Abstract
While numerous scholars in the fields of counseling and psychology have called for the implementation of social justice counselor education and training, there remains concern that both multiculturalism and social justice are only embraced superficially and may not truly be enacted in counseling and psychology training programs. Often, counseling and psychology education programs include multiculturalism, diversity, and even social justice in their mission statements, but they fail to offer their students the depth and breadth of training experiences required to actually provide such an education. For instance, most programs have one course that addresses multiculturalism, but this concept is only occasionally mentioned in other courses and social justice is rarely discussed at all. This gives the false impression that counseling and psychology education programs are addressing diversity, when in actuality these programs are not preparing students to practice in ways that attend to the unique experiences of the diverse clients they will serve or to address to the complex ways in which social injustice manifests in the lives of clients, particularly those from marginalized social groups. Further, since multiculturalism and social justice have become popularized in the counseling and psychology lexicon, we now see regular attempts within counseling and psychology education programs to actualize these concepts, but in ways that are often superficial and simply reinforce the status quo.
In the counseling program in which all the authors are faculty members, we have worked to infuse a multicultural-social justice framework throughout the program over the past 13 years. While we continue to grow and face challenges, in this chapter we describe some of the practices that we have found to be successful and provide recommendations for how our profession can revision and decolonize our educational practices. In this chapter, we focus on five areas that we see as critical in decolonizing the practice of counseling and psychology education: banking education versus education for critical consciousness, “othering” multiculturalism and social justice versus infusing multiculturalism and social justice throughout the curriculum, voyeurism versus voice, community as an afterthought versus community as integral, and political neutrality versus political engagement. We provide examples from our own practice as educators that we hope others can expand on and continue to improve in order to better develop future social justice-oriented counselors.
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Goodman, R. et al. (2015). Decolonizing Traditional Pedagogies and Practices in Counseling and Psychology Education: A Move Towards Social Justice and Action. In: Goodman, R., Gorski, P. (eds) Decolonizing “Multicultural” Counseling through Social Justice. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1283-4_11
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