Social advocacy groups with LGBTQ youth: A means for the trainee to learn about self

Melissa Luke & Kristopher Goodrich

Paper title: Social advocacy groups with LGBTQ youth: A means for the trainee to learn about self

The purpose of this presentation is to describe preliminary results of a study exploring the experiences of school counseling trainees while engaged in an existent course which integrated social justice group work practices. This project grew out of collaboration between the researchers that highlighted the gap in the preparation of counselors to effectively work with LGBTQ adolescents in schools (Carroll & Gilroy, 2002; Israel & Hackett, 2004). Through their previous community engagement, the researchers observed practicing school counselors’ lack of awareness of LGBTQ students and their needs (Goodrich & Luke, 2009), many local schools struggling to establish and maintain Gay/Straight Alliance student groups (GSAs), as well as the opportunity for university-community collaboration around these issues.

The presenters designed the course project to increase trainee’s awareness of their own subjectivity (e.g., their social identity or positioning; Peshkin, 1988), while also providing experiential opportunities for them to co-facilitate psycho-educational group work with LGBTQ high school students and their allies. Awareness of subjectivity was theorized to assist the development of trainee’s conceptualization, intervention, and personalization skills (Luke & Bernard, 2006), thereby better preparing them to meet the needs of LGBTQ adolescents through their co-facilitation of GSAs (Goodrich & Luke, 2009). From a social justice perspective, the researchers endeavored to give voice to the needs and experiences of LGBTQ adolescents, which have gone largely unheard in the counselor education and school counseling literature (Israel & Hackett, 2004). A concomitant advocacy related intention was to provide support, development, and assistance to new and established GSAs in local high school communities through a university-community public scholarship project.

Applied ethnographic research methods were utilized for this study. Consistent with applied ethnographic methods, researchers kept individual subjectivity journals throughout the project, as their contact with trainees occurred across formal and informal research contexts. In addition, researchers and four trained process observers recorded observations of the trainees in three formal research settings which included the visit to the local LGBTQ Youth Center, three sessions of small group GSA co-facilitation at five local high schools, and three in-class group supervision sessions. Following the various training activities, trainees were required to make an entry in their subjectivity journals. The course instructor provided trainees with a different journal prompt each time to assist in providing some general structure in focusing their entry, as well as gave supervisory feedback.

The results of this study support that trainees grew in their knowledge and awareness of their subjectivity, and this led to a growth in their available skill sets in working with LGBTQ adolescents. The findings support that by infusing a social justice curriculum within extant coursework and engaging trainees in exploring their own subjectivity while working with underserved populations, educators might provide a vehicle for their trainees to understand the nature of inequalities and injustices present across systems (Green et al., 2008) and model how they can more effectively address these issues with their students.