Manuela Calles Scholarship for Women

After 6 years as an early childhood special education teacher, I took a leap of faith to pursue a passion I discovered early on in my career: supporting the parent-child relationship, mental health, and education/advocacy around social-emotional support in the school setting. By going back to school to pursue a clinical counseling license, I know I can do those things and much more. With my past experiences and future career in mind, I deeply value reflection, leading with curiosity, equity, justice, compassion, and caring. These values are essential in being an effective mental health professional and all play a specific role in my future career goals. As a teacher, I participated in reflective supervision to work through problems in the classroom and challenges I faced with students. In practice, this looked like reflecting on my own actions, biases, experiences, and triggers. This reflection made me grow to become a more effective teacher for ALL students. After graduating, I will continue to dedicate time for reflection and plan to provide educators with reflective supervision to make this type of practice more accessible. To be a great mental health professional, one must also lead with curiosity about the reasons behind behavioral responses and parenting practices. For example, I try to frame behaviors as “What is this child trying to communicate?” or view controversial parenting practices as adaptive and learned. It is clear reflection on the past is important, but being open-minded about current situations is also needed, especially when working with people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds and different rearing experiences. In addition, when working with vulnerable and minoritized populations, valuing equity and justice cannot be understated, as children and families are too often discriminated against. To combat this, I frequently engaged in difficult conversations and questioned the status quo. I had to push back on unjust disciplinary actions against students and advocate for the inclusion of children with special needs. As a future mental health professional, I hope to have a bigger and more credible voice for these children and prevent more discrimination from happening in our schools and communities. To highlight my final values, another notable experience was while facilitating a Circle of Security Parenting group. A parent shared with me how challenging it was to get their child to clean up and often just ended up either doing it for the child or throwing their toys away in anger. We talked about what it would feel like to follow through with the expectation of their child cleaning up, what they could say in the moment, and how they were going to handle their own emotions in order to not get angry and throw away the toys. The next time I saw that parent, I asked how it went. They were surprised that I had even remembered that conversation, and at the end, I told them how proud I was that they followed through with something that was so difficult for them as a parent. This simple act of compassion and caring for their experience as both a parent and a person was so powerful and left them feeling empowered and seen. In my future work as a mental health professional in schools and the community, I hope to change the culture and practice around mental health, contribute to ending cycles of abuse, help to create healthier generations and communities, and support caregivers and children who have experienced trauma and mental health challenges. With the help of the Manuela Calles Scholarship for Women, I would be one step closer to financing my degree and pursuing my future goals.