Decolonizing Alterity Models Within School Counseling Practice

Abstract

colonization occurs when counselors knowingly or unknowingly promote a dominant cultural belief and practice that has the effect of maintaining dominant group positions of power and influence (McDowell and Hernandez 2010). Integrating a social justice model of alterity in school counseling means acknowledging that no matter how inclusive we are, howegalitarian we are, or how much we seek to honor and celebrate the other, we often collude with the forces that marginalize and devalue our students from nondominant social locations. A social justice model will acknowledge that a “politically neutral” approach to school counseling contributes to the inequity experienced by students from traditionally underrepresented groups. A social justice mode of school counseling acknowledges that the race to academic success is rigged. We join Figueira (2007) in stating that without decolonization, “all theories and pedagogies of alterity serve as mere dogma and orthodoxies” and contribute to “institutional apartheid” (p. 144) within the profession of school counseling.