Becoming a culturally responsive and socially just clinical supervisor.

Abstract

Clinical supervisors must learn to attend to and address a breadth of cultural, diversity and social justice factors and dynamics when providing supervision. Developing these abilities does not occur automatically; rather, training in clinical supervision has a significant impact on supervisors’ development. Unfortunately, there is relatively limited research on how supervisors develop these same ways of being and working. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore how counselling psychology doctoral students understand their experiences of becoming culturally responsive and socially just clinical supervisors. Findings from this study detail the developmental experiences of novice supervisors and highlight training needs, educational interventions, progression of competencies and experiences with counselling supervisees and supervisors-of-supervision. Implications for theories of supervisor development and approaches in graduate training programmes are discussed along side of calls to more robustly integrate culturally responsive and socially just training and approaches throughout the field of clinical supervision.