TPC-Journal-V4-Issue4

The Professional Counselor \Volume 4, Issue 4 357 During the past 3 years, in which of the following international activities have your faculty participated (check all that apply)? Attendance at conferences outside the United States 35 56.5 Presentations at conferences outside the United States 35 56.5 Joint research with faculty outside the United States 23 37.1 Study-abroad tours conducted individually or through American Counseling Association (ACA), Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (AMCD) or other organizations 19 30.1 Worked as a counselor or counselor educator outside the United States 18 29.0 International faculty exchange 6 9.7 Fulbright Scholar 8 12.9 Other 9 14.5 Item Response M SD The financial contributions toward faculty participation in international activities include the following (scale of 0–100%): Faculty member 30.75 38.38 Department 24.88 34.99 University 36.75 37.55 Professional organizations 7.63 21.57 Most respondents (83.9%) reported that faculty had participated in international activities within the past 3 years. International activities of faculty included attendance and presentations at conferences outside the United States (56.5% each), joint research with faculty outside the United States (37.1%), and study-abroad tours (30.1%). Relatively few respondents reported international faculty exchange (9.7%) and Fulbright Scholars (12.9%). Financial support for faculty international activities was reported to come from the faculty member or university in almost equal proportions, with a lower level of financial support from departments and extremely little from professional associations. The authors asked respondents to report relative percentage contributions from each of those four sources. As shown in Table 2, the standard deviations of responses to all four categories were relatively large, in all cases exceeding the absolute value of the mean. In short, there was a significant amount of variability in response to the question concerning sources of financial support for international activities of faculty. Not shown in Table 2 are responses concerning departmental support for international programs, as most counselor educators who completed the survey did not respond to this question. Among the 14 who did respond, 13 (93% of those responding) indicated that there was departmental support for international activities, through either curricular focus or financial commitments. Over one-quarter of respondents (27.4%) reported that their program had a partner school outside the United States, and nearly all (88.2%) of those respondents reported that faculty regularly visited the partner school. Roughly one-half (52.9%) of respondents from programs with such international partnerships noted that they had reciprocal faculty exchanges with their partners.