Ed Psych Students Reach Out to Community, Offer Workshop on Multicultural Counseling June 25, 2012

What started as a small gathering of graduate students who liked to read scholarly articles and discuss them has graduated to an organization with ambitious goals to raise multicultural awareness in Austin.

“In 2010 several graduate students – a little over a dozen – got together and decided to create what we’ve called a ‘diversity committee’ to raise awareness about multicultural issues related to school psychology,” said Kiara Alvarez, a school psychology doctoral student who came to The University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education from Harvard University and is a founding member of the diversity committee. “Up until this past year our function and meetings have been more informal, with brown bag lunches and a focus on reading about and discussing issues and research relevant to our field.”

Last fall, however Kiara and the other committee members felt that the group had matured enough to do something “bigger.” They decided to expand the committee’s focus and look at getting a large meeting together, ideally something that would draw community members as well as interested individuals from other areas on campus.

With Kiara coordinating the process, they applied for and received a grant and, in January when they learned they had obtained the grant, they immediately began to plan workshop.

“We coordinated with the Graduate Student Association of School Psychology as we planned,” said Kiara, “and began to sort out what we wanted the event to include. We had read and discussed an article by one of UT’s educational psychology alumna, so we thought it would be nice if we could secure her as our keynote speaker. We knew that we wanted to include a poster session that would be open to all educational psychology students and that we’d like to offer continuing education credits to attendees.”

The committee got its wish and was able to have Dr. Janine Jones, a graduate of the Department of Educational Psychology and leading expert on multicultural counseling and intervention issues, speak at the May event.  Reflecting Dr. Jones’ main area of expertise and the topic she’d be discussing, they called the workshop “Multicultural Counseling: Culturally Responsive Approaches in the Era of Evidence-Based Interventions.”

Community and campus individuals who attended the workshop included members of the Texas Association of School Psychologists as well as practitioners in psychology from several Austin-area school districts as well as Austin non-profits that offer counseling services to children. The University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work provided CEU’s for social workers and master’s level counselors who attended the workshop.

The event attracted over 60 people and the diversity committee hopes to be able to offer at least one similarly large-scale workshop or conference a year.

“We live in a diverse, multicultural society but the existing therapist and educator workforce doesn’t fully reflect this diversity,” said Kiara, whose research focuses on high-risk behavior in Latino teens. “Of course, simply increasing the diversity of the workforce isn’t enough.

“All of us, regardless of our background, need to improve our knowledge of other cultures, self-awareness in cross-cultural interactions, and skills in providing services to diverse groups. This is an ongoing, lifelong professional development process that’s particularly critical for those of us who work with vulnerable populations like children and in settings such as schools, which are designed to serve all members of the community”

—Kay Randall, University Communications, 512-232-3910