| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This is an introductory course on the relationship between theory and practice in infant mental health. It is intended for graduate students in Social Work, Education, Nursing and Psychology. Its purpose is to furnish a conceptual framework, based upon attachment theory, for understanding how the emotional qualities of the infant-parent dyads influence the infant's development, the parent's capacity to give care, and finally the professional's state of mind regarding the family. Emphasis is given to how the experiences of early childhood persist over time, and how they are summoned up again by the presence of a baby. This understanding becomes in turn the basis for learning how to plan a treatment approach that takes into account the family's capacities for change. This course meets several educational components for students interested in post-graduate endorsement in infant-family practice. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Welfare of Children & Families (Host) |
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| Credits: | 3 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This course critically examines juvenile delinquency and the adult correctional system in the United States. Students will be exposed to the theories that help professionals understand the development of delinquency and crime within the context of individuals, families and communities. Understanding the mechanisms that contribute to offending is important for social work professionals, as this understanding should directly guide the policies and practices of the justice system. This course will focus on some of the most pressing issues that face the justice system and the social work professionals that work within this system. Such issues include adolescent brain development, poverty, child maltreatment, substance abuse, mental health, disproportionate minority contact (DMC), incarceration, peer relationships, the school to prison pipeline, evidence based interventions and the role of ideology in juvenile justice policy. The course is designed for social work students interested in working in justice settings (micro or macro) or students interested in working with youth populations that may experience contact with the justice system. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Welfare of Children & Families (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This course will introduce and address issues of concern to social work practice youth that identify as Transgender, Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Queer or questioning, focusing on the basic knowledge, practice and advocacy skills it takes to become increasingly competent in providing social work practice and advocacy for people who are in these marginalize, yet highly resilient, groups. From a strength-based perspective, this course will focus on basic social work knowledge and understanding of youth that identify as TBLGQ including the social injustice and stigma facing these groups. Related to TBLGQ youth, key areas of focus include how to advocate, affirm, engage, assess and effectively practice in a culturally responsive manner, while exploring risk and protective factors within the contexts of school, home, health care, and communities. This course will also address self-exploration and ethical dilemmas for social work providers with TBLGQ youth. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Welfare of Children & Families (Host) |
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| Credits: | 3 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This course examines families as a primary context for understanding health and health-related behaviors. Major topics include: 1) substantive and ethical overview of families and health, 2) historical perspectives on the family, 3) demographic trends in family structure, 4) family diversity with respect to social class, race/ethnicity and culture, and sexual orientation and their implications for understanding health phenomena and family models and theories, 5) families as the context for socialization to health beliefs and practices, 6) the provision of family-based care, 7) health profiles of family members and family roles, and 8) family-based skills, programs, and practice concepts. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host), Welfare of Children & Families |
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| Credits: | 3 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This course introduces the fundamental knowledge and concepts for working with victims of all types of family violence. Students will learn about the factors that contribute to child abuse, teen dating violence, intimate partner violence, and elder abuse; the long term consequences family violence, and common treatment approaches. Interconnections between the forms of violence will be explored. Most family violence organizations work on multiple levels, such as macro, mezzo, and micro levels, and they frequently come into contact with a variety of fields of service, primarily the legal, health and mental health, housing, public assistance, and child welfare systems. Therefore, models of inter-system and interprofessional coordination will be presented. Federal and state policies related to family violence will be explored, and opportunities for advocacy will be highlighted. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse, Social Work Practice with Older Adults and Families from a Lifespan Perspective, Welfare of Children & Families (Host) |
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| Credits: | 3 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This course presents advanced topics in Welfare of Children & Families. The topics may include emerging practice issues and advanced application of specific methods. |
| Credits: | 1 |
|---|---|
| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | Self-help and support groups, including 12-step mutual help groups, are common elements in health, mental health and substance abuse settings. The course will examine the services provided by these types of groups, as primary and adjunctive modes of intervention. Self-help services will be compared and contrasted with those provided by professional help system. Special attention will be given to how providers and their agencies can coordinate their activities with self-help groups. Ethical issues that arise in working with self-help groups is another important course topic. The course will examine the level of empirical support for a variety of self-help and support groups. Self-help participation will be examined by age, class, color, ethnicity, family structure, gender, race, religion or spirituality, immigrant or refugee status, and sexual orientation with a view toward mitigating disparities. The basic premise of the course is that working with experientially based self-help, support, and advocacy groups (including 12-step mutual help groups) offers opportunities to social workers and other behavioral and mental health professionals to increase their effectiveness. Many professionals already interact in various ways with self-help and mutual help groups and many more could do so if they were familiar with self-help knowledge and practices. The goal is to enhance provider competencies by exploring use best practices for coordinating with self-help/mutual help groups and fellowships. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This advanced action-based learning course will focus on direct practice and implementation of interpersonal psychotherapy for mood disorders. The focus of this course is on the concepts, theory, principles and practice to the assessment and interpersonal psychotherapy of adults and adolescents with mood disorders in a variety of practice settings. The course content reflects advanced material of current relevance for effective and evidence-based clinical social work practice. Specifically, this mini-course will provide updated training in the Interpersonal Psychotherapy treatment of mood disorders. This course will review diagnostic criteria and assessment, but will mainly focus on clinical skills and will be an interactive seminar type class. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | Suicide is a leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Suicide risk assessment, risk formulation, and treatment are consistently difficult in practice and greater attention to this public health issue and prevention efforts are needed, especially so, by social workers who provide the majority of mental health services in the U.S. This mini course is designed for MSW students who are focused on interpersonal practice and will cover the following topics: the critical issue of suicide (prevalence), suicide-risk assessment (risk and protective factors, warning signs, all components of the Columbia scale), risk formulation (determining next steps after assessment), and prevention approaches (multi-level prevention at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels). Students will have the opportunity to apply knowledge and practice skills with use of case studies, roleplays, and simulations. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host), Social Work Practice with Older Adults and Families from a Lifespan Perspective, Welfare of Children & Families |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | Social workers and other service providers will gain an understanding what human trafficking is and how they can help victims of human trafficking that they encounter in their field of practice, with a particular emphasis on healthcare settings. We will explore the root causes of human trafficking, and our role in perpetuating and combating the underlying causes. We will take a critical perspective on what it means to help a victim of trafficking, as well-intentioned interventions can unwittingly cause the individual's arrest or deportation. Further, we will examine guiding principles for successful engagement with this population, including trauma-informed care, cultural awareness, and harm reduction. Finally, we will hear about local resources that providers can use if they suspect a client is a victim of human trafficking. In this course you will have the opportunity to develop an idea to solve this real world human rights problem. Teams are organizationally the functioning unit of the course. Students will work collaboratively across disciplines to create tools to increase identification of victims in health care settings. Class sessions will focus heavily on prototyping potential solutions and collaboratively generating ideas and next steps. Students will also be expected to spend significant time outside of class working in teams to reach out to relevant stakeholders, conduct research, draft documents, and otherwise work toward the creation of the intervention. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This advanced action-focused learning course will focus on direct practice and implementation of multi-family psychoeducation (FPE) for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder including adults, adolescents, children and their families across the lifespan. A comparison of family psychoeducation groups and other similar methods will be explored. Emphasis will be given to practical application of therapy techniques and troubleshooting difficult and challenging clinical circumstances. This course will focus on developing the group work skills necessary to implement evidence-based multi-family psychoeducation interventions in work with adults, adolescents, children and their families. Special emphasis will be given to the family psychoeducation approach using multiple family groups in the treatment of severe psychiatric disorders. This course will examine the theoretical and empirical foundations for family psychoeducation, as well as, the practice of multifamily group treatment in schizophrenia, bi-polar illness, major depressive disorder, borderline personality disorder and with children and adolescents with serious mental illnesses. An overview of cultural considerations in family psychoeducation will also be provided. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
|---|---|
| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This advanced action-based learning course will focus on direct practice and implementation of the cognitive-behavioral treatment for OCD. Several case examples will be utilized and students will engage in role-play and detailed class discussion focused on these techniques. Emphasis will be given to practical application of therapy techniques and troubleshooting difficult and challenging clinical cases. The course will also include strategies for enhancing adherence to behavioral homework exercises. An overview of empirically established cultural adaptations of CBT for OCD will also be provided. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
|---|---|
| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This advanced action-based learning course will focus on direct practice and implementation of the cognitive-behavioral treatment with children and youth with anxiety disorders. Several case examples will be utilized and students will engage in role-play and detailed class discussion focused on these techniques. Emphasis will be given to practical application of therapy techniques and troubleshooting difficult and challenging clinical cases. The course will also include strategies for enhancing adherence to behavioral homework exercises. An overview of empirically established cultural adaptations of CBT with children and youth with anxiety disorders will also be provided. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
|---|---|
| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | DBT is an empirically supported treatment for individuals with severe emotionally regulation problems. Part of the treatment consists of teaching individuals specific skill sets in mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation and crisis management. This advanced action-based learning course will focus on direct practice and implementation of dialectical behavior therapy for borderline personality disorder and other psychiatric and psychological problems. This course will cover dialectical behavioral therapy approaches to address suicidal thoughts and actions, self-harm, emotion dysregulation, behavioral dysregulation, cognitive dysregulation, and self-dysregulation. Emphasis will be given to practical application of therapy techniques and troubleshooting difficult and challenging clinical circumstances. An overview of cultural considerations for dialectical behavioral therapy will also be provided.Students will learn an overview of these skills and strategies to integrate these skills into their clinical practice in a variety of individual and group therapy settings. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This course will examine practice theory and techniques relevant to social work in a rural setting. There are many definitions of what might be considered a rural community. For the purposes of this course, we will define communities as rural that have a population size of 2,500 to 20,000 with no major metropolitan area within hour of the community. Rural communities are often plagued with similar problems as vast metropolitan areas such as high poverty rates, inadequate housing, and inadequate access to health care. However, the scarcity of resources and professionals including medical providers, socio-economic underdevelopment, and physical distance from services and lack of public transportation are frequently identified as compounding factors of living in a rural community. The impact of differences in the key diversity dimensions such as ability, age, class, color, culture, ethnicity, family structure, gender (including gender identity and gender expression) marital status, national origin, race, religion or spirituality, sex, and sexual orientation will be examined, within the context of practicing in a rural community. This course will also emphasize issues of ethical practice as defined by the social work code of ethics within a rural community. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | The term “post-truth,” the Oxford Dictionaries 2016 Word of the Year, reflects an era where everyone is a few clicks away from information that supports any goal, belief, or outcome desired whether or not that information is factual. Evaluating information and recognizing “fake news” is a critical skill for everyone. For social workers, advocates, policy makers, and others responsible for human well-being, it’s essential to find reliable data and other evidence to promote best practice and avoid the dangers of inaccurate information. Skill in locating and evaluating information can also help a practitioner work with clients and others who bring incorrect information into an interaction. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Community Change, Management & Leadership, Policy & Political Social Work (Host), Program Evaluation and Applied Research |
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| Credits: | 3 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | Through a team-based, experiential, and interdisciplinary learning model, small groups of U-M graduate and professional students work with faculty to explore and offer solutions to emerging, complex problems. This course is offered through the Law School’s Problem Solving Initiative and the topics vary by semester. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse, Policy & Political Social Work (Host), Program Evaluation and Applied Research |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | In this course, students will participate in a simulation in which they will take on the role of policymakers, policy advocates, and community stakeholders. Students will be assigned a role, will research their character, and will engage with the other participants as that character throughout the duration of the simulation. Students will engage with each other in person as well as utilize an online platform to develop coalitions and attempt to sway those with differing positions to their side. Simulation topics vary by semester. The class may be taken multiple times for credit as long as a different topic is selected. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Policy & Political Social Work (Host), Social Work Practice with Older Adults and Families from a Lifespan Perspective |
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| Credits: | 3 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | Understanding the implications of early childhood relationships on adult functioning can provide a powerful framework for creating goals and intervention in adult psychotherapy. Using attachment theory as the foundation, this course will address relationship-based intervention with adults. Students will learn the role of attachment in the development and maintenance of cognitive, emotional and behavioral strategies that adults use to manage needs for autonomy and connection, in social, family and romantic relationships. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This one credit course will focus on the use of an experiential and adventure practice approach (theories, models, tools and techniques) for therapeutic purposes with individuals, groups and families. Students are expected to come with a foundational understanding of clinical work (in particular, some knowledge of clinical group facilitation), and experiential learning. Theoretical models of clinical experiential and adventure practice will be offered and discussed in tandem with clinical social work theories and models of practice. Evidence-based literature will be reviewed that promote nature-based, experiential and adventure interventions that build on strengths and resources of individuals and their families, and that integrate components of other evidence-based practices into the experiential and adventure methodologies. Inclusive and accessible practices will be discussed and demonstrated, especially due to the outdoor and natural setting involved and the physicality of many of the tools used in the approach. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host), Welfare of Children & Families |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | ACT is an evidence-informed approach that utilizes acceptance, mindfulness strategies and commitment to engage clients in behavioral change strategies. This approach has been established as effective in treating clients with a variety of clinical diagnoses. This course will explore foundational ACT concepts as they apply to clinical assessment and clinical interventions with clients including self-acceptance, cognitive defusion, being present, self as context, values clarification and committed action. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | Understanding the implications of childhood relationships on adult functioning can provide a powerful framework for creating goals and intervention in adult psychotherapy. Using attachment theory as the foundation, this course will address relationship-based intervention with adults. Students will learn the role of attachment in the development and maintenance of strategies that adults use to manage needs for autonomy and connection, in social, family and romantic relationships. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host), Social Work Practice with Older Adults and Families from a Lifespan Perspective, Welfare of Children & Families |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This mini course will provide an overview of social work practice in higher education settings and will cover micro, mezzo, and macro practice. Content will include how social work values, concepts and interventions are able to be applied in campus based settings. Course participants will explore the various opportunities to practice social work competencies using the interdisciplinary approach within the post-secondary education culture. Special attention will be given to the ways social workers are uniquely trained to respond to emergent issues and populations on college campuses including students in recovery, first generation college students, under-represented students, sexual misconduct policy and response and implementation of diversity equity and inclusion initiatives. This interactive course will use lecture, guest speakers/panelists, and group discussion to explore the roles social workers may hold on college campuses and how they adhere to social work values and ethics while also translating their skills to this unique setting. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This mini-course will acquaint students with the basic and advanced facts about HIV/AIDS and sensitize students to the multitude of public health, social policy and social service delivery issues that AIDS presents, and provide US and global perspectives to HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention. Students will be sensitized to the special challenges AIDS presents for social work practice. Students will be presented with an approach to evidence based practice, and will review the state of HIV related evidence based prevention practice from national and global perspectives. |
| Pathway Elective For: | Global Social Work Practice, Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (Host) |
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| Credits: | 1 |
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| Prerequisites: | None |
| Course Description: | This course presents advanced topics in Policy & Political Social Work. The topics may include emerging practice issues and advanced application of specific methods. |
University of Michigan
School of Social Work
1080 South University Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106