Addressing the Spiritual Needs of African American Students: Implications for School Counselors.

The historical tendency for educational institutions to symptomize behavior of African American children as dysfunctional or representative of mental disorder is well documented. However, recent scholarship illuminates the connection between oppression, social injustice, racial trauma, and racial microaggressions as the core of stress, depression, and anxiety in African American youth. Moreover, the ethical imperative of school counselors to holistically address the concerns of clients in counseling-including spirituality-has been firmly established. Inclusion of culturally relevant spirituality in counseling may assist African American students in coping with oppression and racism while deriving personal meaning, a sense of hopefulness, and promoting healing within the context of school systems. Keywords: spirituality, school counseling, multicultural competence In our desire to impose form on the world and our lives we have lost the capacity to see the form that is already there; and in that lies not liberation but alienation, the cutting off from things as they really are. Colin Gunton (1985, p.6) According to the American School Counselor Association (ASCA, 2005), today's school counselors are expected to effectively, and comprehensively, promote the personal/social, academic, and career growth and development of all students. In addition to building the core competencies students need for success, counselors should be vigilant in identifying and removing barriers to student academic progress; in particular, counselors need to be diligent in recognizing factors within the educational system that impede educational attainment for marginalized groups or lead to inequities of opportunity in postsecondary and vocational training options (Erford, House, & Martin, 2007). Counselors are expected to be advocates for social justice and leaders of systemic change. Historically, public schools in die United States were designed to serve the predominantly White, Protestant population, yet as the U. S. demographic landscape has changed, the diversity of student populations has increased dramatically, reflecting a more pluralistic society (Curry & Hayes, 2009; Durodoye, 1998; Hobson & Kanitz, 1996; Johnson, 1995; Ramirez, Lepage, Kratchowill, & Duffy, 1998). As a result, school counselors are expected to display multicultural competence in regard to die cultural factors that may affect student learning: gender, race, sexual orientation, religious beliefs and spiritual practice, socioeconomic status, and more. Moreover, today's school counselor is positioned to be a cultural mediator. According to Portman (2009), as a cultural mediator the school counselor, "engages in prevention, intervention, and/or remediation activities that facilitate communication and understanding between culturally diverse human systems that aid the educational progress of all students" (p. 23). However, the education system has been noted as an institution that propagates many of the social injustices experienced by minority groups; this may be especially true based on Ogbu's (1995) cultural-ecological theory, which indicated that African American students may view formal schooling as "forced assimilation to White cultural values" (Holcomb-McCoy, 2005, p. 123) and given that the historical soul-wounding of racial trauma caused by segregation in education continues to cause suffering (Duran, Firehammer, & Gonzalez, 2008). Institutional racism and disparate treatment of students based on race has been notable in areas of gifted education (underrepresentation of African American students), special education (disproportionately high numbers of African American students), and in areas of psychological and intelligence testing (Arredondo, Tovar-Blank, & Parham, 2008). As a result of theh exclusion from academic discourse, African Americans students have experienced lower rates of graduation and lower school commitment than theh White counterparts. …