Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Provides an introduction to multicultural counselling and human diversity with an emphasis on culture, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, age, and abilities.

COURSE DETAILS:

 

This course introduces students to multicultural, social justice and decolonizing approaches to mental health counselling. Multicultural counselling emphasizes the centrality of human diversity to mental health and counselling practice. A social justice approach strives for justice and equity in mental health and mental health care.  It focuses attention on the sociocultural processes, past and present, that construct difference as disadvantage or deficit. A decolonizing approach aims to address the injustices of colonization and re-centre Indigenous well-being and healing knowledge.  Initially focused on race, ethnicity, language and culture, the field of multicultural social justice counselling has expanded to consider multiple and intersecting dimensions of difference including: Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, ability, class, religion/faith.

 

Students will be introduced to frameworks and scholarship useful for developing their multicultural and social justice counselling capacities, such as: Decolonizing, Indigenous holism & Cultural Safety, Racial Justice, Multicultural Core Competencies & Orientation, Culturally Responsive & Social Justice Counselling, Feminist & Gender Equity lenses, Dis/Ability Justice, Anti-Poverty, Class & Economic Justice, Human Rights. Students will critically reflect on their own social positionality, values and beliefs.  Classwork and assignments will help them explore possibilities for enhancing equity, fostering social justice, empowerment, and social transformation in and through the helping professions (as school counsellors, educators, counsellors, counselling psychologists).

 

 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

To successfully complete EDUC 324, students will:

Demonstrate self-reflexivity and constructive participation in a diverse learning community

• Consistently practice respectful communication with all members of the class, online and in person, while critically engaging in self-reflexive inquiry into human diversity, power, privilege and oppression
• Reflect on, explore and evaluate our own social locations, cultural beliefs and values, and how these may impact counselling relationships and process
• Assess their current capacities and develop goals for on-going development.

 

Deepen understanding of relationships among human diversity, social justice and mental health

• Enhance awareness of social and cultural context of helping interactions
• Define and apply concepts of privilege, power, oppression, socialization, and intersectionality
• Explain and analyse ways that culture constitutes, influences, or acts as a determinative of mental health and helping relationships
• Identify examples of social inequality and social exclusion, and articulate the impacts on mental health
• Identify significant events, policies, practices and discourses associated with settler-colonialism and state multiculturalism in Canada, articulate the impacts of these in relationship to mental health 1) for Indigenous, First Nations, Metis, Inuit people/populations 2) Immigrant, refugee and diasporic populations,
• Identify significant events, policies, practices and discourses associated with sex and gender based oppressions, for 1) girls and women 2)Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Transgender, Queer, Intersex (2SLGBT2QI+) people/populations 3) boys and men and articulate the impacts of these in relationship to mental health.
• identify and critique social discources or narratives that reinforce oppression or exclusion
• analyse their own social positionality, client's presenting concerns and therapeutic alliance using intersectionality and other social justice frameworks

Understand and critique strategies for enhancing the cultural safety, cultural responsiveness, social justice and effectiveness in helping relationships

• Describe, compare and critique strategies for building a culturally safe or culturally responsive therapeutic working alliance
• Apply scholarship on how to adapt counselling practice to achieve culturally responsive and socially just aims for example, using models of Indigenous cultural safety and wellbeing, culturally responsive social justice counselling, feminist, queer or trans and responsive and lenses
• Analyse counselling interactions from multicultural / social justice orientation
• Identify culturally relevant resources in the community
• Recognize barriers to mental health services and critique strategies for addressing these barriers
• Explore practices and competencies beyond 1:1 counselling for their social justice impacts
• Review and distinguish micro, meso and macro level strategies used by counselling professionals to achieve social justice aims

 

 

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Access to an APA 7th edition style guide

REQUIRED READING:

RECOMMENDED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: