Training
Linguistic Justice in Family Therapy
Students of our program come from various linguistic representations including Vietnamese, Arabic, Farsi, French, Italian, Hebrew, Ebonics, Spanglish, Spanish, Tagalog, AAVE, Punjabi, Urdu, or Hindi. The MFT program seeks to advocate for justice in language rights through the development of scholarly, pedagogical, and clinical experiences parallel and within the MFT curriculum in standard English.
Spanglish Family Therapy
Since 2018, the MFT program has been offering an opportunity for Spanglish-speaking students to participate in a specialized courses that not only prepares them with the theoretical, cultural, and linguistic skills and knowledge to conduct therapy in Spanish/Spanglish. It also provides them with educational opportunities to gain a further understanding of life possibilities opened by living simultaneously in two or more languages.
Spanglish is understood as the linguistic borderlands of the encounter between two imperial languages, Spanish and English, in U.S. territory. It includes various linguistic expressions of speakers of Pocho, Rancho, Chicanx, Tex Mex, Spanish, Castellano, Ingleñol, and any other borderland languages.
When there are sufficient numbers of Spanish/Spanglish speaking students in the cohort to enable the class experience to be delivered in Spanish/Spanglish, the courses below should be available for Spanish/Spanglish tutelage.
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CSP 600 L (1)* |
Cross-Cultural Counseling Prepracticum (summer) |
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CSP 730 (2) |
Spanglish and Decoloniality of Language (fall) |
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CSP 755 (3)* |
Practicum I: Marriage and Family Therapy (fall) |
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CSP 765 (3)* |
Practicum II: Marriage and Family Therapy (spring) |
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CSP 785 (3)* |
Marriage and Family Therapy Traineeship (fall) |
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CSP 785 (3)* |
Marriage and Family Therapy Traineeship (spring) |
*These courses count toward the MFT curriculum for degree completion
Spanglish Decolonial Healing Certificate
Students interested in furthering their skills and understanding about the Spanglish experience from a decolonial healing perspective can complete the Spanglish Decolonial Healing Advanced Certificate. You can find more information here or please contact marcela polanco at [email protected].
Silk Road Practicum
The Silk Road Practicum is a training context that creates opportunities for bilingual family therapists to engage, practice, and train around issues affecting communities along the historic “Silk Road”. While there is great cultural and linguistic variability amongst these communities, many of the geo-political and socio-cultural issues overlap in ways that create useful opportunities for students to learn from each other.
San Diego is a “Welcoming City'' which acknowledges its geopolitical location in the journey of migrants, and indicates the county’s support for and interest in providing services for incoming refugees and immigrants. In the last 20 years, there has been a large settlement of Middle Eastern and African families seeking refuge. Given this, there is a huge need for linguistically competent and culturally aware practitioners who can work with these communities. The Silk Road practicum responds to this need by creating an educational opportunity for students to engage with the necessary training to go into community agencies and clinics to provide services.
The Silk Road practicum supports bilingual speakers with access to the Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, and Sub-Asian (Hindi, Tamil, etc.) languages. This is a limited list, as there are many dialects spoken within these languages. The Silk Road honors the differences as well as similarities amongst these communities in response to a broader positioning by the U.S. political landscape that places “Middle Eastern'' practitioners with “Middle Eastern” clients without further consideration of the nuances of the geopolitical histories of these communities. Therefore, students are trained to not only work with their own language, but also to engage with communities who have been historically connected. For instance, an Iranian man may be positioned to work with Iraqi men, though these countries speak different languages and have a history of war. The political considerations necessary for humility and connection are unique to the politics of this region, and require ongoing conversations and approaches.
“Si la resistencia la pensás como oposición, es un caso. Pero si la pensás como tejido,
es otro. Y se teje con lo que hay. Y hay malo y hay bueno... Eso es así. Pero también
es así que en algún lado debe estar escondido nuestro yo comunal, aquello que nos
hace sentir parte de algo inmenso. Si pudiéramos hacer florecer eso, todo sería distinto.
Y eso no florece con palabras, quizá. Eso hay que hacerlo juntas...Hay ciertas cosas
que tenemos que vivir sin palabras. Y una de esas cosas es pensar en el cuerpo y en
la sexualidad sin palabras, porque eso sería definirlo con una identidad: lesbiana,
queer, mujer, trans. Nuestro rol como pensadoras es estar hoy a lado de la gente.
En silencio. Tenemos que reemplazar la rigidez de la Modernidad con el cuerpo a cuerpo,
el mano a mano, tejiendo juntas el yo comunal. Tenemos que aceptar que nosotras, hoy,
no tenemos una lengua que nos exprese. Toleremos esta transición sin cerrar nada.
Abramos."
- Maria Lugones (2019), Argentinian, Jota Philosopher (Taken from an interview with
Claudia Acuña in Lavaca)"
UPCOMING eVENTS
License to Freedom at the Margins of Domestic Violence
A Spanish decolonial healing project. The Middle Finger Sociedad Política/The Political Society's 'Pa’l Carajo' Initiative: License to Freedom at the Margins of Domestic Violence.
Date & Time: April 15 from 9:00am-2:30pm (PST)
Number of CEU's for CA: 5.5
Contributors:
Dilkhwaz Ahmed, Evelyng Cohen, Rachel Cratsenburg, Mohammed Darbi, Ayuja Dixit, Jenny
Leverman, Megan Rogers, Navid Zamani.
pAST eVENTS
Hear from our training supervisors
Mayumi Y. Douglass
Just as therapists are committed to effectively respond to the impact of their own values and beliefs on the therapeutic space, clinical supervisors are responsible for attending and responding to the multidimensional cultural identity of their supervisees. To me, providing culturally responsive supervision means: 1) paying attention to my values and beliefs regarding my role as a supervisor and how my cultural background influences the supervision relationship, 2) being curious about the cultural background of the supervisees and avoid making assumptions based on a single cultural aspect such as race, gender, etc. 3) maintaining a trauma-informed approach to supervision in which I attempt to understand the unique experiences of each supervisee and to adjust my supervision style to promote a development of their clinical skills, to strengthen their identity as mental health therapists, and to promote practicing self-care as often as needed.
Navid Zamani
I am honored to be a part of the License to Freedom counseling team where I support with supervision for Marriage and Family Therapists. In this capacity, I am interested in supporting a learning/training process that centers ethics, accountability, and theoretical intentionality in our work. While I practice from a Narrative theory perspective, I am necessarily cautious of "fidelity" to the practices that originate within the English language due to the multi-linguistic context of our work, particularly considering the histories of colonialism at the hands of English-speaking countries. I operate from a decolonial post-structural feminism, and am interested in training therapists who are intentional and political in their work.
Liane Fry
To provide culturally responsive supervision to my supervisees, the first goal of supervision is to establish a trusting and safe relationship with each supervisee. In general, that is created with the supervisor demonstrating positive rapport, being genuinely interested in each supervisee and their success as well as acting with integrity to develop a strong working alliance. As a supervisor, I must demonstrate cultural sensitivity as diversity factors of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion and others are welcomed and encouraged in the supervision space. Initial group supervision sessions start with group members revealing their personal stories to bring out diversity factors and cultivate an atmosphere of respect, exploration, and increased understanding. Further awareness exercises are sometime initiated as well as assigned readings and guest speakers intended to enlarge restrictive perspectives. The goal is to create a culturally responsive atmosphere that isomorphically affects the client and their families in a similar fashion.
Hear from our training FACULTY
Sesen Negash
I'm a bilingual first-generation Eritrean-American cisgender woman. The intersection of my identities color my world and inform how I choose to engage my role as a clinician, supervisor, instructor, and researcher. What I appreciate most about the MFT program at SDSU is that the students and faculty express values, beliefs, and experiences that enrich the clinical learning and training environment. We lean into each other's cultural differences with a healthy curiosity and genuine compassion. Additionally, our MFT students and faculty share unwavering support of our diverse communities and aim to contribute to the mental wellness of those communities using culturally responsive clinical perspectives and practices.
Diego Rogers
I am a bilingual first-generation Peruvian-American and fifth-generation Irish-American cisgender, heterosexual male born and raised in the South Bronx. These identities, along with other variables such as geographical, socio-economic, cultural, educational and occupational migrations, as well as direct and indirect experiences with mental health and substance use conditions deeply influence me as a psychologist and educator. I believe the SDSU MFT program embodies and celebrates cultural diversity by practicing cultural humility and approaching differences with curiosity, compassion and care for each other, and for the persons and communities we serve.
marcela polanco
Within the colonial system of categorization, my body is racially ranked as a Colombiana mestiza, immigrant, brown cis woman, middle class, heterosexual, able bodied with no religious affiliations. My ancestry is South-European by colonization; as well as Muisca, Pijao and Africana. Hablo two imperial languages, Español-Colombiano and 20 years-old U.S. Immigrant-English; also Spanglish. My urban life and work exists in, and benefits from unceded Kumeyaay land. As an educator, I participate in capitalist hence sexist, classist, and racist markets of Eurocentric professional knowledge and patriarchal science, in standard English. My colonial configuration influences my role in the MFT program, seeking to work with people that come to study with us to create a communal from where we expose coloniality together toward the re-existence of otherwise knowledges, healing, being, and the imaginary.
Navid Zamani
Gerald Monk