Sherrie Bruner, Everett Painter, Alessandra Rhinehart, and Anna Lora Taylor teamed up to enter the American Counseling Association (ACA) Graduate Student Ethics Case Study Competition and placed 3rd overall. All four are in the Counselor Education Program – Bruner, Painter, and Taylor as PhD students and Rhinehart as a PhD Candidate.
ACA explains that this competition is an opportunity for graduate students to analyze a potential ethical case and create an appropriate decision-making plan of how to respond.
Once receiving the case scenario, Bruner, Painter, Rhinehart, and Taylor had to identify the dilemma, list their proposed ethical actions, justify those proposed actions, and describe the decision-making model used to arrive at that decision. They chose Welfel’s ethical decision-making model. Painter explained that this model incorporates reflection as a final step, which is not explicit in many other decision-making models. The team’s full essay response is posted on the ACA website.
They placed third out of thirty-nine teams, each winning a fifty-dollar gift certificate to the ACA Bookstore, a certificate, and letter of recognition. Plus, their names are going to be published in Counseling Today, and their team essay response will be submitted to VISTAS (an online peer-reviewed article database) for consideration of publication. Also, they have all been invited to attend the ACA Annual Conference and Expo in Orlando, Florida next month to be recognized at the National Awards Ceremony. Bruner and Rhinehart are planning to attend the conference.
