Creating safe spaces: Latino counselor educators advocating for social justice in counselor education

The field of modern counseling is conceptualized through a lens of social justice advocacy with professionals tasked with actively engaging in advocacy efforts. However, counselor education has been slower to make systemic changes needed to decolonize and dismantle the field to prepare future counselors with the skills needed to adequately address advocacy. Additionally, those faculty personally and professionally motivated to keep the programs to task or lead advocacy efforts are often of marginalized statuses themselves, and thus, the oppressed are working within oppressive systems. Literature centered on the experiences of Black and Asian American Pacific Islander faculty recount systemic challenges and burdens they experience in counselor education advocacy. As another marginalized group within counselor education faculty, the Latino experience has not been explored unless contained within a cumulative experience. This hermeneutic phenomenological qualitative study explored the lived experiences of four Latino counselor educators as they advocate for social justice within counselor education. The themes identified are (a) Creating Safe Spaces, (b) Continuously Reflecting on Cultural Identity, (c) Creating Chains of Advocacy, (d) Embracing Responsibilities, and (e) Confronting Systemic Challenges. Implications for future research include repeating and expanding this study to include the larger diaspora of Latino culture, include more studies with other largely diverse cultural groups, and to address the shortcomings and successes of the decolonization and dismantling of counselor education.