College of Education and Human Development - George Mason University

College of Education and Human Development

My Spouse, My Rival, My Fellow Winner

June 25, 2013

Professors Rita Chi-Ying Chung and Fred Bemak were featured in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article about award-winning couples in academe.

The article, excerpted below, is available online.

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When married couples in academe collaborate, and even compete, sometimes they both win.

Rita Chi-Ying Chung and Fred Bemak each had a distinguished career when they met at a small, invitation-only conference in the early 1990s. Now married for 17 years, they are tenured professors at George Mason University and world travelers who have developed and used their original counseling method in post-disaster areas across the globe.

Professors Rita Chi-Ying Chung and Fred Bemak.

They're also the first spouses to each receive two of the American Counseling Association's top awards. At the association's conference this year, Ms. Chung received the Gilbert and Kathleen Wrenn Award for a Humanitarian and Caring Person, an honor given to Mr. Bemak in 2011. He won this year's Kitty Cole Human Rights Award, which Ms. Chung earned last year.

The "culturally responsive" approach to counseling that the couple developed considers a person as part of a larger family and community, they say. They worked in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, in 2005; Myanmar following Cyclone Nargis, in 2008; and Haiti after the earthquake there, in 2010. During a shared telephone interview, the two of them easily take turns talking and expanding upon each other's points. "We know what our strengths are, and we play to them," Ms. Chung says.

"The challenges came early on in terms of figuring out each other's work style," Mr. Bemak says. "Now we have a full acceptance of how each other works. We very rarely need to sit down and discuss what we're going to do and how we're going to approach it."

Ms. Chung, who is of Chinese origin but was born and raised in New Zealand, first went to the United States in 1990 for a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Los Angeles and has worked extensively with refugee and immigrant mental-health issues In November 2008 she gave a speech at the United Nations on her studies of commercial sex workers.

Mr. Bemak's career, too, has concentrated on multicultural and social-justice issues. He has worked in 55 countries and founded the nonprofit Counselors Without Borders, which sends counselors to post-disaster emergency areas. Ms. Chung is a senior partner in the organization. After they arrived at George Mason, in 2000, the couple revamped the curriculum of the counseling-and-development program to emphasize social justice, multiculturalism, advocacy, and leadership in a global context. Last year Sage Publications released their book about the approach, Social Justice Counseling: The Next Steps Beyond Multiculturalism.

 


About CEHD

George Mason University's College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) includes two schools, the Graduate School of Education, one of the largest in Virginia, and the School of Recreation, Health, and Tourism. CEHD offers a comprehensive range of degrees, courses, licensures, and professional development programs on campus, online, and on site. The college is distinguished by faculty who encourage new ways of thinking and pioneering research supported by more than $75 million in funding over the past five years.

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