TPC Journal V8, Issue 2 - FULL ISSUE

154 The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 2 Participants articulated what social justice in the counseling sphere meant to them. One participant stated, “In order to successfully incorporate a social justice approach to counseling, socioeconomic status, culture, academic proficiencies and group membership must be considered.” Empowerment was identified by multiple participants as key to social justice approaches to counseling. According to one participant, “Empowering individuals is at the heart of social justice.” Additionally, participants pointed to understanding each client as a whole individual, including their unique social location, as important in counseling from a social justice perspective. Participants shared new knowledge of recognizing systems that impacted people in non-dominant groups and acknowledging that the external factors of barriers and injustices may play a role in the need for mental health services. One participant said, “A counselor can promote social justice by helping clients identify the foundation of their behavior and understand that their feelings of insecurity are valid.” Participants identified that a social justice perspective in counseling included a call to advocate for clients. One participant defined advocacy as, “Part of being a therapist who believes in social justice is advocating for and empowering those individuals who feel they have no voice or feel their voice has been extinguished through societal or institutional oppression.” Participants stated that the goal of social justice counseling was, in fact, to strengthen and support the resiliency of their clients who experience challenges brought on by external factors. One person said, “Social justice advocacy seeks not only to fight oppression but to empower individuals and communities that have been historically oppressed to be self-determinant to live lives of meaning and hope through equitable redistribution of resources, power, and opportunities.” Discussion The results of this study offer insight about how using service learning in a human development course impacted community counseling students. Because these findings document a shift in understanding the nature of human development in a pluralistic society, they may be useful for counselor educators who teach human development and who strive to prepare counseling students with a social justice perspective. The Teaching and Learning of Human Development As a core curricular area of accredited programs, coursework in human development is required for all counseling students (CACREP, 2015). Students who seek to become licensed counselors must demonstrate their mastery of this content area on national exams (NBCC, 2015). Therefore, counselor educators have an obligation to prepare students with this knowledge base. However, universalist theories of human development may not sufficiently explain development of all groups in a society (Broderick & Blewitt, 2015; Henrich et al., 2010). There is growing acknowledgement that often embedded in models are the worldviews of those who developed them (Rogoff, 2003). Counselor educators are called to teach human developmental theory in such a way that students will be able to responsibly apply (or not apply) theories to clients from whom and for whom they were not developed. This study’s findings demonstrate that service learning provides participants with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of human development course content through its application in real settings. Participants witnessed how theories did not always match the lives of people at their service-