YFM5100EN - Advanced Family Systems & Culture

Course description

An integrated understanding of individuals, couples, and families within the cultural context. It will offer a study of the family as a system and the difficulties that families experience as they move through life and encounter people from different cultural backgrounds. The course will tackle misconceptions about different culture.

How this course benefits students

We live in a world of diversity and our country (United States of America) is one of the most diverse nations. Diversity poses unique challenges to professionals as they must contend with different languages, cultural beliefs, and biases inherent in culture. Each individual’s cultural context is unique, but sometimes conflicting ideologies and the clash between traditionalism and modern society can isolate people from interacting with others respectfully. This course is designed to provide the students with the tools necessary to understand cultural competence. The student will not only spend significant time learning about other cultures, but also learning about his or her own culture and how misunderstandings impact their own beliefs and ideologies. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to handle culturally sensitive scenarios that can deeply impact their profession.

Why this course is important

cultural immersion exercises and cultural paper where students will be asked to write 10-12 page paper on a group that is culturally or ethnically different from their own origin. This will enable students to experiment and acknowledge differences.

Credit hours
3 hours
Subject area
Youth & Family
Educational level
Master
Learning type
Instructional
Prerequisites
None
Upcoming terms
Pending
* Schedule subject to change. Please contact the Registrar's office with schedule questions.
Professor
Dr. Winnie Nkhoma, Professor of Youth & Family Services

How this course relates to missional core values

Biblically based

This course will be based on Galatians 3: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Students will learn that we come from different families and cultural backgrounds however, in Christ, we are all one family and we must respect and honor each other.

Missionally driven

Our goal is to spread the word of God throughout the world and this course will capture enhance this by bringing understanding. People will begin to understand that God created us all in his image. Therefore, we must spread his world across the universe and respect individuals and cultural differences.

Contextually informed

Family Systems and cultural issues is a critical component within our society and should be addressed from a biblical perspective. We must understand the impact of group oppression, acculturation, and assimilation, on individuals and families systems. It is also important that students learn on cross cultural interaction skills. This will enable them to become more mobile in today’s society.

Interculturally focused

A course on family Systems in the cultural context is essential. It will enable both the student’s learner and the professor to understand the impact of privilege of race and class and prejudice as it relates to working relations. It will also give students the ability to recognized their limits of their competencies related to providing therapy or counseling to individuals who are culturally and ethnically different.

Practically minded

Involvement and learning in this course will be facilitated through discussion of assigned readings, lectures, viewing and discussion of videos. Lecture notes, class reading assignments and resources will be made available to student at MU online

Experientially transformed

The learning in this course will be more powerful on the experimental level. There will be reflective journaling