Advocacy as a critical role for urban school counselors: working toward equity and social justice

Professional School Counseling, Feb, 2005 by Fred Bemak, Rita Chi-Ying Chung

A second way to include an advocacy curriculum in a graduate-level university training program is to redefine the mission and rebuild courses around the new mission. This requires greater support from faculty and administration. It may be helpful to introduce one example of this by illustrating the redesign of a graduate program that dramatically changed to include a mission of social justice and advocacy. Three years ago the two authors of this article arrived at George Mason University (GMU). The decision to accept the faculty positions at GMU was largely based on administrative support for the redesign of the entire counselor education program. The outcome was that the Counseling and Development Program at GMU created a new mission statement emphasizing social justice, multiculturalism, advocacy, and leadership.

The GMU program redesigned 90% of the courses to reflect the new mission and now has a course on counseling and social justice that includes the theory and practice of leadership, social change, and advocacy as well as internship classes in leadership and social justice. In addition, aspects of the mission statement were infused into the content of all the classes; the practicum and internship were redesigned to require assignments that include advocacy toward social justice through the development of prevention projects and the evaluation of existing programs using data. The end result is that counselors in training are taught about social justice and advocacy and through the training they gain an understanding about systems as well as the tools to use as advocates and change agents of systems.

Level 2: In-Service Training

A second way to ensure that urban school counselors are advocating for parity for all students is to provide in-service training. Typically, in-service training emphasizes specific issues or information and procedures about changes in the school system. In-service training is a reflection of the defined role of school counselors, and markedly absent from in-service workshops are sessions related to social equity, leadership skills, or advocacy. Emphasizing advocacy for the success of all students inclusive of poor and ethnic students would be a critical area of training to include for school counselors.

One example of this type of training is illustrated by a training conducted by the first author. As one of the principal investigators of a DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund National Initiative to Transform School Counseling grant, this author set up an in-service training program for school counselors in Columbus, OH. The training program was an ongoing weekly program that focused on advocacy through the use of skill development, projects, and data. Issues and theories in advocacy, leadership, and social justice were presented and discussed. Skills in these areas were introduced and practiced by the participants. Each school counselor identified an issue particular to their school that focused on improving academic achievement for students of color and poor students. In concert with the instructor, targeted evaluations and interventions were developed. This was done through a case study format that included designing evaluative methods, collecting data, and analyzing the data. School counselors then discussed intervention advocacy strategies or ways to introduce the findings from the evaluations to appropriate parties in their schools and school systems. Through an in-service training of this nature, school counselors learned about advocacy on the job.