Brooke Collison

You’ll have to forgive me for a moment while I stray from the serious academic topic of counselor education and focus, instead, on one of Kenya’s most famous activities—the Safari!

I continue to struggle to find ways to make my classes most relevant for the students here in Kenya. At times, the obvious jumps up and smacks me in the face and I ask myself, “Why didn’t I think of that earlier?” I’ve had difficulty getting young students to identify broad social issues that face communities or groups. I’ve been struck by individual students who can name a human need (AIDS counseling, etc.) and who can develop a response [see Blog # 11], but I get less response when there is a class of 20 people. Of course, developing an interactive class [my preferred style] has been difficult all along.

This will be a short blog post—once something has been said which speaks powerfully by itself, then to add to it is foolish.

I suppose that every graduate program struggles with the best way to examine students. Schools wrestle with their mission and the responsibility to turn out graduates who meet some mysterious set of criteria which is never easy to define. The degree says something: “this is a researcher,” “this is a competent clinician,” “this person knows how to teach,” “this person carries on the honor and reputation of the university.”

While I have been teaching on the KeMU campus, my spouse, Joan, has been volunteering several nights a week at a children’s home not far away. A university driver picks her up about 5:00 and she returns to the Guest House on campus where we are staying about 9:00 PM. Each night when she returns, she is full of stories about “the kids.” It takes her a while to talk about what has happened, what she has experienced, and what she might do next to be helpful.