Daniels honored for (literally) setting new standards in counselor education
Posted April 21, 2009
Harry Daniels, UF professor of counselor education, is a co-recipient of the 2008-09 Robert O. Stripling Award for Excellence in Standards, given through the Association of Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES). The national award is named for one of UF’s early giants in the field of counselor education who was best known for his pioneering work in the professional credentialing of counselors.
Daniels received the Stripling Award—along with five fellow members of the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Program’s standards revision committee, plus four CACREP staff members—in March at the American Counseling Association’s World Conference in Charlotte, N.C.
The award traditionally goes to an individual who has significantly influenced counselor preparation, but this year’s recipients were nominated as a group for their several years’ work in developing the 2009 accreditation standards that the CACREP board of directors adopted last summer.
“Through their work on the 2009 standards, the counseling profession has taken great steps forward in its professional development in so many different areas,” wrote John R. Culbreth, associate professor of counselor education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and past chair of the CACREP board of directors, in nominating the group. “I believe the (new) CACREP standards represent a dramatic shift in the professional identity of counseling.”
Highlighting the new standards are the call for emergency preparedness training for all future counselors and the development of the first accreditation standards for an addiction counseling track. The committee also identified performance-based outcome assessments for the various specialty areas of counselor education.
Perhaps the most dramatic change in standards, though, according to Daniels, is requiring counselor education degree programs to hire faculty members with doctorates in that specialty, ensuring that professional counselors are trained primarily by counselor educators.
Daniels joined the UF faculty as a professor and chairman in 1996 and headed the counselor education department until 2007, when he stepped down to return to full-time teaching and practice. During his tenure as chair, UF Counselor Education placed among the top five programs nationally in its specialty every year (and since) in the U.S. News and World Report’s annual survey of America’s Best Graduate Schools. The UF program held the top spot in the 1997 rankings.
