PREFACE

If you are viewing this document, you should know that this is a book-in-progress. Early drafts are released for the Transforming Counseling Psychology Curriculum Showcase at APA 2022, for peer review, and for generating interest in collaboration. The document was last updated on 22 Sep 2026.

In her 2021-2022 term as President of the Society of Counseling Psychology, one of Dr. Amy Reynolds’ Presidential Initiatives was Transforming Counseling Psychology Curriculum and Praxis. Dr. Reynolds invited counseling psychology faculty, practitioners, and doctoral students “to critically examine and deconstruct how various competencies, courses, and content are taught; how we socialize our students; and then re-imagine, dream, and reconstruct new and transformative ways to teach and train.”

Strategies for a Social Responsivity

This open education resource (OER) is a product of the group devoted to research. There are a number of strategies we used to ensure that the OER moves in the direction of being socially and culturally responsive.

  • Our authors committed to using the guidelines for a liberated syllabus found in the CCTC: Social Responsiveness in Health Services Psychology Education & Training Toolkit.
  • We chose the format of OER because provides a zero-cost textbook to faculty and students.
  • We sought authors and co-author teams that represent the diversity of health services psychology including discipline (counseling, clinical, educational),stage in career (students, early career professionals, mid- and late- career professionals), and identities that have been marginalized in higher education and our discipline.
  • Each chapter works its way through an open peer review process where the chapter (with authors clearly identified)is hosted in a shared drive. At least two reviewers can mark up the same document and contribute to the same rubric. At any time the author(s) can see the review and, if desired, dialogue with the reviewers. At the outset, we specified the tone to be “formative not summative.”
  • Although we are still learning, we have attempted to use tools and techniques that are consistent with universal design. For example, we hope that the image captions and headers are marked such that text readers will identify them as such.

Perpetually in Progress

This book is being formatted in R Markdown, rendered into its “book” format with Bookdown, hosted on GitHub, and pushed to the internet (in its html format) through GitHub Pages. This set of tools allows the book to be perpetually-in-progress. This means that our authors can update their chapters at-any-time. It also means that we can add chapters at-any-time. If you are interested in contributing to the book, please contact us. It is one of our greatest hopes that this flexibility contributes to the socially and culturally responsive pedagogy that we intend.

At times, you may encounter copy-editing chatter (e.g., “MISSING REFERENCE”). This means that the chapter has passed through peer review. However, in the process of converting the chapter to the RMarkdown/Bookdown format, we recognized copyediting errors. Rather than delay the publication of the chapter, we have chosen to include it while we finalize correspondence with the authors.

Acknowledgements

Financial support, supporting the copy editing and desktop publishing for this project was provided by the Office of Education, Technology, & Media, Seattle Pacific University (Summer 2022).

The book cover was designed by Dominic Williamson, Senior Instructional Designer in Graphics & Illustrations, in the Office of Education, Technology, & Media at Seattle Pacific University.