Children, Youth & Families

This course will provide a macro lens to assess and engage with various social services, policies, and programs that provide developmental, preventive, protective, and rehabilitative services for children, youth, and families. Students will be introduced to major policies and macro-level issues within the education, child welfare, and juvenile justice systems.

This course will provide foundational knowledge about developing and sustaining a school or organizational culture that is trauma-informed. The course will incorporate principles of interprofessional education, which focuses on helping students in the professions work collaboratively in generalist and specialty practice roles. A primary goal of the course is to prepare students to use interprofessional and team-based strategies to achieve organizational change.

This course will examine practice theories and techniques for working directly with children ages eighteen months to nine years, and their caregivers, via play therapy. This course will emphasize evidence-based play therapies that address diverse groups of young children. Special attention will be given to the meaning of play across cultures, as well as the role of play in the healthy development of children.

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.

This course is intended to develop knowledge and skills for practice with children, youth and families, with special attention to assessment. Students learn about varying approaches to assessment, the various contexts in which assessment takes place, and the assessment skills used with children, youth, and families. Students will be familiar with both strengths and limitations of assessments, and how assessments are used (e.g., in school, juvenile justice, and child welfare forensic assessment) including assessments for intervention recommendations.

In this course, students will be exposed to various theoretical frameworks informing policy development and gain an understanding of basic economic principles frequently employed in policy debates and discussions. With this knowledge, students will be able to identify, in a more sophisticated and nuanced way, policies that promote social justice and those that do not; understand how certain theoretical frameworks and ideas have been used to oppress and empower different groups, and identify points of interventions within existing institutions.

This course will address the theoretical framework of human loss and grief from a culturally and philosophically diverse perspective. Students will be provided with information about why and how humans grieve and how grieving is affected by type of loss, socioeconomic and cultural factors, individual personality and family functioning. Attention will be focused on life span development and the meaning of death and loss at different ages. Various types of loss will be discussed from an individual, family, and socio/cultural/ecological perspective.

Substance abuse represents a major public health concern facing America’s youth. Although all adolescents are directly or indirectly impacted by substance abuse, racial and ethnic minority youth are disproportionately impacted. Social workers play a key role in health promotion and disease prevention, including prevention, intervention and rehabilitation of substance abuse among racial and ethnic minority adolescents in urban settings.

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 course will survey the distribution, determinants, and biomedical, psychological and behavioral aspects of health inclusive of physical, mental and behavioral health and disease across the life span from pre-birth to death. Social, economic, environmental, structural and cultural variations in and determinants of health, disease, and quality of life will be addressed, including the influence of factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, geography, ability, biological, genetic and epigenetic factors.