SOCI 305 Counseling Skills
This course facilitates the development of counseling skills and provides foundational education in core helping skills necessary to the preparation of counselors, teachers, and other professionals involved in human service delivery. While the counseling profession operates in a variety of settings, this course focuses on the helping strategies and interventions applicable to different groups and reaching across cultural divides with counseling skills to become optimally effective agents of change through therapeutic relationships. Students will examine basic concepts in counseling, function of the helper, the demands, strains, and barriers of the helping professions and their effects on the helper. Discussions will include the struggles, anxieties, and uncertainties of helpers. Central to this course will be an on-going self-evaluation of the students' attitudes, values, interpersonal skills, and motives for choosing counseling as a potential profession. The primary purpose of the course, however, is to provide students with the opportunity to learn and practice the basic skills of helping and provide students with an orientation to the field of counseling. Evaluation will be based on evidence of intrapersonal and interpersonal helping skills as demonstrated in role-play and/or written assignments. Didactic material aimed at fostering competency in the area of professional ethics and multicultural sensitivity also will be included. Prerequisites: SOCI 105 AND SOC 115