Developmental Pedagogy in Marriage and Family Therapy Education: Preparing Students to Work Across Epistemologies

As new practice domains open up for practitioners of family therapy in the medical, organizational, and human relations fields, family therapy educators and supervisors are required to cross the epistemological spaces of scientist-practitioner, postmodernism, and critical theory. These new possibilities challenge family therapy educators to become comfortable moving between multiple epistemologies and require a hybridization of knowledge and pedagogical approaches. This article identifies multiple conceptual frameworks for teaching graduate students theories of family therapy and introduces a meta-pedagogical framework for a developmental pedagogy that supports integration of seemingly differing epistemologies.