Mission
As passionate, creative, and highly skilled educators, we aim to provide comprehensive, engaging, and in-depth art therapy and counseling education. Our students develop strong counselor-artist-therapist identities through growth-oriented and reflective classroom, studio, community, and clinical experience. We prepare world-class art therapists and counselors, who are culturally responsive, community-involved, ethical professionals with successful careers.
Vision
Counseling & Art Therapy will be recognized for excellence, integrity, and innovation in art therapy and counseling education.
Core Values
Integrity
We adhere to high standards and accept responsibility for conducting ourselves as moral, rational professionals who are accountable stewards and ethical in our practices.
Creativity
We foster a climate of energy and openness to explore using the creative process, which brings new knowledge and new connections to self, others, and our world.
Self-Awareness
We value self-awareness and the capacity for reflection as intrinsic to effective clinical practice and professional identity development. We strive to maintain these attributes within ourselves and to instill them in our students.
Humanity
We dedicate ourselves to cultivating a learning environment that embraces diverse perspectives and lived experiences, developing a capacity for empathic understanding, and providing compassionate service to individuals, the community, and our world.
Collaboration
We embrace collaboration as a fundamental practice to build a professional community based on support and encouragement of individual and collective expression of ideas for learning, best practice, and growth.
Depth
We value richness and intensity in developing ourselves to be competent in the breadth of understanding about the complexity of the human experience which includes the unconscious, passion for healing, and connections to the soul.
Goals
- Prepare competent entry-level Counselors in the knowledge, skills, awareness, actions, and professional dispositions learning domains.
- Prepare competent entry-level Art Therapists in the cognitive (knowledge), psychomotor (skills), and affective (attitudes & behavior) learning domains.
- Prepare art therapists and counselors with clinical competence in assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning, which includes fostering skills in the therapeutic use of a broad range of art processes and materials, integrative theoretical approaches, and requisite education needed for counseling licensure.
- Prepare art therapists and counselors to speak and write professionally about mental health services.
- Encourage students to develop an innovative, professional, ethical, research-minded, and culturally responsive approach to art therapy and counseling through academic inquiry personal art-making, and self-reflection for self-awareness.
The accomplishment of our goals will serve the:
- Student, by fostering personal and professional discovery and development with the skills to become lifelong learners.
- Client/patient, through student preparation to provide competent client/patient-centered primary and specialty care.
- Institution, by contributing to a seamless learning environment that fosters the development of competent and compassionate mental healthcare professionals.
- Community, by graduating professionals who understand the importance of community service, forging community alliances, and understanding culturally appropriate care.
- World, by graduating culturally humble professionals who practice across the globe and contribute to research and social action.
Counseling & Art Therapy is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs (www.caahep.org) upon the recommendation of the Accreditation Council for Art Therapy Education (ACATE).
