This elective equips students to apply TIC across systems and populations. Students explore trauma’s historical and life-course impacts, TIC principles, and structural influences on access and resilience while practicing assessment, integration, and ethical and policy frameworks promoting safety, trust, resilience, and culturally responsive well-being for individuals, families, groups, and communities.
Athena Title
Trauma Informed Care (TIC)
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in SOWK 7140E
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall, spring and summer
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
Students will explain historical and contemporary perspectives on trauma and the evolution of trauma-informed care as a framework for micro- to macro-level systems change.
Students will analyze the impact of trauma on individuals, families, communities, and organizations, including its role in shaping disparities.
Students will apply trauma-informed care principles to assess needs and design responsive interventions across diverse systems and settings, including schools, hospitals, community programs, and organizations.
Students will examine the interplay between direct practice, policy, and practitioner self-awareness, including how individual, contextual, and systemic factors influence trauma experiences, access to care, and the implementation of trauma informed care.
Students will demonstrate professional and ethical behaviors (including reflection on personal biases, self-care practices, and responses to intense or distressing content) that foster safety, trust, and resilience.
Students will evaluate the influence of legal, ethical, and public policy contexts on trauma informed care and systems-level change.
Students will communicate trauma-related knowledge effectively to multiple audiences and constituencies.
Topical Outline
Frameworks for understanding trauma and trauma informed care theory, research and practice
What is trauma?
The science of trauma: Neurobiology, epigenetics, ACEs, toxic stress, and resilience
Understanding the impact of trauma
What is trauma informed care?
Applying trauma informed care across systems and sectors
Understanding and working with specialized populations
Evidence-informed practices with traumatized individuals, families and groups
Human rights, ethical, legal, diversity, and cultural considerations
Looking forward: Anti-oppressive, anti-racist, healing-centered, culturally sustaining, and liberatory approaches to trauma informed care
