Recent racial injustice has prompted school counselors to reexamine how their practices contribute to injustice. Many school counselors seek to engage in antiracism and advocacy. Multitiered systems of support (MTSS) strategies include data utilization, systemic collaboration, and multilevel practices within a school building. This article illustrates how school counselors who use MTSS can operate with an antiracist lens to dismantle policies and practices upholding white supremacy. School counselors utilizing MTSS are well positioned to adapt antiracist strategies.
The American School Counseling Association calls for professional school counselors to support the holistic development and success of all students. However, the field of school counseling is riddled with practices that have harmed and dehumanized Black students. For example, school counselors engage in practices (e.g., social–emotional learning and vocational guidance), which work to reinforce white supremacy and dehumanize Black students. Further, school counselors may also contribute to the ways that the basic and unique needs of Black students are overlooked, leading to the continued systemic adultification of Black students. What is needed is a radical imagination of school counseling, which centers on homeplace as the foundation in order to engage in freedom dreaming. In this article, the authors engage this radical imagination to detail an antiracist view of school counseling practice that embraces freedom dreaming and homeplace through healing and Indigenous educational practices, youth-led school counseling, and critical hip-hop practices to promote joy, creativity, power, love, resistance, and liberation.
Youth participatory action research is a pedagogy in which students work together to explore an issue that affects them. The school counselor measured the impact on Latina students who participated in the project based on participants’ self-efficacy in attending college and being successful in math and science. Results indicated that students were more confident in their abilities in science and math and also believed they would attend college in the future by the end of the intervention.
Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is a methodology in which youth and researchers collaborate to engage in research within a shared community. This article describes a career intervention conducted with Latina middle school students using YPAR in the school’s Latino community outreach program. Participating students were members of the Latina science club #CHICAS, which was founded by the school counselor. A Latina school parent and researcher collaborated to structure the YPAR exercise. This project allowed Latina students to undertake aspects of the research process within the framework of their communities’ interests, while educating the school counselor about the specific needs of the Latino community. The YPAR exercise also developed skills students could transfer to future career options, such as being able to listen to conversational Spanish while simultaneously translating and transcribing written responses in English. The program highlighted students’ ability to coordinate multiple perspectives as they were informing their school’s administrators while transparently communicating the needs of their ethnic communities. This article highlights YPAR as an effective, mutually beneficial tool for school counselors to engage their ethnically diverse student populations.
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