Through course readings, in-class activities, audio-visual media, guest speakers, course assignments, and service-learning activities, students will:

1. Demonstrate the ability to appreciate and understand the impact of trauma on health outcomes, the contribution of trauma to increasing health disparities, and the impact of integrated and trauma-informed care as a critical component of care for people who are survivors of trauma.
2. Demonstrate understanding of trauma reactions, and tailor trauma interventions and assessments in ways that honor and account for individual, cultural, community, and organizational diversity.
3. Demonstrate the ability to identify and understand the practitioners’ and clients’ intersecting identities (e.g., gender, age, sexual orientation, disability status, racial/ethnicity, SES, military status, rural/urban, immigration status, religion, national origin, indigenous heritage, gender identification) as related to trauma, and articulate the practitioners’ own biases, assumptions, and problematic reactions emerging from trauma work and cultural differences.
4. Demonstrate understanding of how trauma impacts a survivor, the family system (including parents and caregivers), community, and organizations’ sense of safety and trust, and apply the professional demeanor, attitude, and behavior to enhance the survivors’ and organizations’ sense of physical and psychological safety.
5. Demonstrate the ability to recognize practitioners’: (1) Capacity for self-reflection and tolerance for intense effect and content; (2) Ethical responsibility for self-care; and (3) Self-awareness of how one’s own history, values, and vulnerabilities impact trauma treatment delivery.
6. Demonstrate the ability to attend to trauma-related material non-judgmentally and non-punitively with empathy, respect, dignity, and a belief in recovery and resilience.
7. Demonstrate an understanding of how legal, ethical, and public policy issues affect trauma work with individuals, organizations, and communities.
8. Demonstrate the ability to educate and communicate trauma-specific knowledge effectively to multiple audiences, including those communities and organizations that are acutely impacted by trauma.
9. Demonstrate understanding that institutions and systems can contribute to primary and secondary trauma, and offer strategies to reduce these barriers as appropriate.
10. Demonstrate the ability to consistently recognize how cultural, historical, and intergenerational transmission of trauma influences the perception of helpers.

Week 1: The importance of understanding trauma and trauma-informed care
Week 2: Frameworks for understanding trauma theory, research, and practice
Week 3: What is trauma? Acute, chronic, complex, historical, and system-induced traumatic exposure
Week 4: The science of trauma: Neurobiology, epigenetics, ACEs, toxic stress, and resilience
Week 5: Understanding the impact of trauma – Part I: Emotional, social, relational, and cognitive components
Week 6: Understanding the impact of trauma – Part II: Individual, family, community, political, and sociocultural components
Week 7: Understanding the impact of trauma – Part III: Trauma-related disorders, diagnostic comorbidity, and the complexity continuum
Week 8: What is trauma-informed care?
Week 9: Applying trauma-informed care – Part I: Child welfare, school, juvenile justice, housing, and leisure
Week 10: Trauma-informed care across multiple sectors
Week 11: Understanding and working with specialized populations – Part I: Victims/survivors
Week 12: Understanding and working with specialized populations – Part II: Offenders/perpetrators
Week 13: Evidence-informed approaches for working with trauma-impacted individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities
Week 14: Human rights, ethical, legal, diversity, and cultural considerations
Week 15: Looking forward: Anti-oppressive, anti-racist, healing-centered, culturally sustaining, and liberatory approaches to care