2 TPC Digest 2 TPC Digest Sapna B. Chopra, Rebekah Smart, Yuying Tsong, Olga L. Mejía, Eric W. Price Centering Social Justice in Counselor Education: How Student Perspectives Can Help Numerous scholars in the field of counseling have called upon counselor educators to integrate social justice advocacy into their curriculum, course materials, and overall training for counseling students. Counselor educators are themselves products of the larger sociopolitical environment and may inadvertently uphold and reinforce dominant patriarchal, cisheteronormative, Eurocentric norms in their teaching. For example, most counseling training is focused on the individual and often overlooks the role of systemic oppression in clients’ distress and the need for social justice advocacy beyond the counseling room. For this study, we used an online survey to gather feedback from beginning counseling students in their first semester and from advanced students who had started seeing clients. The research process was guided by the overarching question: What are beginning and advanced counseling students’ perceptions of their multicultural and social justice training, and how can their feedback be used to improve their counselor education program? Overall, both beginning and advanced students felt supported by their professors and appreciative of the available Spanish/ Latinx emphasis within the program. Students expressed humility and a desire to learn more about social justice advocacy, with some feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by the extent of societal inequities. Students reported growth in the core areas of awareness, knowledge, skills, and action, with more growth in awareness and knowledge than in social justice action. Although beginning students identified personal biases, the theme of self-awareness was more complex later in the program, suggesting that a longer time spent in the program had contributed to personal growth. The advanced students wrote about clinical application as well and made overt statements about their commitment to social justice. Although students expressed mixed opinions about their social justice training, a greater number of advanced students reported that they thought multicultural and social justice issues were well integrated in the program when compared to the number of student critiques. Though fewer students offered critiques of their training, these responses are important to amplify because some of these concerns are rarely solicited or acknowledged. For example, students of color noted a lack of representation in their faculty, classmates, and curriculum, paired with feelings of marginalization when microaggressions in the classroom went unchecked as well as when instruction centered around the needs of White students. Listening to students’ experiences and perceptions of their training offers educators an opportunity to model cultural humility, gain useful feedback, and make necessary program changes. The process of counselor educators humbling themselves and inviting and integrating student feedback is an important step not only in centering social justice in counselor education, but also in better serving students, clients, and communities. This article offers counselor educators a model for how to assess program effectiveness in multicultural and social justice teaching in addition to practical suggestions for improving social justice education. Sapna B. Chopra, PhD, is an associate professor at California State University, Fullerton. Rebekah Smart, PhD, is a professor at California State University, Fullerton. Yuying Tsong, PhD, is a professor and Associate Vice President for Student Academic Support at California State University, Fullerton. Olga L. Mejía, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and an associate professor at California State University, Fullerton. Eric W. Price, PhD, is an associate professor at California State University, Fullerton. Correspondence may be addressed to Sapna B. Chopra, Department of Human Services, California State University, Fullerton, P.O. Box 6868, Fullerton, CA 92834-6868, sapnachopra@fullerton.edu.
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