Course Offerings

SMB Practica Selections

Requirement: ​All students must register for ONE practicum in the Incoming Year. If you are taking Animal Human Bond you may take a second practicum in the first year. Otherwise you must wait until the second year to take a second practicum of the following: Wellness, Entrepreneurship, or Education.

SMBI Wellness Center Practicum
Instructor​: Traci Stein
3 credits Fall semester + Mandatory Spring 1-credit Independent Study = 4 credits total

Course Description: ​SMBI is a practicum site for TC students to develop their method of a spiritually-based wellness practice. The SMBI Wellness Center offers weekly spiritually oriented groups using diverse modalities such as yoga, contemplative practices, and other forms of inner or bodily work under supervision. The SMBI Wellness Center offers a unique and exciting opportunity to contribute to the growth of TC’s community of students, faculty and staff. Students will participate in a wide range of activities that support a successful spiritually-oriented workshop: literature review and rationale for workshop, general marketing, participant recruitment, weekly group process notes and supervision, and data collection. Students will liaise between the wellness center’s Clinical Training Director, Wellness Center Coordinator, Supervision Instructors, Research Study Directors, and relevant TC Staff (e.g. Title IX coordinator, Office of Diversity). The Fall course will concentrate on the development of a multi-week offering inspired by the interest/skillset of the student (e.g., self-compassion for stress reduction). Depending on student interest and instructor availability, a supervision-only Spring semester may be offered for students to continue to practice and refine their original offering.

Schools With Spirit: Cultivating The Social, Emotional and Inner Lives Of Teachers and Students
Instructor​: Linda Lantieri
3 credits Fall & 2-3 credits Spring semester, yearlong requirement

Course Description: ​Is it possible for public schools to nurture the hearts and spirits of children and teachers without violating the beliefs of families of the separation of church and state? Many courage educators are beginning to acknowledge that cultivating the inner lives of children can become a regular part of a child’s school experience. Using principles derived from modern brain research and various wisdom traditions, this course will explore how the adults in children’s lives can cultivate the habits of mind, body and spirit it will take to integrate contemplative teaching and learning and social and emotional learning into the culture, climate and curriculum of the k-12 school experience. This course will explore how we can approach spirituality in education in an open and non-dogmatic way that deepens each of our inner experiences as well as the children we serve.

Archetypal Symbolism: The Creative Psyche in Art and Therapy
Instructor: ​Aurelie Athan, Ph.D.
3 Credits Spring Semester

Course description​: This workshop explores the transformative power of symbols and archetypes. It places the imagination and our creative engagement with the mythopoetic structure of the psyche at the heart of learning, change, and well-being. Symbols are everywhere, around us and inside of us, yet we rarely take the time to encounter these portals of self-understanding; nor might we know how to extract the meaning offered. The purpose of this class is to mobilize an “inner guidance system” to shift from an external preoccupation to an internal relationship to one’s professional calling.

Analytical Psychology: Jung to the Present
Instructor: ​Mark Kuras, Ph.D.
3 Credits Fall Semester

Course description: ​Analytical Psychology is the foundation course in a two-course sequence in Jungian theory. This course is focused on the “spiritual” trajectory-- shamanism, mythology, religion, hypnotism, Freudian depth psychology--that braces Jung’s work and provides the historical context for Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious” that informed his theory of dreams, symptoms and fantasy and eventually culminated in his structural model of Psyche, i.e. Persona/Shadow, Anima, Self.

Methods of Individuation
Instructor: ​Mark Kuras, Ph.D.
3 Credits Spring Semester

Course description:​ Methods in Individuation, the second course, focuses on the methods, with emphasis on Active Imagination, Jung devised to revisit a sensuality to psychical life progressively suppressed in Western Consciousness and essential to establishing the empirical data integral to Jung’s vision of therapeutic action, i.e. the Self and its Individuation.

Positive Psychology
Instructor: ​Dan Tomasulo, Ph.D.
3 Credits Fall or Spring Semester

Course description: ​This course will investigate the use of evidence based interventions and their modifications derived from positive psychology. We learn to see not only what is wrong-but also what is strong in ourselves and others. Lectures, experiential and meditative exercises, videos, demonstrations, and discussions.