Publishing in the Journal of College Counseling, Part II: Comments on Disseminating College Counseling Knowledge Through Professional Issues and Innovative Practice Articles

Abstract

This is the 2nd of 2 articles in which the editors provide suggestions for authors who are considering submitting manuscripts to the Journal of College Counseling (JCC). The editors describe guidelines for writing manuscripts for the Professional Issues and Innovative Practice sections of JCC. Counseling in the college setting comprises preventive, developmental, and psychotherapeutic services, as well as consultation, supervision, and teaching. The college counseling field responds to continual changes in client demographics, contemporary practices, counseling center mission, and institutional direction. Professional conversation about the issues college counselors face and the practices they use allows them to more effectively adapt to these changing contexts. The Journal of College Counseling (JCC) publishes critical examinations of pressing professional concerns and descriptions of newly emerging practices. Professional Issues and Innovative Practice submissions allow college counselors an avenue for sharing within the professional community and making a contribution to the scholarly literature. The purpose of this article is to provide suggestions on how to communicate successfully when writing manuscripts for the Professional Issues and Innovative Practice sections. Professional Issues Articles Professional Issues manuscripts should present in-depth analyses of contemporary issues that affect the various constituent audiences within the field of college counseling, including practitioners, directors, and divisional mad institutional leaders. Directors may be most interested in issues related to putting counseling center missions into practice, whereas practitioners may be most interested in how contemporary issues affect the daily work life of college counselors. Divisional and institutional leaders are often primarily interested in resource questions and relationships between college counseling and institutional outcomes (such as student retention). Correspondingly, manuscripts for the Professional Issues section should delineate which campus constituencies might be most interested in, or affected by, the professional concern presented in the manuscript. In addition to clearly identifying the relevant audience(s), Professional Issues manuscripts must include an explicit definition of the issue to be examined and statements that clearly support the relevance of the issue to the field of college counseling. Professional Issues manuscripts should also provide readers with all in-depth analysis of various dimensions of the issue that is grounded in counseling and related literature. Using literature to support the need for the manuscript does not exclude submitting manuscripts addressing issues that arise from reflections of one's own experience. On the contrary, personal experience provides an invaluable means for identifying salient issues in the field; however, the positions the authors take must also be supported by relevant extant literature from the field. Once the issue has been thoroughly outlined, including recognizing perspectives that fall outside (or even counter to) the position the authors support, Professional Issues manuscripts need to delineate practical implications for college counseling centers, including implications for practice, policy, and recommendations for future research. An example of a recent, well-conceived Professional Issues article is Sharkin's (2004) review of the literature examining the impact of college counseling centers on college student retention. The author began the article by describing the growing need for college counselors to recognize the potential of their work to affect college student retention, while also noting the relative failure on the part of college counselors to relate their work to this important mission of student affairs. Next, the author outlined research findings on student retention as a function of counseling, which included a review of the impact of academic counseling, psychological counseling, and other psychological services offered by college counselors. …