“Everybody's Teaching and Everybody's Learning”: Photovoice and Youth Counseling

Although the language of social justice counseling theory has become more focused and explicit within the past decade, a dedication to the "dignity, diversity, and uniqueness" (Engels & Bradley, 2001, p. 101) of all people is fundamental to the heritage of the counseling profession. Crethar, Torres Rivera, and Nash (2008) noted that the counseling profession actually originated with concern for people affected by injustice. They defined social justice counseling as a multifaceted approach to counseling in which practitioners strive to simultaneously promote human development and the common good through addressing challenges related to both individual and distributive justice. Social justice counseling includes empowerment of the individual as well as active confrontation of injustice and inequality in society because they affect clientele as well as those in their systemic contexts. (Crethar et al., 2008, p. 270) In bringing this conceptualization to life, counselors have developed innovative interventions at many different levels of practice. Comstock et al. (2008) showed how relational--cultural theory provides a framework for socially just counseling through its elucidation of contextual, culture-based relational disconnections. Grounding their interventions in liberation psychology (Martin-Baro, 1998) and Freirean pedagogy (Freire, 1970), Duran, Firehammer, and Gonzalez (2008) connected community well-being with counseling practice among indigenous peoples. They explained that these socially just practices require that counselors become "enmeshed" in local culture in a way that creates what the authors called "epistemological hybridity"--a process of learning from community wisdom that promotes "liberation from orthodox professional Western practices as are commonly taught in most counselor education programs" (Duran et al., 2008, p. 292). Lee and Rodgers (2009) struck a similar chord as they encouraged counselors to move beyond "the passivity often inherent in counseling as 'the talking cure' to become active voices and conduits for social/political change" (p. 285). As with the other authors cited, Lee and Rodgers did not suggest that traditional individual counseling approaches are without utility; rather, counselors seeking to meet the needs of members of marginalized social groups should be ready to address issues beyond those that are individual and/or internal. Thus, counselors who can implement interventions that incorporate advocacy and social action will be in a better position to ensure that these clients can access the resources and services they need and to "address the significant social, cultural, and economic challenges that have the potential to negatively affect psychosocial development" (Lee & Rodgers, 2009, p. 284). Hipolito-Delgado and Lee (2007) further emphasized the importance of such advocacy and action for counselors working with marginalized youth, such as children of color and those in poor urban communities. These young people, they explained, experience oppression in mainstream institutions as part of their "daily routine ... [which] involves negotiating the hardships that are a product of a legacy of discrimination" (p. 327). Hipolito-Delgado and Lee suggested that counselors could support young people in addressing these barriers through the facilitation of development of critical consciousness and the promotion of community connection and social activism. The foregoing discussion points to the need for innovative practices that will allow youth counselors to move beyond conventional "talking cures," to connect adolescents to their communities, to facilitate social action and critical consciousness, and to promote the opportunity for professionals to learn from community wisdom in the process. In this article, we profile an example of a project, undertaken as part of a community-based organization's (CBO) after-school programming, that addresses all these aims. …