There are many kinds of helping relationships--coaching, mentoring, psychotherapy, and others. In this interview with W. Brad Johnson, Susan Robison explores how some of his insights about mentoring can be applicable to other types of helping relationships, like coaching. Mentoring is viewed as a broader relationship, but does include many of the…

Romer and Walker's "Appreciative Inquiry," which obtained input from 16 capable personal assistants, challenges some influential assumptions about personal assistance and opens a way to think about the demanding work of developing capable and committed personal assistants. Attempts to depersonalize the relationship between people…

High on any Top 10 list of the most frequent advice offered to young faculty members is this: No good deed goes unpunished. The aphorism at first seems cynical, pessimistic, dysfunctional. Doing good, as members of a higher-education community, is their job. What if everyone just looked out for No. 1? The entire promotion-and-tenure system--which…

The quality of the work that paid support staff carry out within services for individuals with intellectual disability is clearly crucial to achieving positive quality of life outcomes for service users. Despite this fact, support staff have been relatively neglected as a focus for research within their field. That is not necessarily to say that…

The author shares how he helps a student who is a drug addict and reflects about the role of teachers on the campus. He believes that most teachers on the faculty are caring individuals, often parents themselves who want the best for their students. But the author also realizes that teachers are pressed for time, have a wide range of conflicting…

The Reverend Paul Locatelli has been president of Santa Clara University for 20 years. He was recently appointed as Jesuit secretary for higher education throughout the world and will step down as president of the university later this year. In this interview, Locatelli talks about how Pope Benedict, seeing universities as part of the church's…

According to an influential view, empathy has, and should have, a role in ethics, but it is by no means clear what is meant by "empathy", and why exactly it is supposed to be morally good. Recently, Peter Goldie has challenged that view. He shows how problematic empathy is, and argues that taking an external perspective is morally…

Following a definition of agency, presents classical causation theory. Reviews one counseling theory and then shows how the mechanistic biases of psychology have been incorporated into this account. Recommends corrective theoretical measures in line with an agential view of behavior. (Author/ABL)

Describes an effective program designed to raise the empathy level of helpers. Based on a human relations training approach, it incorporates didactic instruction, experiential learning, modeling, feedback, and imagery. (JOW)

If there is justification for men to research female practice, they must satisfy several criteria: they must recognize men's position of privilege and women's position of oppression; they must understand and accept women's experience; and they must recognize that women have accumulated more cultural capital for caring. (JOW)

Mentors' roles include standing behind the learner (creating a supportive "holding environment"); leading the learner (acting as guide); face to face (listening, questioning, making connections); and shoulder to shoulder (acting as companion, ally, and co-learner). (SK)

Argues that autistic people experience greater comfort from imposed routines than from a yielding form of love and understanding called naive humanism. Assesses the flaws of naive humanism via Collin's theory of action, a reductionist approach. Compares the different social contexts of care of autistic people. (Author/CCM)

Discusses several obstacles to staff/parent partnership and describes 13 ways of building and maintaining such a collaborative relationship. (RH)

Provides an overview of mentoring and networking and encourages helping professionals to explore the literature and processes of mentoring and networking to use and extend these ideas as they work with students and clients toward life goals. (JAC)

Describes one educator's efforts to aid gang members by initiating alternative education and recreation projects in Oakland and Los Angeles, California. Believing that young people join groups to fulfill unmet needs, the author finds caring adults the key to helping kids with affiliation and self-esteem deficiencies. (MLH)