TCU Classes/Programs

Special Needs Adoption Course
Beginning in fall of 1999, we began offering the Special Needs Adoption Course (SNAC) on the TCU campus. In its current version, we will be training 25 hand-selected undergraduates in the knowledge and pre-professional skills necessary to successfully intervene with children who have difficulties with attachment, social skills, and self-regulation. The skills portion of the SNAC syllabus is based upon the scripts and principles developed by Dr. Karyn Purvis for work with special needs adopted children. These scripts and principles form the foundation for all of our interventions, including the home programs, family camps, and summer camps. The SNAC syllabus is available online for those of you who want to see what we do in the course.

Multidisciplinary Child Development Minor
Graduates of SNAC go on to pursue careers in a variety of fields, including psychology, speech/language pathology, education, nursing, and social work. We have heard from a number of students working in a wide variety of settings (including adoption agencies) about how valuable SNAC was in their training and professional orientation. Working with many of our colleagues from other disciplines on the TCU campus, we are now seeking to enhance this impact on our TCU graduates by developing a multidisciplinary child development minor. A special feature of this proposal is that it will interface with the current statewide initiative (including UT-Austin, UNT, and Texas State University) to enhance the pre-professional and in-service training of early childhood mental health professionals. In particular, the goal of this initiative is to systematically infuse training programs with information about attachment theory, attachment disorders, and attachment-based interventions.

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