Changing Perspectives Counseling

Changing Perspectives Resource Manual

Changing Perspectives

Changing Perspectives charts the pivotal period in Houston’s history when Jewish and Black leadership eventually came together to work for positive change. This is a story of two communities, both of which struggled to claim the rights and privileges they desired. Previous scholars of Southern Jewish history have argued that Black-Jewish relations did not exist in the South. However, during the 1930s to the 1980s, Jews and Blacks in Houston interacted in diverse and oftentimes surprising ways. For example, Houston’s Jewish leaders and eventually Black political leaders forged a connection that blossomed into the creation of the Mickey Leland Kibbutzim Internship in Israel for disadvantaged Black youth. Initially Houston Jewish leadership battled with their devotion to liberalism and sympathy with oppressed Blacks and their desire to acculturate. The distance between Houston’s Jews and Blacks diminished after changing demographics, the end of segregation, city redistricting, and the emergence of Black political power. Simultaneously, Israel’s victory during the Six-Day War caused the city’s Jews to embrace their Jewish identity and form an unexpected bond with Black political leaders over the cause of Zionism. Allison Schottenstein shows that Black-Jewish relations did exist during the Long Civil Rights Movement in Houston. Indeed, Houston played a significant role in the scope of Southern Jewish history and in expanding our understanding of Black-Jewish relations in the United States.

Counseling and Action

Engaging in action is at the heart of our most meaningful experiences. And given the fast-paced, goal-driven nature of modern society, engagement in action is also central to how we perceive ourselves. Action has traditionally been viewed as an end product of the counseling process, but now a bold new redefinition makes counseling not only a driver of action, but an action in itself. Counseling and Action couples a timely update on the multiple roles of action in counseling with an action-based framework for enhancing progress between client and professional. Grounded in the core concepts of contextual action theory as well as key aspects of counseling (e.g., identity, intentionality, emotion), the book explicates an approach that is responsive to client complexities and the larger social conditions that frame them. Expert-penned chapters apply theory to practice, illustrating levels of engagement in action as counselor and client negotiate goals and work toward their realization. And an especially useful section offers guidelines for intervening with specific populations and addressing particular issues. Among the topics covered: Designing projects for career construction. Agentic action in context. Counseling intentional addiction recovery grounded in relationships and social meaning. The action of mindfulness in counseling. A contextual action theory perspective on self-efficacy in individual counseling. Counseling processes and procedures through the lens of contextual action theory. With its forceful argument for a quantum leap in both theory and practice, Counseling and Action is transformative reading for professionals, educators, and graduate students in social work, psychotherapy, psychology, and counseling.