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Graduate Diploma in Christian Counselling
The Graduate Diploma in Counselling course is designed to prepare people wishing to be involved in the counselling profession or related fields of Christian ministry to undertake formal study at the graduate level. The course aims to provide a clinical training year that builds upon prior study in counselling, psychology, or a counselling related discipline at the undergraduate level. As such, it presupposes a background in psychology and/or related social sciences at the undergraduate level.
The input from various external Assessment/Review Panels, national course review Working Parties, professional counselling associations practising counsellors and educators is reflected in the design of the course. The course was developed to meet the needs of students and Christian counselling agencies and churches for training in counselling at the Graduate Diploma level that incorporates a Christian perspective. The course has a deliberate emphasis on practical clinical training. This is reflected in its practical core modules.
The practical core modules provide the student with the theoretical and practical experiences required to function effectively in a variety of church, para-church and community-based settings as a counsellor. At the heart of the Graduate Diploma course is a year long counselling practicum. This provides students with the opportunity to learn counselling from experience. The Counselling Theories and Interventions module and Case Conference module deliberately interact with the Counselling Practicum, following an action learning format, where students reflect upon their practicum experience in the class tutorials, while applying what they are learning in the tutorials in their work with clients in their practicum as they progress through the course.
Initially the practical experiences are in class exercises and role plays and assignments that require students to understand and effectively apply generic counselling and communication skills in a structured counselling interview setting. Through the year students are exposed to a variety of theoretical approaches to counselling, so they can develop theoretically based counselling strategies in their work with clients. Simultaneously, students develop a familiarity with common psychological problems counsellors encounter, and appropriate therapeutic interventions for addressing these problems.
Progressively a greater degree of independence is required of the student in the counselling practicum. The student will initially progress from observing counselling settings to increasing active participation in counselling settings under the supervision of an experienced counsellor to working independently with his or her own clients as the supervising counsellor judges the student has developed sufficient expertise to competently work with counselling clients. This progressive process from observation to independent counselling work will vary between placement sites, taking into account the individual abilities of students, and unique requirements and ethos of counselling agencies students have placements with.
Adequate professional training in counselling requires a familiarity with the professional ethical standards of the counselling field. These are addressed in the module on Professional Ethics. Counselling requires the deployment of the counsellor as a person in the counselling process to a greater extent than other professions. In the module Counsellor Self-Care, students are encouraged to explore themselves, develop reflective self-awareness, and learn essential principles of self-care and maintaining personal boundaries, in order to minimize the risk of burn-out and dangerous counter transferences and boundary erosions, which can result in negligence and mal-practice.
The inclusion of an Elective Strand in the course provides the student with the opportunity to pursue the study of subjects or areas that have a personal appeal. Subject selection is governed by two considerations, to provide students with additional learning opportunities that develop an area of relative weakness, and to provide additional learning that is pertinent to a student’s area of interest or anticipated field of work.
The need for this course is assessed on the changing needs for counselling services not only within the church but also in the wider community. The design of this course takes into consideration place of the contemporary church and its practical and long-term ministry needs as well as developing community standards for basic training courses in the field of counselling. Tabor College is in a unique position to offer such a design as there is the scope and exposure across the range of denominations as well as across the disciplines of psychology, ministry and theology.