♦ Managing Conflict and Crisis ♦
Graduates should have the ability to deal effectively with interpersonal conflict and campus crises. Specifically, students should be able to:
- provide leadership and positive solutions to resolving interpersonal conflicts;
respond calmly and thoughtfully to campus crises; - provide support to individuals, both students and employees, who have been adversely affected by interpersonal conflict or a campus crisis.
I responded to four student crises in Fall 2006: a hate incident, a death threat, a suicide threat, and a death by suicide of a student’s former girlfriend. Sharyn Miller’s “Counseling Issues” course prepared me to respond calmly and quickly to each of my distressed students. My education continued with my survey of faculty perceptions on counseling issues (posted in Counseling and Personal Development). Awareness and preparation are the keys to crisis response. Both faculty and staff need to be constantly updated on counseling issues and be prepared to appropriately respond when students are in distress.
- I will be presenting a workshop on Academic Advising for Students with Counseling Issues, at the University of California Academic Advisors Conference in May 2007. I experienced tremendous professional growth due to the Adult Development and Counseling courses I completed for this program. It is a pleasure to extend the collective knowledge of my peers, and to also learn from their insight and reflections.
Counseling Issues (PowerPoint Slideshow) - Timely and appropriate crisis intervention requires preparedness, action, learning from the critical situation, correcting shortfalls and planning for the next crisis; a situation we pray will not come. Education is the key to safer education. Read a short paper on Crisis Response.
Best Practices in Crisis Intervention - I was blessed to live in a very diverse community while growing up. I had homosexual neighbors, who were loving couples, and I was only peripherally aware of the social stigma that oppressed them. Narrow-mindedness and bigotry were not tolerated in my home, and George and Vance were just folks on the block to us. In writing my Counseling Issues final exam, I was again thankful for learning to see people as individuals and for being taught inclusion and acceptance as a child.
Responding to a Hate Incident