This module explores the importance of self-identification as a negotiation and rapport building skill crucial to autonomy and dignity-filled practice. After this module, you’ll have an opportunity to craft your own introduction practice and build familiarity with naming yourself in the work.

This module explores assessing various risks associated with counselling work and building respective plans for safety through a systemic lens. We also explore what it means to build collaborative safety and what collaboration actually is. After this module, you’ll have thorough, practical, and integrate-able practices to address harm within your therapeutic work.

Through this module, we explore and critique how white supremacy shows up in our education, practices and lives, impeding our ability to be with clients and our ethics in the work. Upon completion of this module, you’ll have the opportunity to redefine your practice through collective ethics.

In this module, we explore the applications of intersectionality and confluence as theories that guide our conceptualization of ethical, justice-oriented practice. Upon completion of this module, you’ll have a framework to build complexity and nuance associated with global implications and systematic erasure into your therapeutic analysis.

Both intersectional feminism and liberation psychology offer foundational conceptualizations of the roots of psychological harm and promote models of care that aim to facilitate the healing of both the affected individual and the communities and systems they belong to. After this module, you’ll be familiar with both these empirically validated theories and have a framework to integrate these theories into your working models of conceptualization.

Through this module, we develop a critique of psychology’s complicity a punitive logic that is empirically validated to be in opposition to wellness. After this module and in integrating abolitionist framework into counselling practice, you’ll be able to incorporate community-focused, dignity-centered ways of addressing power within counselling as well as ways to support clients in resistance to carceral logic.

Anti-colonial practice requires practitioners to be able to explore the process and impact of continual colonization on turtle island. Through this analysis we learn from Indigenous resistance and wisdom, deconstructing what has been normalized by the colonial roots of our profession. After this module, you’ll have a framework to support practice and continual learning from an anti-colonial lens.

Through this module we will discuss race as a social construct while identifying the reality of racism alongside the resistance, activism, and community healing within BIPOC communities. After completing this module, you’ll be able to describe the connections of racism on mental health; use anti-racist practices in relation to the self and within counselling practice; and support clients through a resistance-based framework.

An in-depth consideration of spirituality and religion is often ignored in counselling programs even though they are fundamental aspects of client experience. An unfamiliarity in exploring these concepts further compounds the specific oppression experienced by folx holding non-colonial faiths. After completing this module, you’ll be able to invite spiritual/religious practices within counselling practices; become aware of your own biases around religion/spirituality; and recognize the impact of spiritual/religious practices on mental health and healing.

This module was designed to support practitioners in beginning to examine cisgenderism, patriarchy, and queer theory with a particular focus on the importance of language, social constructs, and how they impact the ways we understand gender and sex. It will also describe the ways that queer theory impacts counselling outside of gender and sex through an intersectional lens. Upon completing this module, you’ll be able to apply queer theory beyond your understanding of gender and sex, recognizing the ways social constructs and language limit counselling work.

Exploring the impact of sexuality and relationship structures are often neglected clinical programs, largely due to the stigma associated with exploring sexuality and the normalization of purity culture. In this module, we will explore different relationship structures and the spectrum of sexual identities/expressions. Upon completing this module, participants will be able to use appropriate language when talking about sexuality and relationships in their counselling practices and unpack biases and assumptions of relationships and sexual identities/expressions that are non-cis-het-mononormative.

Through this module we will explore the intergenerational impacts of classism and class mobility, examine classism through an intersectional lens - with special attention to capitalism, race, health, criminal legal system, access - and how this impacts mental health. Upon completing this module, participants will be able to identify the ways that counselling can be classist; implement practices that are more just to those with financial barriers; and understand the ways that mental health struggles are related to class through an intersectional lens.

Through this module, we will examine the impacts of ageism of biological health in relation to the medical system model within therapeutic practice. Upon completing this module, you’ll be able to weave an age analysis in relation to previous modules; identify the impacts of perceived age and access; and demonstrate knowledge of ethical considerations such as consent and autonomy.

Ableism is commonly the least explored -ism when speaking of anti-oppressive practice. In this module we will examine the deconstruction of ableist language and practices common in counselling, as well as describe the intersections of disability justice in relation to class and the criminal legal system. After this module, participants will be able to implement aspects of disability justice into their counselling practice; begin to distinguish counselling interventions through a disability justice lens; and co-create counselling practices that resist problematic, individualizing, and deficit-based narratives.

Healthism can erase contextual factors (including race, poverty, capitalism, and food deserts) and choice/autonomy. Through this module, we will explore the ways in which healthism and anti-fat bias intersect and its impacts on mental health, while naming the history around anti-fatness in relation to anti-Black racism and colonialism. After this module, you’ll be able to integrate a contextual approach to “health” and anti-fat bias that focuses on dignity and autonomy, recognizing the impact of anti-fatness in counselling and health settings.