Moral, Spiritual & Ethical Foundations
This competency area highlights the importance of having the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to develop and maintain integrity in one’s life and work.
This includes thoughtful development, critique, and adherence to a holistic and comprehensive standards of ethics and commitment to one’s own wellness and growth.
For our program at APU, the emphasis is both a personal and professional “compass” of honesty, truth-telling and servant-oriented approach while articulating a Christian worldview that reflects the values, ethics and principal teachings of the Christian faith.
My Personal Theory of Helping Relationships within Student Affairs
The final assignment for the course, Counseling: The Helping Relationship, challenged me in identifying my own personal theory of helping. Through familiarizing myself with foundational counseling theories and reflecting on personal beliefs and identities, I was able to discover and form my personal theory when approaching ethical helping relationships with students. My personal theory of helping was inspired by techniques and methods from both the Person-Centered Theory (Rogers, 1951) and the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy approach (Murdock, 2004). These two perspectives highlight a holistic perspective of the human ability to reach full actualization, as well as emphasizing the helpee’s active role in the counseling interactions. This assignment guided me in developing core competencies by challenging me to view my various positions as helping and counseling opportunities, and reflect on my values as they pertain to student wellness, healing, and growth.
The Compassionate Student Affairs Educator
The faith integration component for the course, The Role of Diversity in Student Affairs, involved reading through and reflecting on the written works of pastor Gregory Boyle. His published work titled Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (2010) encompasses powerful and diverse narratives from the pastor’s efforts towards gang intervention and rehabilitation within Los Angeles California. After reading about the humanitarian and social justice accomplishments of Father Boyle in LA, we were asked to incorporate our own faith backgrounds into the impactful work of our multicultural action plan projects. This assignment strongly ties into the necessary competencies of a student affairs professional as it requires reflection of personal faith values, how they influence our world view, and developing an awareness of social justice issues, all within student affairs multicultural outreach.
As I reflected on Father Boyle’s values and commitment to kinship and compassion, I challenged myself to identify the unconscious biases and limits of my empathy towards specific student populations. Throughout Father Boyle’s book, example after example of endless grace and compassion towards gang-affiliated people proved to be a barrier breaker and bridge builder. Completing this assignment acted as a spotlight for me in recognizing my own biases, and as a reminder to seek compassion and grace for others, as well as for myself.
Reflection on Setting Boundaries
within Student Affairs
During our introductory course, Introduction to College Student Affairs, we were asked to reflect on our current understanding and perspective of healthy boundaries between ourselves and our students as well as work-life balance and mental health. Additionally, we were asked to integrate faith perspectives by considering Jesus’s example regarding healthy boundaries. As stated by authors Magolda and Magolda, “Student affairs professionals who passively allow the mindless erosion of personal and professional boundaries can experience exhaustion, cynicism, depression, anger, anxiety, hopelessness, and physical illness” (Magolda, P. M., & Magolda, M. B., 2013). This assignment supported me in my early boundary development and continues to inspire the reflective process in which I actively reflect and implement new boundaries within my work-life balance to ensure the best interest of both myself and my students.