Friday, 9:00 am – 12:00 noon
Johnnie McFadden, PhD
Benjamin Elijah Mays Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina

STYLISTIC COUNSELING: A Model for Transcultural Skill Development

While individuals in the helping professions provide invaluable service to clients, students, staff, colleagues, and community, there continues to be a need to enhance our knowledge and skills commensurate with the global marketplace to interface more effectively with an international constituency. Stylistic counseling is a concept and a strategic approach toward thinking and communicating with individuals as well as with groups. It is a model that purports to assist persons in acquiring a systematic and hierarchical perspective on insights for working with clients within and across cultures. Participants will be exposed to the development and enhancement of their own transcultural counseling skills. The significance of transcultural understanding from a universal perspective is as paramount today as at anytime in our history.

Johnnie McFadden, PhD, the Benjamin Elijah Mays Professor at the University of South Carolina, is an international authority on transcultural counseling and communication, and his historic stylistic counseling model is used worldwide. Dr.McFadden is the author or editor of fifteen books and has presented or published over 250 professional papers, journal articles, symposia, and workshops in numerous places throughout the world such as Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Belgium, the Netherlands, Morocco, Kenya, Brazil,
Mexico, Scotland, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, etc. His most current book is entitled Culture and Counseling: New Approaches. Professor McFadden is a member of many boards and professional/civic affiliations including the Columbia Museum of Art. He is the recipient of more than thirty awards in his profession and is one of twenty renowned counselor education professors biographically featured in the 2003 book, Leaders and Legacies: Contributions to the Profession of Counseling. This honoree’s motto is, Do the right thing for the right reason. He is a member of First Calvary Baptist Church, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, Inc., Director of the African American Professors Program at USC, and a life member of the NAACP. He founded and is currently Director of the highly successful Benjamin E. Mays Academy for Leadership Development.

Friday, 3:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Frances E. Kendall, PhD.
Consultant for Organization Change
Berkeley, CA

Starting With Ourselves: Bringing Our Whole Selves To The Work We Do

Often our fantasy is that we walk into work and hang our selves—our identities, our attitudes, our experiences, and our passions—on the coat rack by the door. We mistakenly believe that we then bring an educated, objective and neutral self to our interactions during the day.  This session is designed to help us “re-member” ourselves, as Thich Nhat Hahn says. It will bring greater clarity to the ways in which who we are affects how we see ourselves and how others see us so that we can enter situations intentionally and fully present.

Frances Kendall is a nationally known consultant who has focused for more than thirty years on organizational change and communication, specializing in issues of diversity and social justice. Because she believes that personal and organizational change is possible, she is committed to facilitating the core changes necessary to create work and learning environments that are hospitable to all people. She doesn't skirt the deeper challenges inherent in helping organizations accomplish that mission. In the last ten years, she has worked with various colleges and universities, as well as numerous corporations, not-for-profits, government agencies and educational institutions. Author of Diversity in the Classroom, Dr. Kendall received her M.S. from Bank Street College of Education and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her latest book, Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships was published by Routledge in April 2006.

Saturday, 12:45 pm – 3:15 pm
María Elena Torre
Director
The Institute for Participatory Action Research and Design at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
New York, NY

Identity Development and Intergroup Relations in the Contact Zone

As global capitalism continues to braid communities and nations together in ever-evolving relationships, individuals’ experiences of ‘self’ and ‘identity’ are increasingly multiple and overlapping.  This keynote address will discuss the practical and theoretical contributions for cross-cultural education of framing studies of identity development and intergroup relations within contact zones – messy social spaces in which people come together across difference, and relationships to power are confronted, challenged, and blurred. 

María Elena Torre is the founding Director of the Institute for Participatory Action Research and Design at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Committed to participatory approaches that challenge traditional notions of expertise, her work with communities in schools and prisons has looked at the intersections of knowledge production, individual growth and development, and intergroup relations.  Introducing the concept of ‘contact zones’ to participatory research, she asks how we can build a ‘we’– from which to build knowledge, relationships, policy – in radically inclusive spaces?   She is a co-author of Echoes of Brown: Youth Documenting and Performing the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and Changing Minds: The Impact of College on a Maximum Security Prison, and has been published in volumes such as Everyday Antiracism: Concrete Ways to Successfully Navigate the Relevance of Race in School (The New Press, 2008), Urban Girls, Revisited (NYU Press, 2007), Handbook of Action Research (Sage, 2007), and in journals such as Feminism and Psychology, the Journal of Social Issues, Qualitative Inquiry,and theJournal of Critical Psychology.  She is a recipient of the American Psychological Association Division 35 Adolescent Girls Task Force Emerging Scientist and the Spencer Fellowship in Social Justice & Social Development in Educational Studies.  She is on the board of the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project, What Kids Can Do, and the Diversity Advancement Project of the Center for Social Inclusion.