The main School of Education website is maintained by the External Relations Office. If you have any questions regarding this site, you may send an email to webcentral@education.wisc.edu or contact the office by phone (608) 265-7875 or (608) 262-0054. If you need to access the Wisconsin TTY Relay service, the phone numbers are TTY: 1-800-947-3529 or Voice: 1-800-947-6644.

History, Purpose, and Goals of the Social Justice Conference

 

Recently, ethical standards published by the American Psychological and the American Counseling Associations have included the role of advocacy in delivery of culturally-competent mental health care. The inclusion of advocacy work in these standards has increased the attention given to the macro-level factors of inequality and challenging negative social environments that often create barriers to personal growth and intensify psychological distress. Simply put, counselors are constantly confronted with issues that cannot be resolved solely through change at the individual but that necessitate change at the social level as well. As such, there is a growing focus on the application of our understanding of how to create change in the individual to the transformation of the context in which the client develops as an individual, strengthening the explicit link between multicultural counseling competence and issues related to social justice (Jackson, 2000; Mays, 2000; Strickland, 2000).

 

We concur with Strickland (2000) that psychologists must be willing to articulate and teach about social justice relative to our professional practice and science. Although psychology has a rich tradition of advocacy counseling promoting social justice and reducing oppression, many mental health professionals are ill-prepared to speak about and teach on social justice issues in counseling and psychology. We believe that training opportunities are sorely needed wherein graduate students and faculty alike can explore and cultivate the critical attributes and skills needed to do advocacy work in mental health (Kiselica & Robinson, 2001). To that end, in 2002 our department organized what has become an annual conference to explore the issue of social justice within the practice of mental health counseling. I t emerged out of students' initiative and desire to expand their graduate education beyond the classroom.

 

The goal of this one and one-half day conference is to gather people who are engaged in clinical practice, counselor educator training, and culturally relevant research to dialogue about how to integrate issues related to context transformation within clinical practice, identifying useful individual, group, and organizational change strategies to work effectively across the multiple systems influencing clients' lives. This mini-conference includes a student colloquium, roundtable sessions and workshops, and keynote presentations by invited local and national speakers.

 

This innovative effort promotes learning outside of the classroom for graduate students and is consistent with our department's mission to train multiculturally-competent counselors and counseling psychologists, a mission that has been recognized and awarded by the American Psychological Association.