About

The Department of Counselor Education at Radford University offers a unique blend of courses designed to provide the skills and knowledge necessary for becoming a knowledgeable, thoughtful, skillful and caring counselor. The M.S. in Counseling and Human Development program is intensely clinical and involves significant student engagement in situated learning or clinical practice.

Emphasis on the students’ personal and professional growth and development permeates the entire educational process. Didactic and experiential learning components are provided to ensure that students develop a thorough knowledge of the helping process and their personal role as a facilitator of human development and change. An individual style of counseling is created by a blend of courses, directed experiences, supervised clinical practice and personal growth. This unique combination has proven to be an effective training process for our graduates who seek employment as professional counselors in varied settings or who desire advanced graduate study beyond the master’s degree.

Department of Counselor Education Mission Statement

Radford University’s Department of Counselor Education prepares emerging counselors through an experiential, contextual, and systemic curriculum, infused with foundational and current counseling-related research, counseling and human development needs of clients from diverse backgrounds and culturally diverse populations, and clinical and outreach activities.

The program helps students develop a strong counselor professional identity through ethical and competent practice as well as expanding self-awareness. Students serve as professional school counselors in K-12 public school settings and professional mental health counselors who practice in community agencies and other clinical mental health settings.

Toward meeting the mission, the Department of Counselor Education has the following objectives:

To recruit qualified applicants with focus on the inclusion of qualified candidates from diverse and underrepresented populations, (e.g., racial, ethnic, sexual, disabled, economic minorities, etc.);
To provide experiences that inform and facilitate professional identity through personal and professional growth;
To teach the effective application of legal and ethical standards of clinical practice;
To assist students in developing multicultural counseling competencies (e.g., awareness, knowledge, and skills to meet the needs of a pluralistic society);
To teach the core counseling skills and strategies that are foundational to the helping process;
To contribute to the counseling profession through professional membership, participation in conferences, and participating in advocacy and social justice initiatives;
To maintain CACREP and NCATE accreditation;
To evaluate the program through recommendations from program faculty, current and former students, advisory board, and additional stakeholders and analysis of critical data derived from student learning outcomes.