Mike Caverly is one of the newest professors to join Wayne State College as an assistant professor in the counseling department. Caverly specializes in trauma, neuro and grief and loss counseling, with a passion for multicultural counseling and cultural humility.

Caverley attended Northern Illinois University where he received a Ph.D. in counselor education and supervision. He also has a masters of counseling from the University of Queensland in Australia.

For the past eight years, Caverly has been working as a counselor at different universities. Now, as an assistant professor, he is teaching three classes at WSC which are Counseling theories, pre-practicum and group counseling.

The one thing that has helped Caverly, especially in the practicum course, is bringing skills from his experience of working as a counselor into the classroom as much as possible. This practice helps take the information from the book and all the theoretical substance in it, and it makes it relevant, alive and applicable to who the students will be working with.

“I can tell that the students really like it when I bring in my experience,” Caverly said. “I can tell the students like when I talk about all the different clients that I have worked with. I have lived abroad for four years and I have counseled in Australia for three years. That experience has really shaped how I work with people, especially in a multicultural context.”

Caverly hopes his time here at Wayne state can offer somebody who is willing to be collaterally humble. As he explains, collateral humility is all about understanding what you don’t know.

“It is all well and good that I lived abroad for so long, but there is still so much that I can learn,” Caverly said. “There is still so much that I can gain from working with different people who may have a different experience than me. How can I learn about those things? How can I learn with these people? How can I continue to develop as a multicultural person? I think it’s a really cool area, the concept of cultural humility. It’s a really important way to approach a lot of things, but counseling for sure, it accepts that I don’t know everything and that I can continue to learn.”

Caverly said that he will be bringing multicultural aspects into all of his classes, and continue to adapt, and teach the usefulness of being able to adapt.