Debra Pender
by Mark McGowan
A professor in NIU’s Department of Counseling, Adult and Higher Education has received a national award from a division of the American Counseling Association.
Debra Pender won the Group Practice Award from the Association for Specialists in Group Work this spring in recognition of her more than 20 years of facilitating crisis intervention groups. The honor also celebrates Pender’s statewide leadership in the field and her research into group process factors associated with critical incident stress debriefing.
She received her award during the ACA’s annual conference in Hawaii.
“My husband, who is a firefighter and paramedic was with me, as was my daughter, who’s a counseling student,” Pender said. “It was particularly touching given the level of dedication I’ve seen on this campus in our personnel.”
To Pender, however, her true reward is the opportunity to work with critical incident responders.
“Emergency responders are normal people with normal coping skills who get exposed to the worst moments any of us can imagine. When it’s bad for them, it’s beyond-belief bad for us,” she said.
“I can’t even begin to describe what an honor it is to serve that population. They’re incredibly courageous,” she added. “Considering the graphic nature of what they see, they dust themselves off, put themselves back together and go back to the work the next day, knowing that sometimes your best effort is all that you can do. It’s an honor to be part of their world.”
Pender, who came to the NIU College of Education in 2005 as a visiting professor and was hired in 2006, became involved with emergency responders when she was working as a counselor at a community agency in southern Illinois.
“A local fire department came to our agency and asked for assistance in developing a team to do critical incident stress debriefing,” she said. “I started meeting with them, and ended up doing my thesis research on fire, police and EMS stress in that region. We developed the team that became a part of the statewide network.”
Meanwhile, Pender built strong relationships with emergency responders as she learned about their lives and their jobs.
Pender spent a “pretty cool but terrifying” day in fire school, learning how to wear the gear and how to breathe with the self-contained breathing apparatus. She shadowed police officers on duty and rode along with paramedics.
She also became an official trainer for the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation to teach others how to conduct debriefings, serves on the Illinois Terrorism Task Force Committee on Volunteerism and teaches crisis counseling as part of NIU’s homeland security education initiatives.
“It’s an undergraduate- and graduate-level course for anyone in the helping professions – teachers, school administrators, human resources professionals, nurses, social workers, family therapists, counselors,” Pender said. “That format will be shared with eight of the 12 public universities in Illinois.”
Her current research focuses on variables of group process, including whether the leaders conduct quality meetings, by asking emergency responders in attendance about themes that emerged from their debriefings.
“An important one is acceptance – that their reaction to stress was accepted by the peers they work with and that it was a normal, and not abnormal, reaction,” she said. “Others are the camaraderie of everyone getting through an event together and the realization that you have to let go.”