Integrating Service Learning and Difficult Dialogues Pedagogy to Advance Social Justice Training

Pre-service training dialogues

Trainees in the graduate program come from a wide variety of backgrounds reflecting diversity in social class, race and ethnicity, family educational histories, and other important identity and experience-based characteristics. Approximately half of the students are first-generation college students and more than half are the first in their family to attend graduate school. A few have experience working or volunteering with homeless individuals and a few have experienced homelessness or near homelessness themselves. The majority of students, though they may have experienced oppression related to some other aspect of their identity, have not worked directly with homeless communities. As a result, students express a range of views about social class, poverty, and homelessness. Some students express fear and trepidation whereas others express pity, describe shaky confidence about their ability to help, or feel overwhelmed by the enormity of social problems; most express empathy or sympathy. Furthermore, the clientele of PHC reflects a wide range of backgrounds including diversity in ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, and ability representing experiences such as first time or long-term homelessness, former incarceration, substance abuse, mental health issues, discrimination, sexual identity transitions, sexual trauma, and long-term unemployment. As a result, pre-service dialogues are designed to promote understanding of the variety of intersecting identity characteristics that correspond with poverty and homelessness as a central focus of knowledge-based and awareness training as well as the influence of the students’ intersecting identities. At times, these dialogues are difficult because there is tension between students’ desires to feel safe in the classroom and instructional needs to fully prepare students to confront potential biases, stereotypes, and privileged expectations in advance of service delivery, which can feel threatening or anxiety-producing for some students.

Levels of awareness among trainees can vary widely on the basis of personal experiences with the multitude of identities and whether they have had prior engagement or work experience with people of differing ethnicities, abilities, sexual orientations, gender identities, and social classes. Thus, a key objective of the pre-service training dialogues is to promote greater awareness for some students and to prompt others to reflect on the ways their prior experiences or backgrounds will come into play during the course of their work on the project. For a small number of students without direct experience or past work histories with marginalized populations, the dialogues are sometimes the first step toward reflecting on privilege, power, and oppression. Thus, in addition to discussing information regarding the expected clientele, dialogues are structured to bring forward students’ assumptions, stereotypes, and possible biases about what they will encounter, as well as potential emotional reactions they may have in doing the work. Because the graduate program recognizes all counseling as multicultural counseling, as defined as an interaction between counselor and client that is influenced by the dynamics of multiple dimensions of cultural identity (Hays, 2007), preparation for counseling within the service learning event is also framed within a multicultural training perspective. Thus, there is a focus on self-awareness combined with the development of communication skills, empathy, self-awareness, and cultural competence through dialogue. Students inevitably make mistakes in the development of multicultural knowledge, awareness, and skills, which create an atmosphere in which unsettling emotions (e.g., fear, anxiety, anger, frustration) can surface and produce intra- and interpersonal tensions in the classroom.

From the beginning of the semester, students learn that they will train for, and then engage in, employment counseling service for homeless and near homeless individuals. For several sessions prior to the event, the focus is on gaining the technical knowledge and counseling skill needed for résumé and employment counseling including a strength-based narrative approach to résumé counseling (Toporek & Flamer, 2009). The strength-based approach makes several assumptions: (a) clients are experts on their experience, (b) clients desire to tell a story of strength, resilience, and capacity, (c) clients have stories of strength, resilience, and capacity, (d) the story being told in clients’ résumés may not reflect the story of their strengths, and (e) the central goals of the counseling process are to help clients recognize the strength in their experience and to help them rewrite their story in a way that conveys the strength of their experience as well as translate the story in a way the reader (i.e., the employer) can understand (Toporek et al., in press).

Two sessions prior to the event, in the first part of the class session, students practice the strength-based narrative résumé counseling approach through role-plays with the partner they will collaborate with during the event, integrating the use of computers in the counseling process (as they will be using a computer with the client at the event to create or revise a résumé). In the second half of this session, the instructor asks students to revisit the ground rules for a respectful learning environment that they developed at the beginning of the semester, integrating the goals noted previously for difficult dialogues including respect, humility, patience, courage, and perseverance. They are then told that they will be shown a series of slides, each containing one word, for example, “poverty,” “poor,” “homeless,” “out-of-work,” “sex worker,” and “ex-offender,” and are asked to write words on a 3 × 5 inch card reflecting their immediate reaction to each word. The instructor collects the cards, shuffles them, and then slowly reads the reactions to each word, for example, all the cards relating to the word “homeless.” It is important that the cards do not contain the students’ names so that students feel less inhibition about sharing their reaction to decrease the influence of social desirability and image management issues. Students are asked to note their feelings as the reactions are read aloud and then respond to these as well as develop hypotheses about how their own feelings and thoughts may be influenced by their own personal identities and life experiences.

The tenor and content of the dialogue that ensues vary depending on the level of awareness and experience brought by individuals in the group. It is not uncommon for students to express fear or trepidation accompanied by awareness that these feelings may be distorted. Sometimes, perspectives are expressed that convey generalized stereotypes without awareness. This type of response provides potential for difficult dialogue as this may be accompanied by a sense of unfounded certainty. This provides the group with the opportunity to challenge, with compassion, the student(s) expressing the assumptions. Typically, students hesitate to directly challenge in an effort to maintain harmony on the surface. Thus, the instructor must recognize these dynamics and facilitate deconstruction of the assumptions, modeling compassion for the student(s) expressing such generalization while attempting to minimize microaggressions (Sue et al., 2009) that may affect the other students. Questions such as “how does it feel to hear . . .?” can begin such discussion.

To close out this portion of the session, students are engaged in an activity to further identify assumptions they may bring through the use of a poem and self-reflection. Students are asked to close their eyes while the instructor reads aloud the poem, I’m Sorry She Said (Harvey, 1993), a monologue of a woman speaking to an unknown listener describing her need for help given her difficult economic, health, and family circumstances. Throughout the poem, the speaker apologizes for imposing on the listener and conveys a sense of powerlessness in relation to the speaker. Students are asked to visualize the speaker and to whom she is speaking and then write about the immediate image that comes to mind including visible identity dimensions of the speaker and the listener in the poem. The instructor then asks students to consider, without sharing, what in their own background, experience, or identity dimensions may have influenced their initial reaction. The formation of assumptions, biases, and stereotypes are then discussed within the context of influences of media portrayals, happenstance, and family or community lessons. Students are invited to consider the ways in which they may begin to be aware of, and challenge, generalizations about this population.

Throughout the dialogues, students are encouraged to maintain a curious posture while looking for ways to expand their own and their classmates’ capacities to embrace a strength-based perspective. Students discuss how preconceptions about participants are often based on assumptions rather than reality, and how emotions such as pity or implicit condescension have the potential to interfere with the focus of their strength-based services. Instead, students are encouraged to develop what Brown (2013) referred to as “compassion amidst oppression” (p. 139), in which service providers are aware of their own intersecting identities and cultural norms, sensitive to differences in human experiences and identities, and exude an understanding of differences that allows creativity and flexibility to promote strengths and resiliencies in the face of distress and dysfunction. It is important to be sensitive to traumatic experiences students may have had that may reflect violence, homelessness, or recovery processes that they or their family may have experienced. This can be done to first acknowledge that, although most of our assumptions are a result of very limited information and experience, it is possible that some students may have had significantly difficult experiences. Therefore, it is important not to make assumptions about their colleagues, to assume best intentions for learning, and demonstrate respectful listening and speaking.

For the session prior to the event, students are assigned to read scholarly articles (e.g., McBride, 2012; Russell, 2011) as well as a “Street Sheet” article (“Welcome to Street Sheet,” n.d.) and view video interviews of homeless and formerly homeless individuals (National Coalition for Homeless, 2011) to achieve the goal of increasing awareness and addressing assumptions and biases about the homeless and near homeless population. The session begins with an instructor-facilitated debriefing discussion regarding students’ insights and feelings of the difficult dialogues in the previous session, integrating their reflections on the readings and video interviews regarding homelessness, mental health issues related to long-term unemployment, and details about the event itself including the structure, map of the facility, and agenda for the event day, as well as a description of other services that are expected to be present at the event.

It is important that the pre-event dialogues result in an atmosphere in which the students begin to see themselves as a team because the work they do at the PHC event is most effective when they are able to rely on each other for support, creativity, and help. At this point in the process, difficult dialogue techniques are used to facilitate students’ openness to being vulnerable with one another in ways that promote a sense of unity, trust, and cohesion as a group. To initiate this sense of team, students are asked to share the types of behaviors and attitudes they hope to see from their colleagues to act as a strong team. In this way, the nature of the difficult dialogues shifts from tension and anxiety to risk taking, honesty, and vulnerability. During this part of the discussion, students sit in a circle and the instructor sits outside the circle. Students are instructed to talk with each other directly, to develop a shared understanding of what kind of support they would find helpful from each other. This tends to be a richer discussion when it follows the earlier dialogue exposing attitudes and assumptions about homelessness. Establishing an environment of collaboration and relative safety is assumed to be a necessary precursor to students becoming more likely to talk to each other, rather than to the instructor, and more likely to take risks and question their own assumptions and biases about the work ahead. In addition, it is hoped that trainees are then more likely to anticipate potential missteps that might occur during the in-service component of the program, develop resilience to overcome misunderstandings that may occur, engage one another in supportive and collaborative ways, and make observations that can be processed during the post-service debriefing dialogues.

Engagement process dialogues

The event day is structured so students arrive at the venue, check-in, and attend the Mayor’s Rally designed to provide volunteers with a history and vision of PHC and generate enthusiasm for the day ahead. Following the rally, students are asked to circulate and meet each of the employment agencies represented, explain their role, and learn the services and criteria for recipients. Once they have done this, they are to explore the other services throughout the wider event such as health care providers, legal services, and others. Students then return to the Employment Services section to begin work. Whereas the pre-service dialogues are constructed among students and instructors, the engagement dialogues take place between the students and participants as well as between the students and the other service providers. These dialogues arise organically as a function of the work and are not orchestrated a priori or facilitated by the instructor. The dialogues between students and participants are similar to other counseling dialogues except that they emphasize a partnership between the student and the participant to affirm a preferred and genuine story, and develop a product that speaks to the participant’s assets, strengths, and potential in the face of difficult histories and practical barriers (e.g., no phone number, no address, long gaps in employment history, incarceration). In this strength-based narrative approach, the counselor describes the résumé as a story tool and the counselor’s role as helping the participant to tell her or his story in a way that a potential employer will best be able to see the strengths that the participant has to offer. The counselor typically asks the participant to “tell me about your most recent job experience, paid or volunteer,” and then listens and explores for depth about the experience. The counselor emphasizes the participant as the expert in her or his work and experience while asking questions that allow for reframing of the story highlighting important skills. They work together in partnership to explore the story and identify strength-saturated narratives and sometimes navigate the stories of negative experiences. Because most participants who come for the résumé service are actively seeking this assistance, the dialogues are primarily positive in nature, particularly because the model of résumé counseling that the students are trained in is a strength-based narrative model (see Toporek et al., in press).

However, service learning trainees may inadvertently make mistakes or experience challenges when working with an unfamiliar group of individuals who represent a population toward whom trainees may have been socialized to view through biased lenses. Thus, there are inevitable interpersonal and communication challenges that trainees must traverse in working with some clients, and these sometimes result in difficult dialogues between students in their roles as service providers and the recipients of their services. Furthermore, the engagement may feel rushed because clients typically must access a wide range and as many resources as possible in a short time. Thus, the potential for frustration can be high when misunderstandings occur. These in situ difficult dialogues may or may not result directly from differences in identities or life experiences, but inevitably they will be affected by whatever differences happen to exist. In these circumstances, the “difficult” part of the dialogues may occur on the basis of friction or conflicts between goals, objectives, and viewpoints, or challenges communicating across differences related to social status, education, social values, and lived experiences. In addition, the realities of the frustrations that the participants may feel in relation to the web of social service organizations they often have to cope with may be shaped by previous disappointments, perceived disrespectful treatment, inadequate or irrelevant service, and other experiences. Students must engage in empathic dialogue and honor the experiences, or perceived experiences, of the participants. In addition, although it occurs rarely, there are also dialogues that occur in which participants have difficulty communicating. For example, participants may have a cognitive or psychological disability that interferes with their ability to communicate.

Dialogues with other service providers generally take two forms: one in which the interaction is between the student and other types of service providers, and another that takes place between the student and the agency staff present within the employment services area. The dialogue between the student and non-employment services staff is designed to expand the students’ knowledge of the larger social service systems and to provide a context for a social capital map (Garcia & McDowell, 2010), which is discussed later in the section on debriefing dialogues. Dialogues also take place between the students and the agency staff within the employment services area. This dialogue is an informal process, which can be best described as a bridge between groups of service providers with sometimes substantially different backgrounds, and with limited or no prior relationship, learning to operate as colleagues and allies in a very short span of time. These dialogues can be challenging on the basis of differences related to identity characteristics, professional language, and expertise, as well as lived and professional experiences directly or indirectly tied to the work being done. The dialogues generally reflect respectful and collegial interaction although the various parties often come from different sets of operating frameworks, sometimes making some of these dialogues difficult as well. Occasionally, students may experience the dialogues as challenging on the basis of perceived power, status, and expertise; service providers typically have more extensive experience working with homeless and near homeless participants attending the PHC, yet may not have graduate education. The framework of the service providers tends to reflect what might be described as a case-management, community organizing, non-profit or government agency perspective whereas the students are immersed in training from a counseling perspective. Although it is uncommon for fully developed difficult dialogues to occur in situ during the PHC event, some of the interactions that take place become important material for the debriefing dialogues that take place following the event. Following the event, students are required to write a one- to two-page reflection paper summarizing their feelings and thoughts prior to the event, their experiences, thoughts and feelings during the event, and their reflections post event to be submitted the following week.

Post-event debriefing dialogues

Similar to the pre-service dialogues, the debriefing dialogues take place in the classroom between the students and the instructor is involved as a facilitator. In class, students are asked to write their observations and perceptions of what they appreciated about their partner’s approach the previous week as well as recommendations for improvement of the ways in which their partner worked as a partner, approached the task, and engaged with the participant. Students must identify at least two areas of partner strengths and two areas for partner growth. Partnership pairs are then asked to share these with each other, with the speaker using constructive language, and the listener using non-defensive basic listening skills. The instructor circulates to observe the partner discussions. Following this, a large group discussion is facilitated, debriefing what it was like to reflect their observations of their partner’s strengths and challenges, without disclosing the content of those discussions. Next, the instructor shifts the focus of the dialogue debriefing the experiences of each student, having them write 2 to 3 points of self-reflection regarding insights as well as observations of things they might have done more sensitively. The instructor raises fodder for challenge and exploration in terms of the ways in which students reflect the humanity and strength of the participants. To enhance intragroup dialogue, the instructor sits outside the circle for this portion and students are asked to talk to one another directly. Students are provided with opportunities to discuss challenges they experienced during the event, whether related to intrapersonal issues associated with power, privilege, and biases, or situations that arose during interactions with participants or other service providers. Dialogues regarding observations and interactions students experienced during the course of the event are designed to enhance further awareness, knowledge, and skills of each trainee. Oftentimes these dialogues are focused on sharing positive experiences of growth and learning about the strengths and humanity of the participants as well as reflecting on the challenge felt by the trainees. In most circumstances, these dialogues involve a significant degree of trust, cohesion, and vulnerability that carries over from earlier team-building difficult dialogues. At times, however, tensions and conflicts might surface when feedback is challenging and instructor facilitation of difficult dialogues becomes crucial.

For this class session, students are required to read articles regarding the Advocacy Competencies model (Lewis et al., 2002; Toporek, Lewis, & Crethar, 2009), social capital mapping in therapy (Garcia & McDowell, 2010), and a portion of a required text, an employment networking book written for job seekers (Darling, 2010). There are multiple intentions for this segment of debriefing including contrasting the audience experienced at PHC with the target audience of the networking book, reflecting on the students’ own networking map in contrast to their clients’ social capital maps, and encouraging a systems perspective of the ecological environment (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1979) including the role that different social services play and the opportunities and constraints that are present for participants by their engagement with those systems. With their partner from the event, students engage in a social capital mapping exercise (Garcia & McDowell, 2010) focusing on one of the participants to whom they provided services during the event. They identify the various systems that the participant likely interacts with, for example, Workforce Development Center, Department of Social Services, Food Bank, Free Health Clinic, Shelter, mental health counseling, and so on. Then the dyads hypothesize the ways in which the participant’s relationship with each of these systems may reflect opportunities and constraints per Garcia and McDowell. For example, reflecting upon mental health counseling, opportunities may include such things as empowerment, connection with a caring person, greater self-understanding, and assistance in accessing resources. Constraints for relationships with systems of mental health counseling might include stigmatization, lack of understanding on the part of the provider, condescension, diagnosis, and other negative outcomes related to receiving mental health service.

The next step of the exercise provides a potent catalyst for making the debriefing dialogues a powerful and intimate form of social justice pedagogy. That is, the participant’s social capital map is contrasted with the traditional model of networking for employment, in which students review their own network map created earlier in the semester reflecting the relationships they have with friends, colleagues, educators, employers, and family members, and then add the social service staff they met through the course of PHC. They then identify the ways in which those relationships represent opportunities or constraints for the student. The opportunities generally outweigh the constraints and the issue of power relationships is introduced. For example, they may have relationships with the same service providers that participants do, yet the power each holds in those relationships is very different and thus the constraints are typically greater for the participant than for the student. Students are asked to share these observations among the group as a means of deepening the learning experiences across trainees with differing backgrounds and experiences. Difficult dialogues may occur among the students, particularly when students who represent privileged identities (e.g., representing dominant identity groups such as non-Latino White racial groups, upper-middle class) do not acknowledge the power they typically hold in their relationships with persons or structures compared with those who do not hold privileged identities in society. This requires instructional facilitation of dialogue that helps to surface awareness of an often implicit process to promote engagement, understanding, and honest feedback hopefully leading to a deeper level of multicultural learning.

As an extension of the social capital mapping exercise, discussion regarding Kivel’s (2009) concept of the “buffer zone” (p. 134) provocatively engages students in contemplation regarding the role that service providers may inadvertently play to maintain status quo and systemic inequity. That is, in Kivel’s proposition, the economic pyramid creates a structure in which 1% of the population holds 75% of the wealth in the United States, 19% of the population holds 44% of the wealth, and the remaining 80% hold 9% of the wealth. He identifies the 1% as the “ruling class” (Kivel, 2009, p. 132) and posits that this group is in a position of power such that they are able to make decisions about distribution and access to resources for the other 99%, yet avoids directly managing or interacting with that 99%. Furthermore, he posits that to maintain this structure, there is a system in which a buffer zone is created whereby legal, educational, and professional systems provide services and a structure for control. He notes that, within this system, it is to the advantage of this ruling class that a few noteworthy individuals are rewarded through scholarships, grants, social services, and other means, as a way of placating the bottom 80%, limiting the number of people who move within the economic system, and communicating a message that success is individually determined rather than a result of a larger system of inequity. This framework is presented to students to prompt discussion regarding the difference between providing service and working toward justice. Furthermore, this provokes discussion about how participants may perceive the trainee’s association with a system or bureaucracy and that this association may not always be seen as helpful. Students are asked to reflect on ways that the social capital map may need to be revised in light of this. Furthermore, to address inequities and social justice, counselors can work with clients to increase opportunity in relation to constraints present in the clients’ social capital map (Garcia & McDowell, 2010). Advocacy is described as a way to facilitate clients in increasing their social capital.

To facilitate students’ ability to visualize how advocacy can be used as a counselor, the Advocacy Competencies model (Lewis et al., 2002; Toporek et al., 2009) that was presented prior to the event is reintroduced along with a chapter that applies the model to individuals living with poverty (Liu & Estrada-Hernández, 2010). This model describes six different domains of advocacy interventions along two dimensions: the extent of client involvement in advocacy (in collaboration with the client or on behalf of the client) and the focus of advocacy (individual, organizational, or societal; Lewis et al., 2002). The interaction of these two dimensions results in a matrix of six different domains describing types of advocacy (empowerment, client advocacy, community collaboration, systems advocacy, public information, and social/political advocacy), and the model provides specific strategies and recommendations of skill development depending on the domain of advocacy. Students work together to identify ways in which they may be able to collaborate with PHC participants around issues that might benefit from advocacy, for example, access to particular services. Their experience at PHC is used as an illustration to practice applying the Advocacy Competencies model (Lewis et al., 2002) in preparation for an advocacy assignment due later in the semester in which students choose an advocacy project to address a vocationally oriented issue. Specific recommendations for advocacy around homelessness from the APA (2009) Presidential Task Force Report are also discussed within the context of the PHC experience.