Competency: The Road to an Excellent Helping Professional

General principles of Psychologists by American Psychological Association are:

Principle A: Beneficence and Nonmaleficence : To do no harm. 

Principle B: Fidelity and Responsibility: Psychologists uphold professional standards of conduct, clarify their professional roles and obligations, accept appropriate responsibility for their behavior.

Principle C: Integrity: Psychologists seek to promote accuracy, honesty and truthfulness in the science, teaching and practice of psychology….

Principle D: Justice: Psychologists recognize that fairness and justice….

Principle E: Respect for People's Rights and Dignity: Psychologists respect the dignity and worth of all people, and the rights of individuals to privacy, confidentiality, and self-determination.

This full-time one quarter, junior- senior level program is designed for academically serious students who want to become a competent helping professional. Students will learn the above principles through character building activities and transformative learning which integrates conceptual learning with emotional understanding.

The foundation of helping is the helper’s ability to be aware of her/his/zir/their  own experience and learning from them. In order to assess self-awareness competency students will explore (a) their relationship to social media, (b) their values, beliefs, and biases, and (c) the ability to have meaningful interpersonal relationship as they study life-span developmental psychology, abnormal psychology, theories of personality, ethics, and diversity and inclusion.

In order to build a character students will critically examine roles of ethnocentric bias, attribution error, asymmetric perception, social projection, implicit learning, and inappropriate generalizations in shaping their values, beliefs, and biases.

Paradigm shifts in thinking (conventional dichotomous, hierarchical, and linear to holistic) and learning (conceptual to transformative) will be emphasized as tools to understand complexities of self and others. Students are required to complete reflective and transformative learning activities (e.g., participate in weekly somatic psychology activities, record daily conscious raising activities, uncensored writing responses to specific questions on a regular basis, and participate in weekly small group meetings for in depth processing of the program material). 

Credit will be awarded in Theories of Personality, Abnormal Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Diversity and Inclusion, or Ethics.