Considerations for Incorporating Social Justice Within Counselor Supervision

Understanding social injustice and inequity and the resulting effects on mental health is imperative for counselors to best serve their clients and students. Supervisors of counselors-in-training are poised to help them gain a better understanding of privilege, power, oppression, and their own biases.

Clare Merlin-Knoblich, PhD, NCC, is the director of the master’s and post-master’s school counseling programs at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A former high school counselor, she researches innovations in counselor education and supervision, including social justice school counseling practices to reduce prejudice and promote multicultural awareness.

Dr. Merlin-Knoblich says it can be helpful to understand social justice supervision issues for supervisees in three tiers, citing 2009 research by Chang, Hays, and Milliken.

“First, supervisees encounter social justice issues in themselves and their own self-awareness,” she says. “Supervisees may or may not have developed a sense of their own experiences with privilege, power, and oppression, and these experiences will shape their counseling work. Supervisors play a critical role in cultivating supervisees’ self-awareness and a deep understanding of how their own identities impact the counseling process. For example, a clinical mental health counseling student who identifies as White may benefit from reflecting on their race and the role it has played in the historical colonization of scores of minoritized groups across the world. This inescapable history and associated privilege can manifest in counseling sessions when a client of color feels uncomfortable with a White counselor or believes ‘They won’t understand what I go through.’ In supervision, supervisors help supervisees understand the implications of their privileges or experiences with oppression and how they may impact the counseling process.

“The second level is client or student services,” she continues. “Counseling students ought to consider how privilege, oppression, and social justice issues impact not only themselves as counselors, but also their clients and students. Supervisees benefit from regular reflections on the privileges and experiences with oppression that their clients and students’ multicultural identities afford them. They also benefit from recognizing the role privilege or oppression has with their own counseling processes.” She offers the example of a family counselor-in-training becoming angry when a family misses a session without calling. “The supervisee would benefit from reflecting on the notion that having access to reliable transportation and phones are economic privileges that some families and clients lack, which can directly impact their access to counseling.”

The final tier is a systems level, she says.

“Counseling students can and ought to explore in supervision how the proximal and distal systems in their clients and students’ lives are impacting them. For example, a school counseling intern may benefit from disaggregating school data by demographic variables to unpack if the number of students who are suspended disproportionately represent a minoritized group, such as students with disabilities, multilingual learners, and/or students from minoritized racial/ethnic backgrounds. Learning such information can then catalyze counseling efforts in individual work with students who are the victims of such discriminatory practices in discipline, in addition to systemic efforts to collaborate with school and community stakeholders to remedy the oppression and transform the discipline practices. Such efforts might include leading professional development sessions with teachers or revamping a school’s discipline program to reflect restorative practices. Supervisors can support school counseling students through such advocacy efforts.”

Social justice issues at these three levels are evident in her sessions as a supervisor, she says.

“Sometimes concerns arise that discretely fit into each of these categories, and other times issues emerge that involve two or three of the levels at once. For example, though many counselors-in-training may have previously taken a multicultural counseling course or read books on antiracism, when discussing counseling relationships with other real human beings, our biases and privileges come up in ways we have not examined before,” she says.

“I once supervised a counseling student who was raised in California, a state she described as progressive and typically liberal,” Dr. Merlin-Knoblich continues. “But when we really started analyzing her attitudes toward clients in poverty, she realized that she had internalized biases blaming people in poverty. Unpacking these beliefs in supervision helped her better support her clients and understand systemic issues limiting their access to a sustainable income.”

Conversations about social justice within supervision can help counselors-in-training to become more empathic, among other benefits, adding that virtually everyone harbors some layer of bias that they’ve learned and may not realize. Supervisors can help supervisees understand this, look inward, eliminate biases, and become more effective as counselors, she says.

“For example, a counselor-in-training may have been raised with anti-immigrant beliefs and is now assigned an adolescent client who recently immigrated to the United States. Their supervisor can help them understand their anti-immigrant beliefs and where they stem from, including false narratives about immigrants being criminals or taking jobs from other people. Once drawing awareness to the misinformation a counselor-in-training has and their subsequent bias, a supervisor can draw attention to the assets and strengths immigrants often bring to the country, including courage, talents, different languages, and passion for a new country.”

Building self-awareness of privilege and oppression is an “ongoing, unending journey” for all counselors, she says. She recommends having discussions with supervisees about privileges they have been afforded, ways in which they may have been oppressed, the underlying role of their multicultural identities, and how their experiences affect their relationships with others, including clients and students.

Supervisors can also help counselors-in-training navigate the inevitable social justice–related cognitive dissonance they may experience when working with clients and students, Dr. Merlin-Knoblich says. She recommends that supervisors “balance their validation of supervisees with appropriate challenges that will help them make sense of dissonance in a supported way.”

Though multicultural counseling competencies can be similar to social justice competencies, they are not the same, she says.

“Multicultural counseling competencies draw important awareness to the diversity and differences among people. But social justice competencies take just awareness to a deeper level,” she says. “They do not just acknowledge difference, per se, but also engage concepts of power, privilege, and oppression. These key concepts surround our multicultural identities and have created inequitable systems throughout society.”

Dr. Merlin-Knoblich stresses that advocacy and social justice should not be viewed as choices; they are obligations for counselors, and we must be proactive, she says.

“I would recommend that counseling supervisors explore a commitment to social justice advocacy that manifests from their first supervisory session with a supervisee or class to their last supervisory session. In other words, social justice and advocacy are not concepts that can be honored in just one class or course. They must be engaged throughout the supervisory process to do them justice and to build a thorough understanding of the role social justice plays in counseling for counselors-in-training,” she says.

“If our goal as counselors is to support the mental health needs of students and clients, and we know that discrimination, marginalization, and oppression increase mental health problems among both youth and adults, then it is only reasonable to intervene with the sources of oppression instead of waiting for them to do damage and show up in our offices,” she continues. “As Desmond Tutu said, ՙThere comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.’” 

Clare Merlin-Knoblich, PhD, NCC, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Counseling at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A former high school counselor, she received her master’s degree in professional school counseling from the University of Georgia and her PhD in counselor education and supervision from the College of William & Mary. She regularly publishes articles about social justice, supervision, and school counseling in journals such as The Professional Counselor, Journal of Counseling and Development, Counselor Education and Supervision, and Professional School Counseling. She also currently serves as co-editor of the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision Teaching Practice Briefs.
 

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