Week 9 Assignment
SIDEBAR 4.6
Advocacy Examples Advocacy in career counseling might be as simple as finding a mentor for a Hispanic woman who is uncertain about entering the engineering field. It can also include talking with prospective employers about the various environmental barriers that might keep certain individuals from applying for certain jobs. Advocacy in career counseling can take various forms, and it is vital that career counselors understand how they can work as social justice advocates on behalf of their clients.
In 1998, Lee and Walz published a landmark book titled Social Action: A Mandate for Counselors. The authors of this book recognized the importance of social advocacy in counseling and challenged all counselors to make social advocacy more prominent in their work with clients. In 1999, Loretta Bradley was elected ACA president and made advocacy a central theme of her leadership. Her leadership culminated in the publication of the book Advocacy in Counseling: Counselors, Clients, and Communities in 2000. In 2000, Jane Goodman, then president of the ACA, commissioned a task force to develop advocacy competencies for the profession. The task force developed the ACA Advocacy Competencies in 2001. The ACA Advocacy competencies provide a framework for career counselors to enact advocacy strategies. The ACA adopted the Advocacy Competencies (Lewis, Arnold, House, & Toporek, 2002) in 2003 as a response to the growing need for counselors to implement advocacy interventions.
The Advocacy Competencies consist of three levels of intervention (Ratts, Toporek, & Lewis, 2010): client–student, school–community, and the public arena. Each level is divided into two domains that assist a counselor in acting with, and on behalf of, the client. The client–student advocacy level includes the client–student empowerment and client–student advocacy domains. At this level, career counselors recognize the impact that social, political, eco- nomic, and cultural factors have on an individual’s career development. Career counselors use direct interventions to identify clients’ strengths and help to identify barriers and potential allies. The school–community level includes the community collaboration and systems advocacy domains. At this level, career counselors are aware of how environmental factors negatively affect career development and choose to respond to these barriers by collaborating with community organizations and advocating to remove unnecessary career barriers. The public arena level includes the public information and social– political advocacy domains. At this level, career counselors might take action against societal and normative career barriers by taking the issue public and by advocating politically against the presence of social injustices.
SIDEBAR 4.7
Integrating Advocacy in Counselor Education Learning how many counselor education programs and departments have developed internship experiences designed to hone the advocacy skills of counselor candidates would be interesting. In today’s increasingly diverse society, it would be unusual for practicing counselors to have a caseload devoid of clients who had experienced oppression and discrimination in the process of attempting to enter a career field or become upwardly mobile once established in an occupation.
Given the historical and philosophical underpinnings of multicultural and social justice, understanding the complementary nature of the career coun- seling field’s two perspectives is important. When combined, both per- spectives can strengthen the work of career counselors (Ratts, 2011). The multicultural perspective helps career counselors develop insight into how social, political, economic, and cultural forces influence the career develop- ment process. Understanding the sociopolitical nature of career development often leads career counselors to recognize that they cannot continue to do the same things if they want to help culturally diverse clients. Increased under- standing of the sociopolitical context of client problems can often serve as a gateway to social justice advocacy.
Ratts (2011) viewed multiculturalism and social justice as “two sides of the same coin” (p. 35). In other words, both multiculturalism and social jus- tice are necessary when working with culturally diverse clients. Rubel and Ratts (2007) added that the multicultural perspective is about social justice. They believed the multicultural and social justice perspectives shared com- mon assumptions: the need
· To view clients within the context of their environment
· To explore whether client problems are connected to oppressive social, political, and economic conditions
· To move beyond traditional models of helping when working with culturally diverse clients.