February 1, 2025

Bracketing Memo 1 - Researching Problems of Professional Competence (PPC) in Counselor Educators (CEs)

I am reading John W. Creswell’s Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design (2nd edition) as I embark on a qualitative inquiry regarding problems of professional competence in counselor educators. I’d like to complete some of the exercises in this book―and post them here―as a form of honing in the rigor of our inquiry. In defining qualitative inquiry, Creswell writes:

“Qualitative research begins with assumptions, a worldview, the possible use of a theoretical lens, and the study of research problems inquiring into the meaning individuals or groups ascribed to a social or human problem. To study this problem, qualitative researchers use an emerging qualitative approach to inquiry, the collection of data in a natural setting sensitive to the people and places under study, and data analysis that is inductive and establishes patterns or themes. The final written report or presentation includes the voices of participants, the reflexivity of the researcher, and a complex description and interpretation of the problem, and it extends the literature or signals a call for action” (p. 37)

This post is an attempt to focus on reflexivity, an effort at bracketing: Why do I come to this research in the first place? What informs my prior assumptions about the questions I’m asking?

Experience with an educator’s problematic behaviors

Within the literature, this research was initially inspired by Brown Rice & Furr’s (2015) study in counselor educators. They utilized the construct of problems of professional competence, which was conceptualized by Elman & Forrest (2007) in the wider psychology literature. I’ve chosen to focus on this construct because it has predominantly been focused on students and trainees.1 Yet the flexibility of the definition can and should apply to counseling educators, as the student-faculty power imbalance is particularly vulnerable to power imbalances.

Questions and problems resonate with the researcher for a reason. As I am not an educator, my reason for this inquiry is a blend of the personal and professional: While a student, I experienced the emotional and academic consequences of an educator’s professional competency problems. For good reason, counseling programs focus intently on the dispositions and ethical behaviors of students. Yet as I’ve encountered in researching this topic, the guardrails for counseling educators’ bad behavior is unspecified. Given wider trends in higher education in the 21st century, along with the unique vulnerabilities of being a counseling trainee, ethical standards are imperative to protect programs and students.

Advocate and participant

I am an active advocate in my approach. As a student and alumni, my advocacy transformed into an open letter with 23 student signatures attesting to this educator’s behavior. This was then distributed to program faculty, department administration, and the university’s president to begin an investigation. This process was emotionally draining, especially in listening to the number of stories that were similar and worse to my own. It also revealed the political nature of higher education, especially the power interactions of administrators, faculty, and students.

In researching this topic, I am initially unsure of what my advocacy-participatory leanings will generate. Given the lack of rich data on the topic, I want to start by generating a peer-reviewed study that documents these problematic behaviors from multiple perspectives. My first study begins with how educators experience their colleagues’ professional competency problems. In starting here, I am hoping this will allow us to explore the following research questions:

  1. How do educators experience and conceptualize their colleagues’ problematic professional behaviors?
  2. What do educators believe could be done about this behavior?

This second part leans into my advocacy approach, and could potentially identify new categories of problematic counseling educator behavior, generate ethical standards, provide robust identification and reporting guidelines, or create new professional or institutional mechanisms to correct these behaviors.

References

Brown‐Rice, K., & Furr, S. (2015). Gatekeeping Ourselves: Counselor educators’ knowledge of colleagues’ problematic behaviors. Counselor Education and Supervision, 54(3), 176–188. https://doi.org/10.1002/ceas.12012

Elman, N. S., & Forrest, L. (2007). From trainee impairment to professional competence problems: Seeking new terminology that facilitates effective action. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 38(5), 501–509. https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7028.38.5.501

  1. This is at least the case in counselor education literature. I am unsure of whether other psychological or social work specializations focus this term on educators.↩︎

Research Memos


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