MAC Class Notebook

(Table of Contents)
Chpt 1: Introduction to the Class Notebook
Chpt 2: Registration & Pre-registration
Chpt 3: Required 500 Level Courses
-  MAC 502 (Group)
-  MAC 503 (Individual)
-  MAC 512 (Family Systems)
-  MAC 514 (Developmental)
-  MAC 521 Syllabus
-  MAC 522 (Abusive Rel.)
Chpt 4: Required 600 Level Courses
-  MAC 601 (Psychopathology)
-  MAC 602 (Assess/TX)
-  MAC 620 (Ethics)
Chpt 5: Elective 500 & 600 Level Courses
-  MAC 651 (Substance Abuse)
-  MAC 661 (Marriage/Family)
-  MAC 671 (Expressive)
-  MAC 691-692 Internship
-  MAC 560 (Children)
-  MAC 570 (Career)
-  MAC 695 (Clinical)
-  MAC 695 (Statistics)
Chpt 6: Independent Study Courses
Chpt 7: Transfer Courses
Chpt 8: Internship Classes

(On-line Forms)
Annual Schedule 
Request Transfer Credit

Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology ("MAC")

MAC 521: "Gender & Ethnicity in Psychotherapy"
Sample Syllabus (Subject to Change)

Faculty Member: 

Leticia Nieto, PsyD

Course Description:

This course examines the clinical implications of gender and ethnicity issues in counseling. It is designed to provide students with a conceptual framework from which to view the complex interplay of cultural forces that impact the theory and practice of psychology. This course will engage students in the debate of culture as more than concrete patterns, customs, values, usages, traditions, and habit clusters that serve as control mechanisms, plans, recipes, and rules for governing behavior; just as gender may be more than the socially prescribed roles and modes of expression that accompany the experiences of men and women.  The goal is to empower students to address their ethical responsibility to ask questions that will facilitate gender and culture-fair counseling and therapy. Course objectives include:

• To become familiar with some tools for assessing:

• world-view differences between therapist and client
• cultural biases that influence clinical interpretations
• gender issues that influence interventions and assessments
• assumptions that foster the 50 min. verbal, face-to-face practices
• cultural contexts that determine/define therapeutic procedures

• To explore the issues affecting therapy with and by women. To explore the issues affecting therapy with and by men. To explore the issues affecting therapy with and by heterosexuals, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals
• To create a personal, ethno-cultural genogram to expand students' definitions of ethnicity. To increase awareness of their cultural and gender identity as persons and as therapists.
• To examine diagnostic criteria used by the mental health profession to judge normality and abnormality and explore the possibility of inherent culture and gender bias.
• To enhance self-knowledge and therapeutic competence through experiential and written self exploration.

Required Textbooks:
(Please do not order your books for the current semester from this list.  It may not be up-to-date.)

• Kivel, Paul (1996). Uprooting Racism. New Society Publishers
• Derald, Sue (1990). Counseling the Culturally Different. John Wiley & Sons
• Laidlaw, Toni Ann, et. al., 1990. Healing Voices. Jossey-Bass.
• McGoldrick, Monica, et al. (1982). Ethnicity and Family Therapy (Selected chapters only from), Guilford
• Thompson, Keith. (Ed). (199_). To Be A Man. Tarcher.
• Zweig, Connie. (Ed). (199_). To Be A Woman. Connie Zweig.
• Walker, Scott. (1990). Stories from the American Mosaic. Graywolf Press.
• There will be readings on reserve, which will form part of the required readings, as well as some suggested readings.

Course Requirements:

Each item below makes up one seventh of your grade. Please submit two clear, typed copies of each written assignment; one will become part of the class record, the other will be returned to you with comments.

1. Prepare a guided journal entry for each class session with questions and responses to the reading material, films, experiences and class discussions. Always include insights from exercises in the Kivel book.
2. Complete a focused, three-page "Culture and Gender Exploration" examining the student's own cultural and gender identity and its implications for the student's development as a therapist.  Please include in these papers reflections about how your own culture's attitudes have helped shape your identity. Please examine such issues as class, ethnicity, class, religion, sexual orientation, and gender. How might this need to be reworked for various client populations? Please examine your perceptions of "others and otherness". Describe the process of exposure to various groups and your experiences with forms of oppression. How have you dealt with ideas of power and privilege? What were you taught passively or actively about groups, yours and others. What groups have you had limited exposure to and therefore tend to carry more prejudice against? Please think about the way privilege intertwines with your cultural identities and how it might affect your work.
3. Collaborate with others in the class to guide and facilitate discussions of required readings.
   • You and your team must thoroughly read all assigned readings for the session you will lead and discuss them together prior to the class date.
   • You and your team will prepare a readings summary outlining one to three main points from each article or chapter assigned. (You may be dealing with both gender and ethnicity issues)
   • You an your team will initiate and sustain a productive discussion of the issues in the reading, ensuring participation from the whole class. (As a class participant, try to participate fully in discussions led by others; you will want them to similarly participate in the discussion you will lead.)
   • Time-keep during your session to make sure that all the agreed-upon points are covered in the allotted time. Once your discussion starts, any one reading source could take up the whole time.
   • Make a record of any additional insights that came out of the discussion which were not already in your outline. Submit this with your reflection (see below).
   • Meet after the discussion session with your team to debrief the discussion. Questions to consider: How did it go? What came up? What went well? What could have been done differently?
   • Individually, submit a reflection paper (no longer than one page) on how the discussion went and what you learned. (Sign up on first night)
4. Complete a 1 to 2 page written summary of observations from an interview with a person of a group as different from you as possible.
   • This assignment will be most useful if you choose someone from a group with whom you've had little contact and about which you are, therefore, more likely to carry misconceptions or prejudices. Remember, we all have prejudices.
   • Also, choose someone from a group where you carry a dominant membership and they carry subordinate membership. (refer to handout "Social Group Membership Profile")
   • If you choose to interview someone of a different nationality, it is important that they live permanently in this country an has lived here for five or more years.
5. Participate in and contribute to all class sessions and experiences including role playing and other participatory activities.
6. Complete a final, written self-evaluation.  In addition, please write a brief, separate evaluation of the course and instructor.

Return to Required 500 Level Courses

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