Developmental Pedagogy in Marriage and Family Therapy Education

New practice domains are opening up for practitioners of family therapy in the medical, organizational, and human relations fields. In this new environment, family therapy educators and supervisors are required to cross the epistemological spaces of scientist-practitioner, postmodernism, and critical theory. These new possibilities require that family therapist educators become comfortable moving between multiple epistemologies. This poses increasing challenges that will require a hybridization of knowledge and practice approaches in MFT education. Through focus groups consisting of 34 participants, all of who were in their first quarter of a Master’s degree program in Marriage and Family Therapy. We found a rich set of themes that reflect the experiences of students in their first quarter of learning multiple, potentially contradictory theories. The data that emerged reflect both the deep and varied student experiences that took place as they were introduced to multiple perspectives in their first quarter, as well as student desires that they would have liked to have had met during their experience. The results in each of these areas uniquely inform potential future MFT pedagogical practices. Keywords: pedagogy, epistemology, family therapy, narrative analysi