The CIIS approach to learning
Experiential, integral, and socially just — three commitments that shape everything we do in the ICP program, from how we structure a class session to how we understand the therapeutic relationship.
Three pillars of CIIS pedagogy
Experiential learning
Knowledge is not simply transmitted — it is lived. The classroom becomes a site of practice: relational, somatic, and reflective. Students inhabit the roles of both clinician and client in training contexts, which asks faculty to create brave, boundaried containers for inquiry.
Integral framework
The integral aspiration honors multiple dimensions of knowing — psychological, spiritual, somatic, cultural, and systemic. Faculty and students hold theory lightly and stay open to complexity, contradiction, and mystery.
Social justice
Personal healing cannot be separated from social and political context. Social justice is woven into case conceptualization, theoretical frameworks, supervision, and classroom culture — not added on.
Voices from the CIIS tradition
Offered as orientation, not dogma.
"Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education."
— Martin Luther King Jr."Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
— often attributed to W.B. Yeats"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984)Creating the learning container
The classroom is a relational container within which students practice becoming therapists. That places particular responsibility on faculty to attend to the quality of the relational field, not just the content.
Safety & challenge
Enough safety to take risks, and enough challenge to grow. Faculty attend to this balance actively rather than assuming it.
Process over product
How the class unfolds — the relational dynamics and unexpected feelings — is as significant as the planned content.
Land acknowledgment
CIIS is on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land. Many faculty open courses with a land acknowledgment and invite reflection on what it means for healing work.
Community agreements
Creating explicit agreements with students at the start of the semester — confidentiality, respect, and stepping up / stepping back — is common ICP practice.
Professional identity development
A central goal of ICP training is developing students' professional therapeutic identity — their sense of themselves as ethical, competent, and culturally humble practitioners.
The parallel process
Just as therapists are shaped by their supervisors, students are shaped by their relationship with faculty. How we hold discomfort, repair ruptures, acknowledge power, and remain curious is itself a model of therapeutic presence.