58th Annual PCA Conference

Name: When Lived Experience Enters the Counseling Classroom: Integrating Structural Trauma and Experiential Knowledge into Counselor Education (1.5 CE)
Start: 2026-11-07T10:30:00-0500
End: 2026-11-07T12:00:00-0500

When Lived Experience Enters the Counseling Classroom: Integrating Structural Trauma and Experiential Knowledge into Counselor Education (1.5 CE)

Saturday November 7, 2026 10:30am - 12:00pm EST

Session Feedback (for CEs)

Counselor education programs increasingly enroll students whose lives have been shaped by structural trauma, incarceration, early parenthood, domestic violence, adverse childhood experiences, loss, and systemic inequities. These students enter the classroom not as blank slates but as practitioners-in-formation who carry experiential knowledge with profound clinical relevance. Yet the professional socialization process embedded in counselor training may inadvertently suppress these perspectives, pressing students toward standardized professional identities at the expense of the authentic insight that first drove them into the field.

This presentation examines a critical question facing counselor education today: Are CACREP-accredited programs and their educators equipped to honor, sharpen, and integrate students lived experiences with structural trauma, or do current training paradigms risk muffling those perspectives, producing clinicians who are credentialed but disconnected from the human complexity they will encounter in practice?

Speakers

Divine Lipscomb, M.Ed., NCC, LAPC

Graduate Assistant, Penn State University

Divine Lipscomb, M.Ed., NCC, LAPC, is a doctoral candidate in Counselor Education and Supervision at Penn State University and a licensed mental health therapist serving rural Central Pennsylvania. A TEDx speaker, published researcher, and the first Black and first formerly incarcerated... Read More →

Teree Lipscomb

Graduate Assistant, Penn State

Teree Lipscomb is a graduate student in the Master of Education in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, Schools and Communities program at Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Human Development and Family Studies with a minor in Rehabilitation and Human... Read More →

Saturday November 7, 2026 10:30am - 12:00pm EST

90 Minute Education Session

Tickets

Success you have shared X tickets.

58th Annual PCA Conference

Divine Lipscomb, M.Ed., NCC, LAPC

Teree Lipscomb

Attendees (1)

Get help with the event

Success you have shared X tickets.

58th Annual PCA Conference

Divine Lipscomb, M.Ed., NCC, LAPC

Teree Lipscomb

Attendees (1)

Sign up or log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

Get help with the event