May 13, 2008

Dr. Song Lee, an assistant professor in the Counseling, Special Education and Rehabilitation Department at California State University, Fresno, has received one of the nation’s highest awards in counseling.

Lee, a Fresno State alumna who may be the only Hmong-speaking counselor educator with a doctorate in the United States, was honored at the American Counseling Association conference in Detroit on March 24. The association has more than 45,000 members throughout the world.

The honor, the Courtland C. Lee Multicultural Excellence Scholarship Award, is presented to a graduate student in counselor education whose dedication and academic work demonstrate excellence in the theory and practice of multicultural counseling. Song Lee earned her master’s degree at Fresno State and was nominated for the award last year while completing her doctoral degree in at North Carolina State University.

“The ACA awards are the most prestigious in the counseling field,” said Dr. Charles Arokiasamy, chair of the Counseling, Special Education and Rehabilitation Department. “This is a high honor for Dr. Lee and also for the program and the Kremen School of Education and Human Development. Fresno State students are learning from among the nation’s best.”

Dr. Sari Dworkin, a Counseling, Special Education and Rehabilitation professor who was among Lee’s teachers while she was earning a master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy, said her new colleague is the first person in the history of the department to win the coveted award.

Lee joined the Fresno State faculty last fall after completing her doctoral degree at North Carolina State University. Her dissertation, “Hmong Women Issues: Identity and Mental Health,” evaluates Hmong women's perceptions, behaviors and mental health well-being related to identity development and with cultural and acculturation contexts.

Dr. Sylvia Nassar-McMillan, Lee’s professor at NC State University who nominated her for the award, said Lee’s dissertation brings critical importance to the global understanding of multicultural issues particularly from a Hmong-American perspective.

“As a Hmong refugee and a woman, she experienced firsthand the struggles that minorities have to overcome,” Nassar-McMillan said.

Lee is a native of Laos who has spent most of her life in California and is a 1993 graduate of McLane High School in Fresno.

Her journey to the national spotlight has its roots in one she undertook in 1976 near the beginning of her life in the jungle of war-torn Laos. At the age of two, Lee, her parents and five siblings were forced from their homes by communist Vietnamese.

They endured a several-days trek on foot with Lee’s mother carrying her infant sister and her father carrying her year-old sister. The older children, ages 8, 6, and 4, were carrying food and other survival essentials, Lee remembers. Although she was a toddler, Lee had to walk night and day under threat of attack and other dangers, including a border-crossing of the Mekong River into Thailand, where many drowned.

After five years in a refugee camp in Thailand, the family arrived in the United States.

Lee, who holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Davis, said her commitment to issues of multiculturalism started in high school but her vision crystallized while a master’s degree student at Fresno State. After earning her degree in 2000, she chose North Carolina for her doctorate, to increase her exposure to other Hmong environments and cultures outside California.

“I also wanted to educate other communities about the Hmong,” she said. “Some of my professors, classmates and community members in Raleigh have never heard of the Hmong, although North Carolina has the fourth-largest Hmong population in the United States.”

Lee said her goal is to contribute to the field of counseling through practical work, empirical studies and literary work among the Southeast Asian population here, especially the Hmong population.

Dr. Paul Beare, dean of the Kremen School of Education and Human Development who was instrumental in recruiting Lee to Fresno State’s faculty, noted that she will help serve Fresno’s Hmong community, one of the largest in the nation.

"She will be an inspiration to young Hmong women just by being herself," Beare said. "Given our loyalties and connection with the Hmong community here, we wanted to be sure we had the only Hmong speaking counseling Ph.D. in the country right here at Fresno State.

For Lee, being singled out nationally was a high honor and thrill. She said the award was especially satisfying because she met such national leaders in counseling as Dr. Sam Gladding, author of several popular texts in the field, the award’s namesake Courtland C. Lee, who presented the award to her.

"To have this man personally hand me the award was something I would never have even dreamed," Lee said. Courtland Lee has written several popular multicultural texts, many of which Song Lee has studied.

For more information about Counseling, Special Education and Rehabilitation at Fresno State, contact Arokiasamy at 559.278.0325 or e-mail charlesa@csufresno.edu.