CORE 500 Convocation

Content: Convocation is the opportunity for the Graduate School community to come together across disciplines to honor the collective work we do. Convocation integrates students into the larger Lewis & Clark community, and makes cross-disciplinary connections. In service of these goals, students and faculty will share reflections about the role of creativity, compassion, and commitment in their respective professions and engage in small group discussions using a collection of common readings as catalysts.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 0 semester hours.

CORE 501 Graduate Seminars

Content: These experimental courses include a range of topics including the following: Audio Postcards, Theory and Practice of Dialogue, Resistance in the Classroom and Community, and Engaging Boys: Educational and Counseling Contexts. Offered in varied formats to meet the needs of adult learners.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

CORE 504 Journey Through Change

Content: This course will explore the change process through Joseph Campbell's and William Bridges' writings. Each individual, family, and organization is on a journey through change and struggles with challenges regarding how to change, grow, and heal. Some struggle successfully while others give up and revert back to old habits and styles. An awareness of the change process and the process of mentoring is a key component to understanding one's power. The stages of mentoring in education and mental health will be delineated. The class will be an engaging combination of short lectures, exercises, and videos.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 505 Immigrants in the United States: Opportunities and Challenges

Content: Through research on immigration, documentary film, and interviews, teachers and counselors gain knowledge and understanding about the diverse experiences and lived reality of first- and second-generation immigrants in the United States today. Topics for discussion include acculturation, identity, language, social and cultural capital, economics, and transnational movement.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 2 semester hours.

CORE 506 Displacement: Living and Learning in Native America

Content: Participants learn from the historic and contemporary experiences of the people indigenous to the United States. Drawing from essays, poetry, and short fiction, this course considers the implications of Native American experience for professionals in counseling and education.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 507 Maps of Return and Recovery: Native American Resilience

Content: With particular attention to the experiences of contemporary Native American people, supports exploration of the paths of resilience. Ways taken for returning and recovering are evident in the use of maps as a theme in contemporary Native American literature. Following this theme, the course involves imaginative and actual investigation of recovery and its maps--maps that are sometimes testimony, sometimes instruction, sometimes prophecy.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 508 Great Tribal Leaders of Modern Times

Content: Spanning the fields of Native American studies, multicultural studies, American history, political science, and sociology, this course focuses on video interviews of tribal leaders who have worked to preserve tribal self-determination, treaty rights, and the constitutionally protected status of sovereign governments. The leaders speak of federal policies from the 1940s to the present that altered and often destroyed tribal identities, such as those of the removal, termination, and assimilation eras.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 509 Spirituality, Religious Diversity, and Professional Practice

Content: We explore the nature of spiritual and religious experience as a source of meaning for individuals, communities, and cultures, the diversity of these experiences, and the new religious diversity of American society. We inquire into the experience of persons from differing world religious traditions, and practice authentic dialogue with them. Through exploration and reflection we examine the implications of spiritual consciousness and religious diversity for living and working as helping professionals.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

CORE 512 The Gift

Content: How do we maintain self and community in a society driven by market exchange? What are our cultural norms for gifts and reciprocity? How do gifts bind families and communities? How do we discover the "gift of labor," work that satisfies beyond financial compensation? What is the artist's role in a consumer culture? These are among the questions posed by poet Lewis Hyde in his classic study of literary anthropology, The Gift. There are also the questions that motivate our exploration of gifts in this course. We take Hyde's questions as springboards from which to launch our own investigation of culture, community, gift, story, and work.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 513 The Work of Paulo Freire

Content: Study of one of the most influential educators of the 20th century. A revolutionary pedagogue, Paulo Freire was also a humanist, philosopher, liberation theologist, public intellectual, and visionary. He worked with UNESCO, the World Council of Churches, Harvard University, and many decolonized countries, as well as "the wretched of the earth." Freire, who was imprisoned and then exiled by a Brazilian junta for his views on education, politics, economics, culture, society, and religion, dedicated his life to the pursuit of freedom, justice, democracy, liberation, humanization, and collective empowerment. Explores Freire's ideas in the context of education in North America.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 2 semester hours.

CORE 514 Bearing Witness: Writing, Documentary Studies, Social Justice

Content: What is the writer's, teacher's, citizen's, or counselor's role in bearing witness? How do we observe, record, and interpret events from the everyday to the unspeakable? In this nonfiction workshop, we'll explore a continuum of creative nonfiction including literary journalism, essay, and memoir. We'll write from our own observations of cultural life, exploring ethical issues as well as style, voice, and literary form. Also listed as LA 504/604 and WCM 504/604.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 516 Telling Lives

Content: Which stories are ours to tell and which carry us into the terrain of others' lives? Our own stories often intersect with those entrusted to us by family, friends, and strangers; all are shaped by the cultures we inhabit. In this workshop, we'll explore biography, ethnography, journalistic portraits, and documentary writing. Our texts will include our own writing as well as works by various writers and practitioners in documentary inquiry.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 519 Amish/Las Vegas: Polarities in American Lifestyles

Content: These two subgroups are symbolic of the polarities within ourselves and our society. Las Vegas represents instant gratification, materialism, risk, impulse, excitement, and individualism. The Amish symbolize simplicity, plainness, selflessness, community, slow change, and humility. This course explores both subcultures and reflects on the everyday societal, familial, educational, and personal tensions that mirror these polarities. It uses interdisciplinary-focused lectures, directed discussions, and videos to illustrate the need to understand how culture affects our daily lives.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 526 Narrative and Voice: Themes of Gender and Culture

Content: Examines the central need to make meaning from the predicaments and possibilities of human life through story. Readings draw from different cultural traditions in psychology, anthropology, literature, and biography. Participants explore gender and culture as meaning systems that affect individual responses in cognitive, social, and moral realms, drawing connections among their own biographies, individuals they serve, and lives addressed in selected narratives.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

CORE 530 Daily Writing in the Spirit of William Stafford

Content: You don't eat just once every few days. You don't speak just every week or so. Learning is continuous, and hunger is closer to breathing than to an annual rite. So why not write daily? In this workshop, we will feed on examples from the daily writing of William Stafford, and practice in the spirit of his work. The emphasis will be on the process of creation: creating texts the length of poems but for use in multiple genres. The goal will be to know what it feels like in the body and in acts of sustaining witness to practice the continuous writing life you have imagined.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

CORE 532 Writing Culture: (Title)

Content: What shapes our identities as members of a family, workplace, religious group, or nation? How do we learn the rules for how to act in unfamiliar cultures, and how do we write about that experience? In this workshop, we'll write to discover the unique patterns of our own cultural worlds as well as those we've entered through literature, travel, and everyday experience. We'll read contemporary nonfiction to explore different cultural perspectives and we'll examine issues of craft, including character development, voice, and literary form. The workshop may also involve fieldwork and documentation of Portland life.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

CORE 534 The Informed Life: The Path of Creativity

Content: Exploration of the integral role of creativity in our personal and professional lives, investigating questions like: What is creativity? What is the role of creativity in human survival? How can we energize our existence through new paths of creative development? Students explore many aspects of creativity, including its sources, the value of risk-taking and failure, the necessity of creativity in organizations, the cultural contexts of creativity, the key role of humor, and ways to include a creative lens in everyday endeavors. Readings are selected by students from a wide range of disciplines.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 2-3 semester hours.

CORE 537 Seminar in Moral Development, Ethics, and Imagination

Content: Exploration of how children and adolescents develop ethical judgment, imagination, and a sense of justice and compassion. Memoir, literary narratives, poetry, environmental studies, music, film, reflective journal writing, and case studies from participants' experience with youth in many contexts will guide our explorations. Engages preservice and inservice school personnel in meaningful learning experiences responsive to individual differences, interests, developmental levels, and cultural contexts.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 538 Race, Culture, and Power

Content: Analysis of race, culture, and power as distinct but intersecting social constructs. Participants scrutinize scientific, institutional, and systemic racism in today's U.S. society; the various forms, dynamics, and consequences of white privilege; formal and informal power in society; the power elite; the concentration and intersection of wealth, power, and privilege; the hierarchy of cultures; the ideology of Euro-centrism; the roles and manifestations of race, culture, and power in international affairs; centers and peripheries; and hegemony and counter-hegemony.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 2 semester hours.

CORE 540 Envisioning a Sustainable Society

Content: This course is designed to encourage an extended conversation about the health and longevity of industrial societies and steps that could be taken to enhance their sustainability. Rapid economic change coupled with the impact of human technologies on planetary systems is threatening the stability of both social and natural environments. In coming decades, people who work in public schools and mental health institutions are likely to encounter the consequences of these events. They could also play a role in shaping a society that is less ecologically damaging and more respectful of human needs poorly met by most contemporary economic and political systems.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 2 semester hours.

CORE 542 Drama for Learning and Social Action

Content: Interactive exploration introduces teachers, counselors and other professionals to ways of using drama in their work. No theatre background required. Through workshops, readings, and discussion, participants experience drama as both art form and tool for learning and for addressing issues. Reflects a pluralistic drama education perspective that prompts engagement with issues of diversity, examines how cultural knowledge is constructed, critiques the dominant culture, and confronts questions of equity and social justice.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

CORE 543 Ways of Seeing/Ways of Knowing

Content: How individuals construct and are formed by their cultures. Each individual's way of knowing and seeing is influenced by his or her ethnicity, gender, social class, sexual orientation, and learning history. Examines factors that create an individual's experience of what is valuable, aesthetic, acceptable, or taboo. Readings, films, field trips, discussion, and writing help participants articulate their perspectives on self and culture.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 545 The Contemplative Dimension of Education and Counseling

Content: Drawing from multidisciplinary and culturally diverse sources, students will look deeply at how the contemplative/mindfulness process can nurture a commitment to engaged compassion in their teaching and/or counseling practice. Combining reflection, readings, journaling, dialogue, and hands-on learning activities, students will be introduced to historical and contemporary overviews of contemplative philosophy and practice. Embracing the paradox of co-existing truths, we will consider this issue from multiple perspectives ranging from quantum physics to Buddhist philosophy to recent findings in neuroscience. This course also incorporate readings from "The Impossible Will Take a Little While."
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 546 Reading Other Voices

Content: This course will bring together graduate students and educators and counselors from the community to find ways to incorporate culturally sensitive texts in their work. We will draw from a variety of texts that address differences in race and culture such as Pam Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising, Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians. We will write from our own cultural backgrounds to uncover how our worldview shapes the reading of works made unfamiliar by different notions of self and community, time, religious and social values. Reading and writing together, we will experience the richness and multiple dimensions of language itself. Also listed  as WCM 546/646and LA 526.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 547 Visual Metaphor

Content: An exploration of folk and fairy tales both through visual and oral storytelling. Students will choose an ancient story that connects with their personal life. Character, theme, and story elements will be explored. This exploration will include a consideration of cultural bias, values, and beliefs that underlie our interactions with each other in our personal and professional lives, key aspects of any service-oriented profession.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 548 Healing Power of Story

Content: The hardest times in life can make you "voiceless," but also offer the greatest opportunity for stories. At these times the invitation to tell someone your story can be a critical encouragement in the healing process. As caregivers, teachers, counselors, parents, nurses, doctors, and patients, we will look at our own stories and those of others to practice strength and healing. Through writing, we will explore the uses of journals, fiction, essays, and poetry in the telling and receiving of stories.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 565 Communicating with Compassion to Connect and Heal a Broken World

Content: Nonviolent communication, as developed by Marshall B. Rosenberg, provides a framework and a set of skills to address human problems from the most intimate relationships to global political conflicts. We will use this concept to explore the applications of nonviolent communication in both personal and professional settings. Offering a way to enter into "power with" relationships, rather than "power over" relationships, is a powerful antidote to a competitive, judgmental, and disconnected world.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 566 Facilitating Change: User Friendly Research and Practical Strategies

Content: The nature of change, the stages of change, and systems for assisting self and others to make progress with respect to change. Course draws on research (Prochaska, Norcross, and Di Clemente) that has applicability across professions, as well as practical relevance for daily living. Students will have opportunities to apply principles to actual or hypothetical situations in their personal and/or professional lives.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 567 When a Nation Wages War: War and Peace Alongside Spiritual Perspectives

Content: When a nation wages war, change invades our lives and something shifts within us. Any normal incident can turn into a crisis. War uncovers deeply felt passions and leads to difficult questions. Compassion, commitment, and community building--essential elements for surviving war and for making peace-are key aspects in determining what response students will bring to this topic. By being spiritually present to issues of and questions about war and peace, helping professionals can better walk with students and clients during these war-saturated times.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 568 Tapping Community Resources to Support Minority Populations

Content: Counselors and educators explore the impact of complex factors such as culture, race, and ethnicity on schools and communities. Utilizing current research and culturally responsive approaches, topics include the achievement gap, access-to post-secondary options, and professional journeys. Strategies include best practices, critical self-reflection, and establishing supportive networks to nurture our work. The course includes additional off-campus community-based activities.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 2 semester hours.

CORE 574 Personal Voice in Professional Writing

Content: A workshop to explore the power of writing to engage diverse perspectives, ideas, and cultures at the restless boundary between personal insight and professional practice. In our search for equity, social justice, and inclusion, collaborative writing in professional life may be the most important writing we do. As educators our own writing is our best teacher, as counselors our written reflections will give us our best advice, and as leaders our work will be improved by writing about the challenges we face. To foster expressive clarity, the class as a writing community examines reading, collaboration, personal voice, critical thinking, and audience.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

CORE 615 Graduate Seminars

Content: These experimental courses include a range of topics: Audio Postcards, Rethinking the Line Between Us, and Field Notes: Observations and Reflections in the Natural World. Offered in varied formats to meet the needs of adult learners.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

CORE 620 Reading the Landscape

Content: This course explores relationships among people, their communities, and the landscapes they inhabit. Participants will examine the social and cultural aspects of a community and learn how to conduct an assessment that identifies attitudes, values, and behaviors. The unique contributions and educational opportunities offered by local museums, historical societies, public agencies, and citizen organizations will be combined with inquiry into local stories that are explore history, culture, aesthetics, geology, and ecology. The focus will be on sustainability and community engagement in natural resource issues, looking at the benefits of ecotherapy and the potential of shared responsibility for community well-being.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

CORE 621 Ecoscapes

Content: "Ecoscapes" integrates appreciation of place, governance of "the commons," and understanding of ecological theory. In a commons, either the property itself or the rights of its use are held in common or allocated by the community according to a set of rules. Immersed in a landscape and with a focus on ecological restoration, students strive to cultivate local knowledge about a commons. Expect moderately strenuous outdoor activity.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

CORE 902 Culture and Community: [location]

Content: An intensive international or intercultural immersion course designed to raise awareness of issues in personal and community well-being in a particular community or region. After pre-visit briefings and readings, students visit professionals at schools, clinics, and NGOs to learn about the cultural and social realities of the community or region. The visit is followed by systematic reflection on implications for local practice and the understanding of one's own self and society. Interdisciplinary approaches and interprofessional collaboration are emphasized.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

CORE 921 Ecoscapes International

Content: "Ecoscapes" integrates appreciation of place, governance of "the commons," and understanding of ecological theory. In a commons, either the property itself or the rights of its use are held in common or allocated by the community according to a set of rules. Immersed in a landscape and with a focus on ecological restoration, students strive to cultivate local knowledge about a commons. Expect moderately strenuous outdoor activity.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.