National and International Challenges

Profession-Related Change Application – National and International

Profession-Related Change Application – National and International Program Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: The need for change, leadership, and advocacy is not confined to local concerns, but to international matters as well. Listen as Dr. Judy Lewis describes worldwide examples of change, leadership, and advocacy.

DR. JUDY LEWIS: Quite a big change has happened in the counseling profession. And that is advocacy coming into the mainstream of counseling. Now counselors always have done advocacy, but usually it was kind of on their own, without any real guidelines to follow. But now with the advocacy competencies, and with the advocacy also having been added to the ACA code of ethics, I think American Counseling Association members now recognize that advocacy is a central part of their work that's very closely connected to their work as counselors.

Now this kind of change is something that just doesn't happen all at once. Step by step, other changes have made this change possible. I think one example of a change that has already taken place that led in this direction was the multicultural counseling competencies.

There was a time when people didn't realize that this was an absolutely necessary competency to be held by all counselors. Little by little it became so integrated into the profession that now there's no question about that. Multicultural competency is a given as something that is absolutely necessary for every counselor, and every counselor educator.

Counselor educators now know that in a counselor education program, you can't just have one course about multicultural competence, and then assume that you don't have to think about it in all of the other courses. It's integrated into our curricula because it's important. That, I think, is one of the groundbreaking changes that led us in the direction that we're going now.

Another thing that happened that's quite different from the this is that counselors started years ago working avidly on issues like counseling licensure through all the states. They started working on issues like I having third party payments go to counselors as they would go to psychologists, and social workers.

So counselors have gotten more comfortable with the idea of doing advocacy, with the idea of actually going to Capitol Hill and doing lobbying. As they became comfortable with this while they were working on what we would call guild issues, issues on behalf of the profession, that again has made it more possible for people to feel comfortable going to Capitol Hill again. But this time, about issues

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Profession-Related Change Application – National and International

that very directly affect their clients and their communities, not just through access to counseling but other kinds of issues as well.

So I think that the more change that happens in the profession, the more change is possible. It takes change for more change to happen. But I'll tell you something else about the counseling profession. There isn't any real change that's going to happen unless it is definitely supported by counselor educators and supervisors. Our students get their professional values, their professional standards. They learn those from their supervisors and educators. If we want to move the counseling profession in a particular direction to make it stronger, those transformational leaders, a lot of them are going to come from the ranks of counselor educators.

I think it's a wonderful thing that American counseling organizations have become so involved internationally in recent times. And what I also think is especially important is that I think we've been avoiding a pitfall that's not so easy to avoid. And that is, I think that we have been very careful not to take our own standards, our own practices, the way we do things here in the United States, and try to impose them on other countries. I think there have been good partnerships that have developed.

I had the chance in recent years to be involved with professional visits to some other countries. And I had a chance to visit some programs that were going on in those countries. And I was really amazed at how successful people have been. People who have been trained in the United States, and then gone back to their own countries, how successful they've been in taking counseling ideas and applying them in ways that really fit their own culture.

Recently, I was in South Africa with a group from the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development. We visited several programs. And one that especially impressed me was one that we saw in Soweto. That was a program that was built on the idea of taking women who had been successful in raising their children in very, very difficult circumstances.

They brought in these women, and these women got some training so that they could do outreach to other women, so you could have ideas of successful parenting spreading from woman to woman to make more and more people affected by it. The actual program was primarily outdoors. There were a few buildings, but they also had a lot of small children there who spent their days there while their mothers were working.

And it was just phenomenal to see how all these pieces fit together. It was an obviously good program. But obviously, a program that was different from what it would have been if it had been in Chicago, or Los Angeles, or Kansas City. It had the stamp of South Africa, and it had the quality we look for in a good program.

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Profession-Related Change Application – National and International

I also had the chance a few years ago when I was at an international counseling conference, to go with another group of counselors to visit a treatment program in Vietnam. This program worked with mental health and substance abuse problems. And what was most interesting about that to me is that it was built on traditional Eastern ways of healing.

The main idea that they talked about was the importance of loving the patients as though they were members of your own family. They had music. They had art. They had acupuncture, and acupressure, and all of the traditional healing methods. It was something that would seem radical in the United States if you were working with mental health and addictions in a treatment facility.

But there, it wasn't what was new and radical, it was what was traditional. And I think that you need to be able to build on what it is appropriate with a particular culture. And it's not something that we could ever impose. I was just very impressed with what I saw going on internationally.

When we're working across international borders, I think one of the things we need to remember is something that's also true when we work across cultures within our country. That we need to approach not just as teachers, but as learners. Of course, we don't want to impose our standards, and our values, and our culture on other people. But just as important, there are things that we can learn from these other cultures that we can use to bring into the mainstream of Western thought.

I think that this is something that really fits and is important for counselor educators to think about. As always, what we need to be doing as educators and supervisors is teaching our students to be lifelong learners, not just people who learn from us and think they know what they need to know for the future. We have no idea what the future is that's going to be theirs.

Profession-Related Change Application – National and International Additional Content Attribution

FOOTAGE: WAL_MMPA6850_542015 (Leadership - Martin Luther King) National Archives. Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. [Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mathew Ahmann in a crowd.], 08/28/1963. Retrieved from http://research.archives.gov/description/542015)

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Profession-Related Change Application – National and International

WAL_MMPA6850_542010 (Voting Rights Protest) National Archives. Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. [Leaders marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial], 08/28/1963. Retrieved from http://research.archives.gov/description/542010

WAL_MMPA6850_2803443 (Lyndon Johnson signs Voting Rights Act) National Archives. Photograph of President Lyndon Johnson Signs the Voting Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr., with Other Civil Rights Leaders in the Capitol Rotunda, Washington, DC, 08/06/1965. Retrieved from http://research.archives.gov/description/2803443

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