31st Annual Convention A Success

Yes, our PACERS 31st Annual Convention was a success. More than 120 came and participated in the 2 and a half day event that tackled the theme: "Relationships at Risk: issues and Interventions." We had three panel discussions, one in the first afternoon, and two the next morning. The areas of relationships tackled were those of the home (marital or couple relationships, parent-child, and sibling & extended family members), corporate setting (employer-employee, management and stockholders) and school organizations (teacher-student, adviser and members in student organizations, as well as administration and personnel). All invited speakers came ready with their powerpoint presentations that aided a lot in their presentation as well as for the participants to actively engage themselves in those highly educational and enlightening presentations. Congratulations to the speakers.

In the afternoon of the second day, we had eight poster presentations, and one video presentation of the CISD experience of one of the PACERS Board during the aftermath of the Reming typhoon in Bicol. After this, the poster presentors were awarded certificates of appreciation for generously sharing their research outputs by way of poster presentation. Then came the paper presentations. Six paper presentors were distributed into three function rooms. and boy, they were jampacked! My student-seminarians I invited to attend, and they did come and learned! Again, thanks to the paper presentors. Even if there was no financial remuneration, as one commented, "it was a great opportunity to share what we have found through our researches." This event may actually be in line with one of Urie Bronfenbrenner's principles, that of communicating his research findings through educational settings like we had in this Convention. This is one of the more interesting events during the Convention. Hence, if this may already be stated here: all counselors are invited to share their research outputs in the coming Conventions. We usually don't do that during the midyear, since all we have then are workshops.

Yes, that was the third day's events. We had three workshops on three areas of counseling practice: the corporate setting, the home, and family/marital counseling. One tackled on Promoting Wellness among employees in a corporate setting. The workshop on relationships at home tackled on Verbal Abuse (of course usually by adults, parents on their children) and some guidelines how to handle such counseling cases. How to handle marital conflicts, including jealousy and infidelity was the focal issues in the third workshop. All three workshops were four hours long, and were presented twice during the day: once in the morning, and once in the afternoon. Participants could attend two out of three workshops.

Looking back, I realize that the workshops were particularly interesting, that maybe it can be replicated in another forum other than the midyear. PACERS also opens itself for regional events. We had once in San Pablo where San Pablo Colleges requested PACERS to run its workshops there and participants from nearby provinces and other schools came. If you have this suggestion, please feel free to communicate to us. Our email addresses are mentioned in the blogs before this. Let us know your thoughts and we can talk about it.