Student Handbook
The Master of Arts in Counseling program at EMU strives to achieve the highest standards of professional excellence in providing psychologically and spiritually grounded training for counselors. We seek to create a community atmosphere within the program, a community bold with creative ideas and open with honesty, partnering in the inner work counselor training requires.
Curriculum
Philosophy | Counselor Formation | Student Objectives
Program Tracks | Coursework | Writing Standards
Philosophy
The curriculum for the Master of Arts in Counseling degree encompasses a wide diversity of experiences, values, and perspectives. The curriculum is much more than the courses offered. It includes the advising and supervision processes, which are deeply concerned with the character and ethical identity of the counselor-in-training, and the initiation into an ethical community of practitioners. It includes peer resourcing and peer collaboration, fostered in daily work and acknowledged in Counseling Student Association membership and student membership in professional organizations such as the American Counseling Association and the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, and their state organizations. The curriculum connects students to the broader community in many ways, including most importantly, the practicum and internship counseling placements. Finally, the curriculum includes more than these structured components in giving expression to nothing less than the character and practices of our total life together as a counselor mentoring community.
The counseling curriculum seeks to model self-aware counseling practice informed by empirically validated assessment and intervention strategies. In extensive practice opportunities in various community counseling placements our goal is to model and promote self-reflective practice by utilizing multiple levels of supervision and feedback. The content courses in the curriculum work diligently to help students understand and become intelligent utilizers of counseling research. We work constantly to find new ways to bring research and practice into productive dialog.
While the counseling curriculum takes seriously the importance of shared counseling language and generalizeable theoretical orientations, we teach and model our belief in the sacredness of individual lives. We seek to help students uncover and develop their own special and unique gifts. Embedded throughout the curriculum is an emphasis on the particularity of clients' personal, family and cultural identities. We teach systems perspectives, which honor unique identities at every level, from personality to family to culture, religion, and nationality. We strive to genuinely integrate multicultural understanding and experiences across the entire structured and nonstructured curriculum.
The curriculum is firmly situated in the broader context of the Mennonite faith tradition. This tradition sensitizes us to an ethic of mutual caring and community building that emphasizes both individual adjustment and just social structures. This orientation applies equally to clients and their life contexts, and to counselors’ personal identities and the ethical aspirations of their profession.
Counselor Formation
Counselor formation is the process of internalizing a professional counselor identity. Counselor formation refers to both inner and outer development, being inclusive of development in self-awareness and maturity in articulating personal identity as well as adequate ability in meeting professional standards in counseling and an organized and articulate reflection on one’s own approach to counseling.
The performance of the student through this counselor formation process forms the basis on which the faculty assesses the level of character and competency required for admission to candidacy and graduation. These expectations are further defined in the following list of over-arching student objectives.
Student Objectives
A graduate of the Eastern Mennonite University Master of Arts in Counseling program will
- Be prepared academically and possess the requisite clinical and professional skills to begin work as a counselor-in-training (the name given to the graduate completing supervision hours before licensure) toward professional counseling licensure, or be certified for licensure as a school counselor;
- Meet program expectations in the areas of professional responsibility, theoretical and procedural knowledge, and personal and professional development;
- Be an informed member of the relevant professional organization(s);
- Demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of the major theories of counseling and provide individual counseling to clients;
- Provide group counseling services to clients;
- Demonstrate a knowledge of the major theories of career development and be able to provide career/lifestyle counseling to clients;
- Describe the major consultation models and demonstrate how to provide consultation services to clients;
- Administer and interpret standardized psychological tests that assess ability, achievement, aptitude, interest, and personality;
- Demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of multicultural approaches to counseling;
- Demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of human development across the life span;
- Read research and use it to improve clinical practice, and be able to conduct program evaluation research;
- Demonstrate the ability to integrate Christian and spiritual perspectives into counseling practice;
- Have internalized and be able to articulate an effective and theoretically grounded counselor identity;
- Utilize self-examination and supervision effectively to improve counseling effectiveness;
- Be able to articulate the values and ethical principles of the profession, and apply these with personal integrity;
- Have effective ways to commit themselves to service to others and to take care of themselves in this difficult work; and
- Experience joy and a sense of purpose in their counseling calling.
Community Counseling
The Community Counseling track, which prepares students for clinical practice as a licensed profession counselor, is a 60-semester hour, CACREP approved track.
The Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) is the national accrediting body for professional counseling. Not all counseling programs are CACREP accredited. To be accredited a program must demonstrate high standards in a wide variety of programmatic areas. The Community Counseling track is CACREP approved.
Coursework
The content of the counseling coursework is largely structured through the standards of the Commonwealth of Virginia and CACREP. Copies of these standards are kept in the main office and may be obtained through the administrative assistant. The CACREP standards in particular help somewhat to standardize educational requirements across states, so that degree work should meet educational requirements for professional counselors in most states. There are differences among states, however, that the student should carefully research if they plan to work in another state.
Curriculum plans for Community Counseling may be found in this handbook. For students doing the degree in two years, very little deviation from these plans is possible. The two-year program is very demanding: students planning a two-year program should have the financial resources to permit full-time study, and have a high degree of emotional maturity. Students extending their studies to three or more years should work with a faculty advisor to plan a personalized course of study. Many students prefer the less stressful three or four year program.
The Student Rating Sheet is the way course requirements and grades are documented within the program. The Rating Sheet is a helpful way to review curriculum course requirements and current status. The Administrative Assistant keeps each student’s Rating Sheet up to date, and copies are placed in the student’s departmental file, given to the student, and given to the student’s advisor.
A specially designated series of courses within the curriculum, Counselor Formation I - III and the Professional Clinical Seminar comprise the counselor formation course sequence. Culminating in the Professional Clinical Seminar, these courses are structured as cycles of repeated work on the common topics of personal and professional identity as a counselor, membership in the counseling profession, ethical frameworks, skills, theory and application, case conceptualization and presentation, and orientation to the next stages in counselor education and development. The Professional Clinical Seminar is our capstone project, and forms one significant piece of the faculty review of each student prior to approval for graduation.
Writing Standards
The style standard for written work within the program is APA. A copy of the APA Publication Manual is kept in the main office for student use, and students are encouraged to purchase their own copy. A helpful synopsis of the APA standards may be found here: http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html.
The graduate programs of the university have also formulated standard guidelines for quality graduate student writing, which serve as a reference point for professors’ grading of written work.
While professors may be very helpful in editing written work, the expectation is that any work submitted is largely grammatically correct and structured in correct APA style. Professors have the prerogative of not accepting written work that falls substantially below these standards.
The EMU Learning Center provides assistance specially geared to graduate student writing.
