Linking Multicultural Counseling and Social Justice Through Advocacy

Abstract

The concepts of multicultural counseling, social justice, and advocacy may be utilized without a clear sense of how best to operationalize them in counselor training. In this article, the authors offer a perspective on how advocacy and social justice interrelate and share strategies for infusing advocacy into counselor training to achieve social justice goals. The authors provide six experiential activities counselor educators may use to provide counselors-in-training experience in a range of advocacy skills.

Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competency Research: Opportunities for Innovation

“…Because research and practice are intertwined, this evaluation should explore changes in multicultural and social justice scholarship capacity in terms of clinical skill development. One area of program evaluation is to measure short‐ and long‐term changes in MSJCC (Ratts et al, 2015) development for counselor trainees, as literature indicates there is insufficient information about both the process of enhancing competency and the outcomes of competency (see Fickling & Gonzales, 2016; Hoover & Morrow, 2016). Related to short‐term assessment, counselor educators can obtain feedback as well as changes in trainee MSJCC for specific training activities within and outside the classroom; this input should be obtained as possible from trainees as well as those who observe them (e.g., clients, peers, supervisors).…”

“…Multicultural and social justice counseling competency is an integral part of counselors’ professional identity (Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs [CACREP], 2015; O’Hara et al, 2016; Ratts et al, 2016; Storlie, Woo, Fink, & Fowler, 2018), viewed as an essential component of counseling practice (Ramirez Stege, Brockberg, & Hoyt, 2017) and training (Brooks, Kim, Moye, Oglesby, & Hargett, 2015). Counselors should continually engage in multicultural and social justice research to identify and work to minimize factors and conditions that might hinder client, group, and systemic well‐being (Fickling & Gonzales, 2016; Gess, 2016; Rosenthal, 2016). Hays and Dahl (in press) define multicultural and social justice research as a purposeful approach to using culturally appropriate research designs, addressing intersections of power within the counseling relationship, and using research as a means of advocacy.…”

Advancing Social Justice Training through a Difficult Dialogue Initiative: Reflections From Facilitators and Participants

“…The last decade has witnessed a resurgence in psychology's commitment to equity, justice, and the dismantling of systemic injustices that plague disenfranchised communities (Koch & Juntunen, 2014;Vera & Speight, 2003). In fact, the promotion of social justice was listed as one of the five core values of the counseling psychology profession (Fickling, & González, 2016). With the increased emphasis on social justice within counseling psychology, there is growing recognition of the need to include social justice pedagogy in graduate training (Flores et al, 2014;Motulsky et al, 2014).…”

Recommendations for School Counselors: Applying the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC) in Assisting Korean Adolescent Students in the United States

“…Such activities could include using the MSJCC as a framework for frank conversations about race and ethnicity, using scenarios such as the one presented in this article and other real-world student-client cases (Storlie et al, 2015). This recommendation is supported by research emphasizing that, although multicultural knowledge is being addressed in counseling programs, more work needs to be done to address the “necessary [multicultural] skill acquisition and development of personal self-awareness” (Barden & Greene, 2015, p. 50) and the infusion of learning experiences for becoming a social justice advocate (Fickling & Gonzalez, 2016). The MSJCC is an ideal guide for facilitating these learning opportunities within a developmental process.…”