Social Justice: A National Imperative for Counselor Education and Supervision

"As Therapists, We Get to Be Quietly Subversive": A Qualitative Exploration of CFTs' Social Justice Practices

Scholars from counseling fields have long urged therapists to recognize the moral imperative of promoting justice and co-creating a more equitable society. Because of their systemic lens, couple, and family therapists (CFTs) are uniquely poised to create systemic change. Scholars in the CFT field have underscored the importance of social justice for decades. However, little empirical evidence exists in the CFT field on how social justice is being prioritized. Using Freire's critical consciousness, this study explores CFT's social justice practices utilizing a national sample of CFTs (n = 22). This study investigates how participants define social justice, develop critical consciousness, address oppression, and practice advocacy. Clinical implications for CFTs to provide culturally responsive services and improve advocacy are discussed.

The Use of Social Justice Concepts in Rehabilitation Counselor Education: Results of an Exploratory Study

Divisive social rhetoric and prevalent racism make the need for infusing social justice throughout counselor education even more urgent than the decades—long calls for it. There is a dearth of empirical inquiry into the ways social justice concepts are enacted across rehabilitation counseling curricula. The current study used an exploratory survey to collect information about the techniques used by rehabilitation counselor educators ( n = 71) to infuse social justice across all of their courses, including their pedagogical choices, rates of frequency for updating coursework, and professional development choices. Findings reveal that educators have favorable attitudes about social justice, are more likely to use academic journals and related disciplines in course development, and to use self-reflection and intuition-based opportunities for social justice professional development. Implications of the findings also include relevancy for supervisors and practitioners, who have the responsibility to and lead social justice education once trainees have entered the field as professionals.

Affective and developmental transitions: qualitative themes in multicultural counseling journals

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to examine how multicultural counseling students expressed their understandings about themselves and others in relation to diversity. The authors wanted to know how cognitive development, affective development, and sense of self-evolved during a multicultural counseling class to examine all aspects of growth.

Design/methodology/approach

– Themes from a phenomenological qualitative analysis of journals from a multicultural counseling class suggest that students struggle with cognitive challenges (dealing with ambiguity, internalizing multicultural concepts, and self- and other-acceptance) and affective challenges (anger, guilt, and fear) in attaining multicultural growth.

Findings

– This expanded view of multicultural growth that includes affective challenges can fill a prior gap in understanding how multicultural learning occurs.

Research limitations/implications

– Implications are explored for counselor educators and supervisors.

Originality/value

– Recent use of journals to provide empirical insights into student growth include a study by Cohenet al.(2015), who used qualitative analyses of journal contents to examine growth in student attitudes toward geriatric clients, death, and dying. Knowing that student journals can provide insights into changing multicultural attitudes, and that qualitative methodology can provide tools for analysis, the authors decided that it might be possible to better understand multicultural growth by studying the journals written in a multicultural counseling class.