On board for five months now, I continue to learn about the diversity of programs within APA's Education Directorate that further the work of our governance board and committees. For this column, I have decided to share some of my initial musings as I discover more and more about the organizational features of our discipline. Moreover, many psychologists working solely within educational settings participate in multiple roles of teaching, research and practice, and many of those working outside of educational settings have significant interests in education. In fact, 46.8 percent of all full-time employed psychologists report involvement in educational activities. Education is fundamental to practice.
Education is fundamental to the integration of science and practice in the public interest.
Given these beliefs, I find the concept of stakeholders as more relevant to the directorate than the traditionally named constituencies. I must also admit that I feel uneasy when labels are used for various groups in psychology as if they conveyed mutually exclusive categories. I have spent years looking at our discipline through the eyes of our graduate students, and have appreciated their dilemmas when they feel asked to identify a particular career path very early in their development. Just as all psychologists are stakeholders in education, so are psychology educators stakeholders in the entire discipline. I believe that the Education Directorate should serve an integrative function for psychology, but it should be an integration that fosters excellence, not just integration for integration's sake.