David
Kimweli participated in MFFP’s summer fellowship program this year through the
School of Education in Counseling and Behavioral Psychology.
This summer teaching post was a last stopover before he took up a tenure
track position at Louisiana Tech University within their Department of
Behavioral Psychology, a program within the university’s larger College of
Education. One of the lures of his
position in Louisiana is that it offers Kimweli his own clinic.
Kimweli’s clinical practices will stem from his research on what he describes as a system of well being. He said, “It is a prevention model of mental health; the current models of treatment are driven by ill being. That is, you get sick first. My system approaches mental health from well being, what we can do to stay better.” His dissertation work, based in Appalachian communities, discovered key aspects of individual experience that often offset the balance of psychological soundness. For instance, people who don’t have local social support or kinship relationships within a relatively short distance, and people who don’t have some kind of religious faith, are at risk of developing mental health problems. Kimweli focused his research primarily on college-age adults ranging from the twenties to more mature individuals returning to school after a time away, where psychological well being had already been compromised. He determined patterns of risk, usually first established in childhood or adolescence, and sometimes exacerbated by the isolation that moving to a college community creates, in order to set the boundaries for his preventative model of well being. While his dissertation work targeted community college populations in the Eastern Kentucky rim of Appalachia, Kimweli’s work out of the Louisiana clinic will service a community more distinct from that attached to higher education institutions. Indeed, the clinic will perform a service for the general community, while also extending his research interests.
Kimweli’s emphasis on clinical analysis and service made him a perfect candidate for teaching the summer practicum for IU’s Counseling and Behavioral Psychology program. The course is designed to prepare M.A. and some Ph.D. students for upcoming internships they will participate in, principally within therapy, counseling, and intervention fields. While teaching this course, Kimweli employed what he called a participatory model of pedagogy, one that employs dialectics. Students are challenged through dialogues based in dialectical thinking to come up with their own syntheses, their own worked-through conclusions about questions sometimes that they themselves originally posed. He said that his students found this method, rooted in dialogue, to be very beneficial in the classroom. Kimweli added that he enjoyed teaching these students immensely, that his experience in the School of Education was extremely pleasant, and that faculty and staff were all very helpful and friendly.