Counselor Education: If It Isn't Fresh,We're Out of Business

Counselor education programs will be under increasing pressure from several sources in the next decade. Psychology licensing laws, the requirements of third party vendors and a changing job market will cause restructuring or elimination of current programs at many universities. Flight, fight, accommodation, and professionalization are considered as ways of coping with this threat. The authors offer recommendations for survival.     

Counselor-Education Curricula and Professional Identity

Satisfaction with present emphasis on various components of curricula and the desire for changes in those same components were assessed as they related to two major opposing perspectives influencing professional identity, strict preparation in classical psychology, and broad, general, experiential preparation. A questionnaire asking counselor educators to rate 25 curriculum areas of their programs with respect to satisfaction and amount of change desired was sent to a modified, stratified random sample of 108 institutions. The responses on the 60 returns were analyzed by using Hotelling's T² and subsequent dependent samples' t tests for indications of discrepancies between present and desired emphases. Significant discrepancies were examined for trends. Overall, there was an expressed desire for increased emphasis in every area. Grouping components logically produced a ranking according to desire for change as follows: career counseling, statistics-research and counseling experience, counseling theory and psychological background, and assessment. Implications of the findings for counselor preparation are discussed in relation to trends found regarding program size and available resources.     

The Climate Emergency and the Transformed School

Education in frugality is less important for young people in the climate emergency than pressurising governments to act. Schools can help in this directly, as well as indirectly by passing on the necessary understanding. This understanding is interdisciplinary as well as disciplinary, but schools in England at least have always been too attached to the latter – as shown by the meagre attention given to climate change in the National Curriculum. A wider problem has been the teaching profession's attachment to traditional ways, a problem shared by other professions. Internet learning, for instance, is challenging the traditional assumption, also found mutatis mutandis in law and medicine, that teaching is face-to-face. The urgency of climate change means that significant changes in traditional professional attitudes may first occur in education. One way young people in England can act is by campaigning to take the National Curriculum out of ministers’ hands and setting up a National Curriculum Commission. On climate change, we might expect it to favour a mix of (1) disciplinary and interdisciplinary, (2) face-to-face and internet-based, (3) top-down and collaborative learning and (4) whole-class and personalised learning.