Groundwork Proposal

For our Introduction to Cultural Sustainability course, our final product is called a groundwork project. This is essentially an outline of what it is we will be working on through the remainder of the curriculum. The first piece of my groundwork project is the following proposal:

Peer counseling is a service offered these days at more and more schools and is beginning to be accepted as necessary. The philosophy of peer counseling is that students in college may benefit from counseling but not be willing to see a professional, or maybe would be better assisted by someone on their own level. Peer counselors understand their limitations in helping students, having received usually forty hours of training rather than a medical degree. Largely, peer counselors present themselves as sounding boards and referrals. Yet they still call themselves counselors. This is an important distinction to make when analyzing the semantics of these types of programs, as this word is one that can mean something much deeper than perhaps it is meant to.



As a graduate student and staff member at Goucher College in the Office of Community Living, I have been granted the responsibility of creating one such peer program for Goucher students. This program is specifically being developed for survivors of sexual assault, but services offered will not be limited to sexual assault survivors in our community. I would like to create a peer network that moves away from the word counseling and instead embraces the concept of listening. I think it reasonable to expect that the ability to truly and sensitively listen to another person, and then to provide the appropriate responses and resources, can be acquired in a forty hour training session. I also would like to use that idea of peer listening to install educational programs about different student issues. When a school has a peer counseling program as well as educational/awareness raising programs, the two are related but different. If we were to implement a peer listening program and also begin projects centered on awareness through listening to one another, the two would seem to complement each other. I also would like to utilize that idea of listening by allowing undergraduate students to feel as though they have a strong role in the production of peer listening and awareness programs. I would do this by allowing student leaders to conduct parts of trainings, to be responsible for other student peer listeners, and to identify and implement which specific issues need to be focused on when raising awareness and educating the larger student body. This way, when I finish my graduate education and therefore most likely leave Goucher and the Office of Community Living, the work I have done will not leave with me.


For the last few years, I have learned an awful lot about sexual assault, domestic violence, trauma, and Goucher College. This information will be very valuable to me as I move forward, although I still have much to learn. In order to develop a program that I can reasonably expect to be sustainable and helpful to students, I would like to learn more about other student issues (i.e. disabilities, substance issues, racial tensions, etc.), about how other colleges’ peer programs run, and about healing through listening in general. Some of this research can be acquired through attending trainings and visiting Goucher’s peer institutions, and some I can learn through library research.


Since I have the privilege of being able to focus on the development and coordination of this program for the next three years, I would like to revolutionize the preexisting model of what peer counseling is. I plan to use knowledge of other institutions’ programs and integrate the concepts of listening and cultural sustainability in a way that breeds a new, more holistic and humanistic peer program. At the end of these three years, I would like to have accomplished two main goals: 1) a peer listening program at Goucher that is sustainable in my absence and 2) a template that allows other schools to easily implement similar programs.