Using Supervision to Prepare Social Justice Counseling Advocates

Over the past several years, there has been an increased focus on integrating not only multiculturalism in the counseling profession, but also advocacy and social justice. Although the professional literature addresses the importance of cultural competence in supervision, there is a paucity of information about social justice advocacy in relation to the process of counseling supervision. In this article, the authors share a rationale for integrating a social justice advocacy orientation in supervision, discuss the connection between diversity and social justice advocacy counseling competence, address challenges faced by supervisors, and suggest specific strategies for use in supervision to prepare counselors to be social justice counseling advocates.     

Secondary Science Teachers' Responses to Student Questions

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Place-based education for environmental behavior: a ‘funds of knowledge’ and social capital approach

In this paper we suggest that a new theoretical framework is needed within environmental education in the discussion of rural, underserved communities in Latin America. We argue that a community-resources approach, comprised of funds of knowledge and social capital, should be incorporated into contemporary research on place- and community-based education and environmental behavior. The model we present builds upon previous research in the areas of education, anthropology, social capital, and environmental education. These perspectives are discussed in accordance with their relevance to high school students in one of the most bio-diverse regions of Central America: the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica. In this context, we suggest that promoting environmental behavior is both contextualized by and dependent upon social and community interactions, or ‘mediations,’ after Lev S. Vygotsky. We believe that the framework presented here may contribute to increased socio-economic, academic, and environmental benefits for underserved, Latin American communities.     

A Phenomenological Exploration of Bhutanese Counselors’ Experiences with Western Counseling

Bhutan has recently invited the profession of counseling to aid in responding to growing mental health problems, social and family issues, and school and career guidance needs. This study is a phenomenological investigation of the experiences of Bhutanese counselors with Western counseling in order to understand the cultural fit between Bhutan and Western counseling orientations. Eleven participants were interviewed and four themes identified: conceptualization of counseling, Bhutanese culture, Bhutanese counseling, and the relationship between Western counseling and Bhutan. Suggestions are made for a potential model of Bhutanese counseling, counselor training, ongoing Western contributions, and the further development of the counseling profession.     

Resignifying Alan Kurdi: news photographs,memes, and the ethics of embodied vulnerability

The Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir’s photograph of the drowned refugee child Alan Kurdi attained worldwide recognition as a media spectacle, initially prompting humanitarian responses and political action, but later morphing into online memes and inciting public backlash as “war porn.” The author argues here that the ethical motivations of photojournalism and memes are oppositional with regard to their representations of embodied vulnerability. While photojournalistic depictions of vulnerable bodies are motivated by an ethics of care intended to generate empathy and progressive social change, memes disrupt those affective connotations through processes of mimicry and replication. By means of a comparative semiological analysis, this paper examines the way the sign system of Demir’s photograph was mutated into memes, radically changing the ethical connotations of the former. The differing ethical affordances of news photos versus memes, and their relationship, explain the reversal of the cosmopolitan humanitarianism initially sparked by the Alan Kurdi photograph and tell us more about the ethical frictions and contrapositions at work in the contemporary media environment.     

Defining and Communicating What “Intercultural” and “Intercultural Communication” Means to Us

In order to engage in our larger discussion, we needed to share our definitions, framings, and theorizings of what “intercultural” and “intercultural communication” mean to us and how we inflect these based on our own experiences, identities, and perspectives. Discussants break down how they understand the notion of “intercultural” behind commonly used and circulated terms in our scholarship.