National Council of Rehabilitation Education (NCRE) Annual Conference

I recently attended the NCRE annual conference, held once again in beautiful San Antonio, TX. I found this experience to be valuable for several reasons. This is the "academic" conference for rehabilitation counseling, meaning that all of the attendees are faculty members from all of the programs nationwide, including select international programs (this year, representatives were present from Puerto Rico, South Korea, and Mauritius). This is a great change of pace from the typical rehabilitation counseling conferences, which are more clinical in nature. Discussions are focused on rehabilitation counseling education trends, counselor training, program accreditation issues, and rehabilitation research initiatives. So, although I am always refining my counseling techniques and current understanding of the disability perspective by attending clinical conferences, NCRE truly is useful for becoming a better educator.

I attended several great discussions, including one addressing the pros and cons of implementing a spirituality course into rehabilitation counseling; the utilization of the EEOC disability discrimination data into current psychosocial aspects of disability curriculum; the value of using distance learning supervision models for praticum and internship students; the development and utility of asynchronous and synchronous modalities for collective research networking, and several more. As you can see, the content was vast and touched on multiple areas of rehabilitation counselor education. I feel that I walked away from the conference with many ideas to consider here at WSSU, both involving my instructional design and delivery.

I also presented my own research at this conference. My presentation was titled, "Work Comp and Weight Gain: A Growing Problem in the Workers' Compensation Rehabilitation System." Although my research was more clinical in nature, I had a great turn out for an audience. Most of the individuals informed me that they find it difficult to train their counselors in areas of private rehabilitation, as there are not many researchers out there focusing on the current trends of this specialization. I shared my clinical findings, and then opened the floor for a free discussion regarding how we as educators can keep our counselors-in-training informed on such a critical concern. The conversation was very insightful, and even I walked away with great ideas on how to deliver my own research to my students.

Overall, NCRE was and always is a success. It's always great to reconnect with colleagues across the country and, let's face it, I was in San Antonio on the riverwalk. But NCRE is a "must do" conference for rehabilitation counselor educators. I appreciated CETL's involvement in my attendance of this valuable experience.