146 The Professional Counselor | Volume 14, Issue 2 education to help students and counselor educators manage difficult emotions, increase their ability to be present, and strengthen compassion and curiosity (Berila, 2016). In addition to individual self-care practices, counselor educators can advocate for community care by tending to the community’s needs and drawing on collective experience and wisdom (Gorski, 2019). The findings point to the need for counselor educators to better address Whiteness and White supremacy, as well as to center the experiences of students from marginalized communities. Counselor educators may be able to mobilize and direct White students’ feelings of guilt into racial consciousness and action by helping them explore Whiteness, White privilege, and what it means to them while allowing and confronting feelings that arise (Grzanka et al., 2019). It may be helpful for educators to read and assign books on White fragility and ways to address it (DiAngelo, 2018; Helms, 2020; Saad, 2020), so that they can assist White students in managing these emotions. It is important that educators explicitly name and recognize White supremacy as it shows up in counseling theory and practice, and to include a shift from the primary focus on the individual to understanding and dismantling oppressive systems. Counselor educators must also attend to the ways in which they center the comfort of White students over the needs of BIPOC students, so that they do not perpetuate harm and trauma (Galán et al., 2021). Although students with privileged identities may learn powerful lessons about oppression from their classmates, it is important that such learning does not occur at the expense of students with marginalized identities. Offering spaces for White students, especially those who are new to conversations about race and racism, to process their feelings may be helpful to avoid harm to BIPOC students who have experienced racial trauma. Similarly, BIPOC students may benefit from spaces in which they can talk freely and support each other as they unpack their own experiences of microaggressions and trauma (Galán et al., 2021). Based on the finding that support from faculty was important in facilitating student growth and learning, counselor educators may benefit from implementing strategies informed by relational pedagogy and relational–cultural theory (Dorn-Medeiros et al., 2020). Relational pedagogy centers the relationship between teachers and students and posits that all learning takes place in relationships. Relational–cultural theory emphasizes mutual empathy and empowerment and is rooted in feminist multicultural principles. Practices grounded in these approaches include professors’ use of self-disclosure to model openness, vulnerability, and self-reflection; and their work to reduce power imbalances and invite student feedback at multiple points in time through anonymous surveys and one-on-one meetings. Counselor educators can uplift students as the experts of their experience (Sharma & Hipolito-Delgado, 2021). Limitations and Future Research The results of this study must be considered in light of a number of limitations. The use of the online survey meant that we were not able to follow up with students for further discussion or clarification of their responses. Adding focus groups or interviews to this methodology would likely provide a more thorough picture. In spite of assurances to the contrary, some students may have been hesitant to be honest out of concern that their own professors would be reading their feedback. It is possible that different themes would have emerged if all students had participated. In addition, 12% of the advanced students had participated as beginning students and therefore were previously exposed to the survey materials. Although this could have impacted their later responses, we suspect that given the nearly 2-year time lapse this may not have been meaningful. Nevertheless, future research and program evaluation would be strengthened with longitudinal analyses. Lastly, the reliability for the ACSA was relatively low, so conclusions are tentative; however, the results support the qualitative data. Despite these limitations, this study offers a model for assessing students’ learning and experiences with the
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