|
Article Excerpt
To prevent lack of understandable interest and knowledge gaps in the American Counseling Association's (ACA) roots and its development, we spotlight the American Council of Guidance and Personnel Associations (hereinafter referred to as the Council) leaders who were assisted by members to solve what was, at that time, professional organization concerns. They looked ahead to shape the next generations of the developing profession of counseling. Gladding and Newsome (2004) credited the Council's hidden history with the formation of what has become ACA (p. 9). Some historical information associated with each leader's administration is reported in this article. Because of space restrictions, little is said about the professional lives of the Council leaders, and almost nothing is revealed about them personally.
* A Review of the Council
Anecdotal information selected from the senior author's (the first author) personal files provide brief tributes to the 17 professional organization leaders of the Council confederation (see Appendix A). Each of the 9 men and 8 women leaders was elected/appointed by the Council representatives annually at conventions or at skeleton conferences from 1943 through 1946, the World War II (WWII) era when national conventions were banned, transportation was curtailed, and travel restrictions were enforced.
No specific, systematic rotation plan existed on paper; leaders chosen were representatives of four major constituent professional associations of the Council: American College Personnel Association (ACPA), Eastern College Personnel Officers (ECPO), National Association of Deans of Women (NADW), and National Vocational Guidance Association (NVGA).
We explain collaboration functions among professional organization leaders and members a short time before the Council's formation in 1934 and chart progress during the existence of the Council until dissolution procedures that began in 1952 were completed. For several years prior to 1951, the Council was moving toward becoming the American Personnel and Guidance Associations. The committee to consider unification presented its landmark report at the Council convention in March 1950, which led to the establishment and implementation of the new Personnel and Guidance Association (PGA). Although most of the Council leaders are little known in counseling literature, their combined leadership actions in a prehistory period of nearly 2 decades made the formation of ACA possible.
ACA has several prototypes. Six years after the founding of ACA's progenitor association known as the Council, the word American was dropped from the title when the original plan of organization was revised. The Council leaders created the structure of the PGA and conducted the first election of officers in the summer of 1951. The word American was added to PGA during the 1952 joint convention of the Council and the new PGA in Los Angeles to avoid having an acronym that was similar to the professional golfers' association. APGA was chartered on July 1, 1952. Meanwhile, the Council's books were closed after 18 years of operation. After restructuring 31 years later, the APGA became the American Association for Counseling and Development (AACD) in 1983, then was recast as the American Counseling Association (ACA) in 1992, representing the counseling profession worldwide.
During 1984-1985, the AACD board of directors and the last AACD senate recognized the Council's golden anniversary. Information was placed in the archives of AACD as a historical remembrance (P. J. McDonough, personal communication, July 31, 1984) and commemorative statements about the Council's history appeared in three issues of Guidepost (now Counseling Today; AACD, 1985; Sheeley, 1984, 1985).
* Coalition Backdrop
Members of several guidance, personnel, and placement service professional associations who held annual conventions during the late 1920s and early 1930s dealt with professional education problems in schools and colleges; these problems grew out of changes in the social order of the depression days. Unemployment averaged 18.2%. To take advantage of lower hotel rates until the early part of WWII, the conventions were held the week before the meeting of the National Education Association, Department of Superintendence; the Department of Superintendence later (1938) changed its name to the American Association of School Administrators. When national conventions of the Council were renewed in 1947, they were not held with AASA.
The guidance-related associations at national conventions often conducted open meetings, joint sessions, and other program activities that were shared with members of different organizations. Among those major associations were the ACPA, NADW, and NVGA, whose combined membership numbered several hundred annually. During the late 1940s, after WWII, and in the early 1950s, membership numbers of ACPA and NVGA each increased to 1,000 or more.
A major issue for guidance and counseling associations during the 1920s and 1930s was how to coordinate and consolidate the annual conventions to avoid program overlapping. Other duplication concerns of association leaders and members included federation formation, affiliation, and association membership building. With the formation of the Council in 1934, each association was allowed to preserve its identity and autonomy.
One of the cooperating organizations, the Personnel Research Federation (PRF), printed a small folder of approximately 40 pages of programs for six organizations at the Cleveland, Ohio, convention in 1929. Programs of 10 cooperating organizations were published by the American Council on Education at the 1930 convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Former President Francis Bradshaw, who chaired ACPA's coordinating committee (an intergroup planning committee), reported at the Detroit convention in 1931 that his committee was meeting, cooperating, and coordinating with other organizations.
An important milestone was reached in 1933 after the national convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the end of his ACPA presidency (1933), Jack E. Walters agreed to chair that association's coordinating committee, which included incoming ACPA President Karl M. Cowdery ( 1933-1935) and former NVGA President Harry D. Kitson (1922-1924). After the convention in Minneapolis, this coordinating committee decided that financial backing was needed to carry on.
Coordinating committee members sent a letter dated March 1, 1933, to President F. P. Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation with a...
|
