Dr. West-Olatunji | Counselor Education

Dr. Cirecie A. West-Olatunji, Associate Professor

1204 Norman Hall
POB 117046
Gainesville, FL 32611-7046
Phone - 352-273-4324
Fax - 352-846-2697
Email - cwestolatunji@coe.ufl.edu

Counselor Educator Receives National Community Service Award

Dr. Cirecie West-Olatunji will receive the Community Service Award from the Association of Black Psychologists at their 2007 convention in Houston, Texas. Dr. West-Olatunji was nominated for her international and national outreach efforts. She has assisted in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast disaster recovery efforts through her SAMHSA deployment, her coordination of counselor educators' outreach trips, and by spearheading a Florida Alternative Break (FAB) for seven counseling and psychology students from the College of Education in August 2006. More recently, this past summer Dr. West-Olatunji coordinated a tour and outreach trip to South Africa and Botswana that included 23 participants from throughout the U.S. Participants consisted of practitioners, counselor educators, and graduate counseling students who met with community mental health service providers in southern Africa and provided trainings, debriefings, and direct clinical services to HIV/AIDS survivors. During the trip, the team delivered approximately $6,000 worth of donated books to the University of Botswana library.

Background

Cirecie A. West-Olatunji, Ph.D. currently serves as Assistant Professor of Counselor Education at the University of Florida. Dr. West-Olatunji formerly held the position of Program Director/Assistant Professor of the Counseling program at Xavier University of Louisiana. Her teaching responsibilities currently include: Counseling in Community Settings and Multicultural Counseling & Development in addition to assigned individual and group supervision experiences. Her teaching philosophy: “Teaching is the ultimate form of the dissemination of research. As such, the classroom is a human laboratory in which student and instructor co-construct their learning experiences in a reciprocal fashion using critical thinking, self-reflection, and instructional techniques grounded in theory.”

Nationally, Dr. West-Olatunji has initiated several clinically-based research projects as co-director and co-founder of the University of New Orleans-Xavier University Joint Research Centers for Multiculturalism & Counseling. She is the co-author of, Future Vision, Present Work, a book focusing on diversity in early childhood as well as several journal articles and book chapters related to multicultural counseling and education.

Internationally, Dr. West-Olatunji has provided consultation and training to the Buraku Liberation Movement in Osaka, Hiroshima, Tottori, and Fukuoka cities in Japan in the area of culturally relevant anti-bias education for young children. She has also provided consultation in Singapore in the area of multicultural pediatric counseling. Cirecie West-Olatunji has served as an educational consultant to Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the creation of a children's television show ("Puzzle Place") focusing on diversity through KCET-TV in Los Angeles, CA.

Dr. West-Olatunji is a graduate of Dartmouth College and attended Teachers College of Columbia University where she pursued graduate studies in the area of Multicultural Counseling Psychology. Dr. West-Olatunji holds a doctorate degree in Counselor Education from the University Of New Orleans.

Dr. West-Olatunji is a licensed professional counselor as well as marriage and family therapist. She is also a state-approved (LA) domestic and family mediator.

Areas of Interest and Inquiry

My research is grounded in multicultural counseling theory that focuses on the role of cultural identity in the psychological, emotional, and educational development of marginalized students. It has been suggested that the behavioral symptoms common among troubled youth have a foundation in their early childhood experiences. Thus, counselors need to focus more heavily on early childhood interventions. Young children, from birth to eight years of age, are my primary research population.

Of significant interest is the disproportional placement of impoverished, culturally diverse children, and other socio-culturally marginalized students, into special education. I explore the developmental and educational needs of young children in low resourced communities using the constructs: personal characteristics (such as dispositions, pre-existing psychological conditions, and personality profiles), parent proficiencies, and schooling experiences.

Using a three-pronged approach, I conduct statistical analyses using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), a dataset consisting of a nationally representative sample of approximately 22,000 children attending public and private schools, and their families. From the results of my analyses, I conceptualize culture-centered interventions with children and disseminate these innovations, such as the rites of passage program and the story circle, in scholarly journals (Multicultural Perspectives and the Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education and Development), book chapters, and conferences.

I am also interested in the role of family support in the resiliency of young children. My analyses suggest that the schooling environment and parental roles are key factors in addressing developmental and educational problems. With prior funding from the African American Success Foundation (Tutt Jones Research Grant) and the UF College of Education, I have been able to develop a diagnostic tool, the Parents Proficiencies Questionnaire for African Americans (PPQ-AA). This instrument is designed to assist parents in identifying behaviors and attitudes that are correlative to high student achievement. The PPQ-AA is scheduled for distribution in the fall of 2009. My work in this area has been presented at national conferences and published in Multicultural Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal.

Also from my analysis of the ECLS-K dataset, I explore educators’ self-reported attitudes toward low-income, culturally diverse students and share conceptualizations about ways to intervene with teachers, counselors, and other school personnel (Professional School Counseling). Most recently, my colleagues and I received funding from the National Science Foundation to conduct research on African-American primary school girls in the local school district. This study extends traditional approaches by moving beyond the intra-psychic challenges of each child to exploring the influences of teachers’, counselors’, and parents’ positioning of the girls as mathematics and science learners. Our initial findings have been published in the International Journal of Learning. We have also presented papers at several national and international conferences, such as the American Educational Research Association and the National Association for Research in Science Teaching. We have also presented our findings as an invited keynote session at the National Education Association’s Women’s Summit using the readers theater format.

I have also conducted studies with early childhood teachers that explore effective approaches for enhancing their cultural competence in an effort to ameliorate the effects of educational hegemony (Journal of Research in Childhood Education and the Journal of Negro Education). During the 2008-2009 academic year, I served as faculty-in-residence at the P. K. Yonge Laboratory School to coordinate a diversity plan for the entire school community. This investigation asked the question, “How can the P. K. Yonge community transform the academic experiences and outcomes for its culturally diverse students?”

I have presented papers on my research findings in South Africa (refereed paper on positionality and African American girls), China (refereed paper on trauma response interventions with culturally diverse children), Malaysia (invited book chapter on culture-centered disaster response), Japan, Singapore, and Brazil. In Japan, I have also disseminated research findings to the Buraku Liberation Movement in Osaka, Hiroshima, Tottori, and Fukuoka cities in the area of culturally relevant anti-bias education for young children. In Brazil, I delivered my research findings using a readers theater format.

I believe that my work impacts the profession by advancing the discourse on the role of culture-centered interventions as effective tools to counter the psychological effects of hegemony for culturally diverse students. Current and future research projects more narrowly focus on traumatic stress and systemic oppression with an emphasis on isolating effective interventions that counter the associated outcomes for socially marginalized youth and their families. My long term goal is to write several books in this area that disseminate my research and advance the discussion about oppression and academic achievement for this population of students.