%). The weighting of assignments is as follows.