The need for a multicultural and social justice leadership approach is critical considering today's political climate that threatens the academic, career, and personal potential of students who are marginalized in school settings. We offer a leadership framework using the main constructs of the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies. This leadership framework provides school counselors with a model to address issues of oppression impacting students.

Discourse represents the languages, ideas, and images that together shape one's understanding of the world. In counseling, discourse determines clinical practice. The authors posit that dominant discourse in counseling promotes an intrapsychic status quo that discounts the relationship between individuals and their environment, which often leads to office‐bound interventions that are inadequate in addressing issues of oppression. The counselor–advocate–scholar model (Ratts & Pedersen, ) is introduced to expand current discourse to include advocacy and research to better address systems of oppression. El discurso representa los idiomas, ideas e imágenes que, en su conjunto, dan forma a nuestra comprensión del mundo. En la consejería, el discurso determina la práctica clínica. Los autores proponen que el discurso dominante en la consejería promueve un status quo intrapsíquico que no tiene en cuenta la relación entre los individuos y su medio, lo que con frecuencia lleva a intervenciones limitadas a la oficina que no resuelven de forma adecuada los problemas relacionados con la opresión. Se introduce el modelo consejero‐defensor‐investigador (Ratts & Pedersen, ) para expandir el discurso actual de forma que incluya la defensoría e investigación, y así abordar mejor los sistemas de opresión.

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The entrenched intrapsychic perspective that currently dominates the counseling professions does not philosophically support social justice advocacy. Because an intrapsychic approach to counseling focuses almost exclusively on change at the individual level, interventions to change an oppressive environment are routinely ignored. Thus, this manuscript presents the argument that a paradigm shift towards an ecological perspective, one that recognizes human behavior as a function of person-environment interaction, is necessary to provide practitioners a clear rationale to engage in social justice advocacy in counseling.

The counseling profession, by virtue of research, dialogue, and the evolution of professional ideology, continues to uphold the viewpoint that psychological distress and disorders emanate from innate or biologically based factors. Consequently, the social reality that counseling partially defines through this discourse may inadvertently constrain the very movement that can most affect change through social action and engagement. Counseling professionals may unwittingly undercut attempts by oppressed individuals, groups, and their allies to create a more equitable and just society through civil disobedience and concerted social action. This article discusses how the current discourse on social justice may neutralize social action by reviewing discourse theory and presentation of a case study that offers strategies to operational discourse theory and support social action and engagement.