School Counselors Involvement and Opportunities to Advocate Against Racialized Punitive Practices

Abstract

Given the increase of violence against Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), there is no doubt a need to tackle racialized violence in schools. This phenomenological study draws on semi-structured interviews with school counselors to explore their experiences and practices to disrupt the racialized disciplinary practices that disproportionally target Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color. We draw on theories of racialized organizations and organizational routines to better understand how school counselors make sense of their practices in racialized disciplinary practices that dehumanize and criminalized youth of color. Findings from this study revealed two themes: 1) school counselors’ perceived neutrality towards disciplinary practices and 2) school counselors’ advocacy in racialized school discipline practices. This study offers some implications for professional school counseling organization, counselor educators, and school counselors to inform their anti-racist pedagogy to dismantle racialized punitive practices in schools.

Antiracism Starts With Us: School Counselor Critical Reflection Within an Multitiered Systems of Support Framework

“…Action requires school counselors and educators to examine policies, practices, and systems for biases and replace them with more equitable ones, which is successful only when individuals within the system have done their own critical self-awareness work. Researchers have highlighted action within the context of MTSS (e.g., Edirmanasinghe et al, 2020) and school counseling (Hernandez et al, 2021), so in this section we provide further considerations related to the integration of action from an antiracist and evidence-based counseling lens.…”

Supporting All Students: Multitiered Systems of Support from an Antiracist and Critical Race Theory Lens

“…Utilizing their reflections to be social advocates for their students is also vital for school counselors, as is using their voices to disrupt structures that uphold white supremacy. MTSS framework can be the vehicle for disrupting white supremacy, shifting the focus from what is wrong with the student to the implementation of supports to better engage the student in the school environment (Hernandez et al, 2021).…”

“…Crowds of activists and advocates poured into the streets in protest, calling for an end to systemic oppression, not only within policing but within all systems, including education. The counseling profession has responded to this call by reexamining how counseling-specific practices such as supervision (Cartwright et al, 2021), counselor training (Mason et al, 2021), and school counseling (Hernandez et al, 2021) contribute to the perpetuation of white supremacy. Existing literature suggests that, like policing, counseling practices have inadvertently contributed to the systemic inequities and merit the urgent adaptation of antiracist practices that will disrupt systemic oppression (Galán et al, 2021;Ladson-Billings, 2021).…”