It is the mission of the College of Education to prepare educational and mental health leaders who demonstrate the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed to serve others and who further the values and practices of their respective professions. We seek to inspire our candidates in the Vincentian tradition, and to foster core values of professional commitment and responsibility, professional relationships, and critical thinking and reflective practice. As a faculty, we are committed to developing programs with courses, clinical experiences and assessments based on the following three complementary orientations:
This orientation is based on the belief that knowledge is created and developed by learners and is influenced by the experiences, values and multiple identities (e.g., race, class, culture, gender, nationality, exceptionality, language of individuals). This perspective drives us to place the prior knowledge and experiences of students at the core of our instructional practice and facilitate their development through meaningful exploration. Constructivist practice invites candidates to be active participants in their own development and to view knowledge — in theory and in practice — as fluid social constructions that are made and remade through reflective interactions with social, cultural and natural phenomena.
Throughout our programs, we also emphasize that education and counseling are most effective when they acknowledge the interdependence of process and product. These are not opposites; rather, they are part of each other as seen, for example, when candidates use a process of critical and creative thought to produce and implement pedagogical approaches or counseling strategies. These outcomes or “products” are themselves part of processes because they represent points on each candidate’s developmental continuum. With this individualized framework for growth, there are multiple paths to effective practice and we encourage educators and counselors to continuously examine and implement a wide range of research-based best practices.
Peer assessment and critical examination of the efficacy of one’s own practice are essential dispositions for all professionals. We believe that reflective practice can be taught in the context of courses that view students as knowledge producers in search of meaning. Pedagogy that poses problems rather than transmits content encourages reflective thinking and doing. Educators and mental health professionals must be reflective and metacognitive themselves in order to encourage these practices in those they serve. We also believe that interaction with current and future practitioners both extends and promotes such reflection. Faculty members in the college seek to extend and promote these orientations through modeling-related pedagogical practices and instilling in our candidates a desire to promote such practices in their professional lives.
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