Abstract
We offer a vision for a vocational psychology that places a larger focus on critical consciousness (CC) to be more responsive to marginalized communities (e.g., immigrants, low-income workers, Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color). CC describes how marginalized people analyze systems of oppression, act toward social justice, and become agentic and hopeful. In this article, we review extant theoretical frameworks that have laid a strong foundation for embedding critical consciousness in research, practice, education and training. We then offer suggestions for promoting critical consciousness within vocational psychology over the next decade. We highlight the promise of transformative, intersectional, and action research with and for marginalized communities; of career interventions that respond to oppression and liberation; and of training that prepares future vocational psychologists to engage in praxis in a complex world. We argue that a greater focus on CC is aligned with vocational psychology’s foundational social justice aspirations.
Keywords
The Need for a Critical Lens in Vocational Psychology
U.S. vocational psychology has roots in the vocational guidance movement, which was led by progressive social reformer Frank Parsons in the 1890s. Parsons provided a practical method to help match immigrant and other low-income workers to occupations that could help them improve their social conditions, while he also engaged with policy as a law scholar and was active in politics and social activism (Jones, 1994; Zytowsky, 2001). It is also important to acknowledge that Parsons’ progressive views did not extend to immigrants of color, and in fact were explicitly racist (Parsons, 1904). This problematic juxtaposition is part of a continuing legacy in which social justice goals are pursued for some workers and contexts while injustice is largely ignored or perpetuated for others. Longstanding critiques of vocational psychology and career counseling practice include the disproportionate focus on those with greater privilege (i.e., individuals who are white, middle and upper class, and have access to education and work options), and a narrow focus on career choice and individual-level decision-making factors (e.g., career interests, person-environment fit) (Blustein, 2001; Flores et al., 2019). For instance, only one decade ago, research about racial and ethnic minorities represented only 6.7% of vocational research articles published in major career research journals (Flores et al., 2006). Much of vocational psychology reflects unexamined neoliberal assumptions about workers and economic systems, and overlooks the systemic and structural dimensions of career development that constrain the educational and work options of most of the world’s workers. Moreover, the field has struggled to keep up with the changing social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics of a world that has become more diverse, and in which pervasive resource disparities continue to grow.
Adopting a critical lens within mainstream vocational psychology will help illuminate ways that research, practice, and training can counter- or reinforce- inequities among marginalized groups. A critical vocational psychology becomes largely concerned with issues of social justice as they pertain to career development, responding to calls from scholars to bring more attention to marginalizing conditions such as group bias, forced movement of people, poverty, unemployment, and lack of decent work. Social justice has been defined in vocational psychology as, “engagement in context-informed scholarship and practice that addresses inequities and inequalities in peoples’ work and life experiences, analyzes injustice within and across multiple ecological levels, and asserts a preferential option for securing basic, non-renounceable human rights over the interests of market, profit, and the maintenance of privilege” (McWhirter & McWha-Hermann, 2021, p. 2). Such a focus requires analysis of how social injustice is maintained in a status quo that is permeated by white supremacy, patriarchy, late-stage capitalism, Christian hegemony, and neoliberal ideology (Brewster & Lopez Molina, 2021; McWhirter & McWha-Hermann, 2021). A critical vocational psychology contests the injustice and inequities of the status quo and does not justify or ignore oppression (Prilleltensky & Stead, 2012). A critical vocational psychology is attuned to intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2017), which posits that social systems of race, gender, class (among others) combine and merge to compound experiences of marginalization and oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism and economic marginalization, anti-immigrant attitudes, ableism). Last, a critical vocational psychology expands its vision and impact beyond individual and small group-level counseling and intervention, and it engages meaningfully with macro-level and multi-level factors in research, practice, and policy, as these factors are essential in changing marginalizing conditions (Blustein et al., 2021; Gutowski et al., 2021; Hooley et al., 2018).
The flourishing of interest in critical consciousness over the past 20 years offers a means for translating critical psychology perspectives into vocational psychology research, practice, and training efforts. Critical consciousness is a psychological phenomenon in which the oppressed become aware of the conditions that marginalize them, develop agency, and engage in action to change these conditions (Freire, 1970; Watts et al., 2011). In this manuscript, we describe critical consciousness and offer several broader and more specific frameworks within which to situate connections between critical consciousness and vocational psychology. We provide a brief summary of critical consciousness scholarship within career development domains. Finally, we provide a vision for infusing critical consciousness into vocational psychology over the next 10 years in the domains of research, practice, and training.
Theories and Frameworks of Critical Consciousness
The concept of critical consciousness (CC), or conscientização, was birthed and popularized by Brazilian scholar and educator Paulo Freire (1970) in his seminal text titled The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. CC refers to becoming awakened to how systems marginalize people, in multiple domains (e.g., education, work, social life, health), and taking action to address and counter marginalization (Freire, 1992, 2021). In working with individuals living in poverty, Freire developed a teaching style that was based on dialogue, problem-posing, and collaboration with students, an approach that sees each student as possessing invaluable knowledge. In this approach to learning, he described the educator as one who is concerned with the sociopolitical structures oppressing students beyond the classroom. As such the educator engages in a shared project of learning with students that draws upon their experiences and observations, and supports the collective and mutual development of critical consciousness. Freire proposed that critical consciousness develops via praxis, or the continuous interaction of two key components: (1) critical reflection, which pertains to analyses regarding marginalizing conditions, and (2) critical action, pertaining to behaviors aimed toward addressing marginalization and injustice.
While Freire wrote extensively about his pedagogical method for facilitating critical consciousness development in educational spaces, he did not offer a theoretical frame or specific propositions regarding how it is developed and manifested. This has motivated extensive theorizing and model construction in the years since Freire’s groundbreaking publications. One of the most promising developments has been Watts and colleagues’ articulation of a Theory of Sociopolitical Development (SPD; Watts et al., 1999; 2003). They describe a 5-stage model of how marginalized individuals or groups move and grow from an acceptance of social arrangements as static and just (Acritical Stage), to growing awareness of injustice that is first accepted and later questioned, to a Liberation Stage, characterized by critical analysis, agency for making change, and actions to contest oppression, that is, critical consciousness. As such, sociopolitical development can be thought of as the process that culminates in critical consciousness. In addition to offering the 5-stage model, Watts and colleagues also provided methods for facilitating movement across stages, and these strategies may be used by educators, social service workers, and others who support youth development (Kirsher et al., 2015). The theory has been well received by scholars in education and developmental psychology, with continuing research that supports and challenges its pillars (Clark & Seider, 2020; Diemer & Hsieh, 2008; Diemer et al., 2009; Kirshner et al., 2015; May et al., 2022). More recently, Pillen et al. (2020) described a framework for the development of critical consciousness including six elements (priming of critical reflection, information creating disequilibrium, introspection, revising frames of reference, developing agency for change and acting against oppression).
Scholars have also expanded Freire’s conceptualization of critical consciousness to include new components that were not initially identified (e.g., critical agency, critical motivation, social justice outcome expectations), and there is an ongoing debate regarding the main components of CC (Jemal, 2017). For the purposes of illuminating the role of CC in vocational psychology, we next summarize CC scholarship and its connections to vocational development through broad CC frameworks and applied CC frameworks. This seminal work is relevant and key in creating a new vision.
Broad Frameworks of Critical Consciousness
A key proponent of liberation psychology, Maritza Montero (1994, 2000, 2007), highlights that liberation psychology goes beyond recognizing oppression to include resisting, countering, or other actions to transform oppressive situations and structures. She summarizes that liberation psychology is about “fostering and catalyzing individual and collective changes and teaching and helping others to understand and to change life and the conditions in which we live” (2007, p. 525). Her work and that of many dedicated scholars continue to move Liberation Psychology forward. Recent texts (Watkins & Shulman, 2008), including one published by the American Psychological Association (Comas-Díaz & Rivera, 2020), offer expansions to the original theory and highlight its relevance beyond its original Latin American context. In sum, liberation psychology is an approach to psychology in which CC is a core element, and an approach that we suggest can be fruitfully applied to vocational psychology.
Critical race theory (Crenshaw, 2010) was developed as a legal theory that unpacks the experiences of people of color who are minoritized in the U.S, and holds white supremacy responsible for this marginalization, as white supremacy permeates institutions and policies. Latino Critical Theory or LatCrit (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001) expands Critical Race Theory by focusing on the experiences of Latinx people in the U.S. and how their experiences are shaped by social identities, language, skin color, and immigration, and constrained by legal, policy, economic and educational systems. Disability justice and/or Disability Critical Theory (DisCrit; Annamma et al., 2013) offers a critique of how people with disabilities are marginalized within systems of healthcare, social services, and other institutions, and offers pathways toward a society that enables the potential of all people. More recently, Undocumented Critical Theory (UndocuCrit; Aguilar, 2019), illuminates the experiences of fear and oppression endemic in undocumented immigrants’ lives in the U.S, and how this marginalization is maintained by state-sponsored violence. Though ostensibly focused on specific groups and identities in relation to social systems, each of the aforementioned critical theories considers the heterogeneity and diversity within those groups. Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2017) is a product of Black feminist thought aiming to expose how the lives of women of color are complicated and impacted by intersecting systems of oppression (e.g., gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age).
All of these critical theories offer tools for deconstructing broad notions of oppression and unjust use of power, give concrete context and language to describe the overt and insidious nature of oppression, and shed light on how to interrupt and counter systems of oppression. As such, praxis of these critical theories supports the development CC. Applying an intersectional lens to scholarship on CC, Godfrey and Burson (2018) propose a shift in attention from individuals who are marginalized to the multiple and interacting systems that marginalize. They call for scholarship that acknowledges the intersections of privilege with oppression rather than treating oppression as a dichotomous experience. In addition, they contend that critical awareness requires sociohistorical knowledge of root causes of oppression. Engaging these larger critical frameworks in scholarship and practice, particularly to understand and interrupt oppression within education and work contexts, will contribute to the infusion of CC within vocational psychology.
Applied Frameworks of Critical Consciousness in Vocational Psychology
Within the educational literature, critical consciousness has been studied in relationship to minoritized students’ academic achievement. For example, CC is identified as a protective factor in Black students’ school success (Carter, 2008; ElAmin et al., 2017), and an ethnic studies curriculum that supported critical consciousness development was associated with significant gains in Latinx student achievement, graduation from high school, and enrollment in college (Cabrera et al., 2014). Seider and Graves (2020) found relationships between critical reflection and critical action and the achievement of students of color over 4 years of high school. Of note, Godfrey et al. (2019) reported that a combination of high critical reflection with low sociopolitical efficacy had detrimental effects on adolescent academic engagement and grades. Such work is directly relevant to vocational psychology given the relationships between schooling, education, and work over the lifespan.
Perhaps the first scholar within vocational psychology to employ the terms sociopolitical development and critical consciousness within an empirical study was Diemer (2003) in his dissertation entitled “The liberatory potential of vocational psychology: The critical role of conscientization.” Diemer and his colleagues have established numerous connections between CC and positive vocational and educational outcomes. Blustein et al. (2005) called for enhancing critical consciousness via vocational psychology training, research, and intervention practices as part of an emancipatory communitarian approach to vocational psychology. Such an approach would acknowledge how intersecting systems of privilege and oppression constrain vocational opportunities for the most people, broaden interventions to include countering unjust conditions, and incorporate advocacy and activism into the role of vocational psychologists.
Diemer and Blustein (2006) reported significant associations between urban youths’ critical consciousness and the career development variables of vocational identity, commitment to future work, and the role of work in their futures. In a longitudinal study, Diemer (2009) found that sociopolitical development (operationalized as, “a consciousness of the adverse impact of racism and sexism, a motivation to reduce social economic inequality, participation in community or social-action groups, and an orientation to help others in the community” [pp. 9–10]) not only had an influence on 12th grade vocational expectations, but also predicted engagement in education and work 8 years later, in a national sample of marginalized urban youth. Much of the work of Diemer and his colleagues has focused on conceptualization (Watts et al., 2011), measurement (Diemer et al., 2015, 2021), and identification of predictors and outcomes of CC (e.g., Diemer & Li, 2011; Diemer et al., 2010; Rapa et al., 2018), within and outside of educational and vocational outcomes.
Another line of critical consciousness scholarship within vocational psychology has focused on critical consciousness among Latinx high school youth. Those higher in critical consciousness were more likely to plan on enrolling in a university after graduating high school, reported higher grades, and had higher engagement in school and in extracurricular activities (McWhirter & McWhirter, 2016). The development and implementation of an intervention supporting career development and critical consciousness among Latinx immigrant high school students is described by McWhirter et al. (2019). Next, we describe vocational psychology scholarship on critical consciousness that has been facilitated by framing investigations within specific theoretical lenses.
Ali and colleagues developed an SCCT-based health career exploration intervention for rural ethnic minority youth in predominantly immigrant communities (Ali et al., 2019). They added an intervention component designed to enhance students’ sociopolitical development, and delivered the original and enhanced versions of the intervention to eighth graders, assessing healthcare career interests, outcome expectations, and self-efficacy. Sociopolitical development in this study referred to “self-perception about one’s ability to make an impact on policy decisions at the community level” (p. 708), akin to the critical agency or political efficacy component of critical consciousness. Students exposed to the sociopolitical development condition showed significant gains in healthcare career interests relative to the other participants; there were no changes in healthcare career outcome expectations or self-efficacy expectations in either condition, nor were there differences in outcomes as a function of ethnic minority status. In another study, Ali and colleagues (Ali et al., 2021) investigated direct and indirect relations between sociopolitical development and healthcare career interests, self-efficacy, and outcome expectations among ethnic minority and White eighth graders. They found that for Youth of Color, sociopolitical development was directly related to healthcare career interests, with no indirect effects via healthcare career self-efficacy or outcome expectations. For White youth, there was no direct effect of sociopolitical development on healthcare career interests, but it had indirect effects via both career self-efficacy and outcome expectations.
Olle and Fouad (2015) tested whether critical consciousness served as a moderator of relations between SCCT constructs of parental support, career decision-making self-efficacy, career outcome expectations, and career exploration intentions among a sample of urban high school students. They found that in spite of significant positive associations between critical consciousness, career outcome expectations, and career exploration intentions, there was an interaction such that for students with higher critical consciousness, the relationship between outcome expectations and exploration intentions was diminished.
Cadenas and colleagues have aimed to further clarify CC development using SCCT to operationalize the linkages among CC components and career development among marginalized communities. This conceptualization operationalizes CC’s core components (i.e., reflection/analyses, action/behavior) as bidirectionally linked sources of efficacy, which in turn promote outcome expectations and outcomes in career and educational domains. This conceptual framework has been supported by empirical research, predicting intent to persist in college among undocumented college students (Cadenas et al., 2018), career decision self-efficacy and outcome expectations among minoritized community college students (Cadenas et al., 2020b), academic performance and intent to persist among minoritized and low-income graduate students (Cadenas et al., 2021a), and serves as a protective coping mechanism among undocumented students (Cadenas et al., 2021c). Additionally, this integration of CC and SCCT has informed career development interventions for entrepreneurship and technology among community college students (mostly low-income, racially minoritized, gender diverse), promoting outcomes such as entrepreneurial self-efficacy, technology readiness, and community involvement (Cadenas et al., 2018, 2020b).
Finally, self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) is often used in educational contexts to explain the role of motivation in student achievement. Luginbuhl et al. (2016) tested whether a model based on self-determination theory explained more variance in low income and Latinx high school students’ educational outcome expectations and school achievement when sociopolitical development was added to the model. Findings suggested that sociopolitical development had positive direct effects on both outcomes, as well as indirect effects on outcome expectations and school achievement via autonomous motivation (satisfaction of needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence).
This brief review of broad and applied frameworks offers scaffolding for continuing efforts to conduct research and engage in practice focused on harnessing the power of critical consciousness within vocational psychology as an ‘antidote to oppression’ (Watts et al., 1999). Evidently, the empirical study of critical consciousness and its links to developmental outcomes is growing, in vocational psychology and beyond. However, as noted by Heberle et al. (2020), empirical studies linking CC with vocational outcomes to that point largely employed proxies of CC rather than specific measures developed to assess CC. Moreover, we note that effect sizes in studies linking CC with vocational and educational outcomes tend to be modest. Finally, there is some evidence that components of CC are not uniformly associated with positive outcomes (Godfrey et al., 2019). As this body of work continues to flourish, and with the advent of specific measures (described in a subsequent section), future systematic reviews and meta-analyses will help establish the evidence for CC development and implications within the vocational domain. To this end, we present suggestions embedding critical consciousness into vocational psychology for the next decade. These suggestions build on the state of the science on CC in vocational psychology to inform future research, practice, and training.
A Vision for Promoting Critical Consciousness within Vocational Psychology
Over the Next Decade
In this section, we provide recommendations for infusing critical awareness, critical agency, and critical action into vocational psychology research and theory, practice, and training. Our recommendations, grounded in liberatory and critical approaches, highlight attention to social, cultural, political, and other macro-level systems that shape people’s work and careers, as well as human agency. The theoretical groundwork has been laid out, as noted earlier in this paper, to facilitate the move toward a more critical vocational psychology. We provide a vision for advancing critical consciousness over the next decade, outlining several areas of foci in the domains of vocational psychology research, practice, and training. We offer this vision with humility, and only as a starting point from which to expand. We look forward to collective expansion of this agenda by and with other scholars, practitioners, and people in the very communities we seek to serve.
Critical Consciousness and the Future of Vocational Psychology Research
Principles of critical consciousness and its developmental processes should inform the conceptualization, design, and implementation of vocational psychology research. Such an approach means attending to questions of context (e.g., what levels of the ecology are included and excluded from consideration?), power (e.g., how might the knowledge generated reinforce or reduce existing disparities?), and perception (e.g., what ideological assumptions underlie a study?) (McWhirter & McWha-Hermann, 2021). Recommended areas of focus include collaboration with BIPOC communities, continuing to enhance measurement, clarification of how CC is formed, conceptualizing intersectionality with respect to oppression and privilege, exploring critical hope and radical hope, and dedicating further attention to critical action.
Research as Transformation with and by BIPOC Communities.
Research on the vocational psychology of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) individuals and communities comprises only a small fraction of the published scholarship in vocational psychology journals. Promoting CC in vocational psychology research involves not only centering on these and other minoritized communities, but engaging individuals from BIPOC communities in charting the way forward. Drawing from recommendations for inclusive social justice research in vocational psychology, scholarship on critical consciousness should engage a breadth of methods and designs, be explicit about values, positionality, and ideological assumptions, and contextualize participants and findings within salient domains of privilege and marginalizing conditions (McWhirter & McWha-Hermann, 2021). Participatory action research (Fals-Borda, 1987) and its variations, such as community-based participatory research (CBPR) and youth participatory research (YPAR), hold great promise but have seldom been employed in studies linking critical consciousness with career development. One exception is Neri’s (2020) study with nondominant youth in a Career and Technical Education program, which made use of YPAR. Methodologies that elicit participant perspectives (e.g., narrative, testimonio) also hold rich promise for illuminating connections between CC and career development. Such efforts are consistent with recommendations to decolonize research (Gone, 2021).
A unique feature of participatory action research is that it is oriented toward structural transformation, since findings from research are intended to inform advocacy to change policies and practices. Participatory and action-oriented approaches to research would significantly enhance understanding of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its recovery, among workers in BIPOC communities. The pandemic disproportionally impacted BIPOC individuals, not only in terms of transmission and death from the virus, but also in terms of employment loss, and in restricted opportunities for upward mobility through education and training (Artiga et al., 2020; Kim & Ali, 2022). An example of participatory research in this area is the COVID-19 Needs Assessment of U.S. Latinx Communities, conducted by emerging Latinx scholars as a collaboration with the Ethnic-Minority Psychological Associations (EMPAs) and Congress (National Latinx Psychological Association, 2021). For this project, the Latinx scholars embedded critical consciousness as a key construct to investigate in relation to how the pandemic had impacted the health, mental health, social community, employment, and education of Latinxs. Several subpopulations within the Latinx communities were engaged in the research process (e.g., Afro-Latinxs, immigrants, essential workers, farm workers, caregivers, youth, LGBT Latinxs). Research from this project was shared with policymakers to inform targeted efforts in the recovery from the pandemic, such as providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who tended to have greater employment losses than people with U.S. citizenship.
Measurement of Critical Consciousness
Until 2014 there were no validated quantitative measures of CC. Prior research investigating CC employed indicators or proxies of CC components, and such methods continue to be employed (e.g., Cadenas et al., 2021a). Burgeoning interest in this construct has led numerous scholars to develop reliable and valid measures that assess CC as a unitary or as a multi-component construct. Diemer et al. (2015) summarized CC measurement challenges and described strengths and limitations of three existing measures: The Critical Consciousness Scale (CCS; Diemer et al., 2017, developed for use with marginalized youth, with critical awareness and action subscales), the Measure of Adolescent Critical Consciousness (MACC; McWhirter & McWhirter, 2016, developed for use with Latinx youth, with critical agency/motivation and action subscales) and the Critical Consciousness Inventory (CCI; Thomas et al., 2014, developed for use with emerging adults, unitary). Another earlier measure is the Sociopolitical Consciousness measure, developed for use with youth in El Salvador (Baker & Brookins, 2014). These four measures focus on critical consciousness of social inequality and racism. The CCS also includes items addressing gender and socioeconomic resources.
In their recent review of scholarship on critical consciousness in children and adolescents, Heberle et al. (2020) echoed and elaborated upon measurement challenges, including that wide variation in how CC is assessed renders comparison across studies difficult. New measures of critical consciousness include the Contemporary Critical Consciousness Measure (CCCM; Shin et al., 2016) and CCCM-II (Shin et al., 2018). Both demonstrate sound psychometric properties and attend to CC in multiple domains (the CCCM addresses racism, classism, and heterosexism, and the CCCM-II sexism and ableism). In contrast with previous measures, these are designed for use with adults, including those without or with fewer marginalized identities, and focus on the critical awareness component of CC (not agency or action components). These measures allow for contrasting levels of CC in different domains (racism, sexism, etc.) via subscales, consistent with recommendations by Godfrey and Burson (2018).
Finally, two short versions of the CCS have recently been developed (Diemer et al., 2020; Rapa et al., 2020) that are the first to assess all three components of CC. The Short Critical Consciousness Scale (ShoCCS, Diemer et al., 2020) was developed using item response theory to eliminate CCS items less important to measuring critical reflection and critical action, and includes a new critical motivation subscale. The Critical Consciousness Scale-Short (CCS-S, Rapa et al., 2020) also presents a short version of the CCS, includes a critical motivation subscale, and demonstrated measurement invariance across ethnic-racial, age, and gender identity groups.
There are several areas in which we expect to see continued CC measurement refinement and development. One is the critical action component, given growing attention to the contexts and interventions most likely to lead to action (e.g., Diemer et al., 2021; Schwarzenthal et al., 2022; Seider & Graves, 2020; Seider et al., 2021). Watts and Hipolito-Delgado (2015) highlighted that critical action can occur at personal, group, and mass action levels; people may also engage in critical action only within specific domains (e.g., anti-racism). Measures sensitive to such variation will be useful in this continued work. The ShoCCS and the CCS-S include five and four items, respectively, assessing participation in groups, events, or personal behaviors to support rights or political aims. The MACC includes three items assessing involvement in groups or activities against racism, promoting justice, and personal behavior in support of justice issues.
Another area for development is the assessment of systems and how they support or thwart CC development. Focusing on oppressive systems rather than on the individuals experiencing oppression is recommended by Godfrey and Burson (2018) as a means to better address intersectionality within critical consciousness measurement.
None of the existing measures were developed specifically to assess CC in the context of vocational development, but any of them might be utilized in conjunction with vocational and educational measures to advance theory, research, or practice. Questions that vocational psychology researchers should address in selecting a CC measure include: Which domains of CC (racism, sexism, etc.) and components of CC (awareness/reflection, agency/efficacy, action) are most relevant to the research questions? At what developmental age are target participants? Which measures have been used and validated with the demographic groups of interest? Academic debate about the essential nature of critical consciousness and its components continues (Jemal, 2017). Continued development, validation, and refinement of measures of critical consciousness will be important to advancing scholarship and practice.
Clarifying Formation of Critical Consciousness
There is ongoing work related to the tools, strategies, and methods for fostering CC, such as dialogue, reflective questioning, psychosocial support, co-learning, process groups, and action/activism (Heberle et al., 2020; Jemal, 2017; Pillen et al., 2020). Vocational psychologists are well positioned to contribute significantly to this line of inquiry, employing qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how CC develops, and how it relates to vocational psychology processes and outcomes (e.g., school engagement, educational attainment, career choice, career roles, work volition, self-efficacy). Furthermore, intervention and participatory research can be used to identify effective strategies for supporting CC development in controlled and naturalistic environments. Such research can contribute to the growing body of evidence supporting the educational and vocational benefits of group, classroom, and community interventions for critical consciousness (Cadenas et al., 2018, 2020a; Cerezo & McWhirter, 2012; Cerezo et al., 2013; Chronister & McWhirter, 2006; Chronister et al., 2020) and the conditions under which CC does not develop or leads to negative outcomes (Godfrey et al., 2019). In addition, research is needed to establish the benefits of fostering CC via individual career counseling interventions.
A promising tool in this endeavor to enhance awareness of intersectionality and privilege is the Privileged Identity Exploration (PIE) Model (Watt, 2007), that identifies eight common defense mechanisms when individuals from privileged groups attempt to recognize, contemplate, and address their privilege. It would be helpful to incorporate this scholarship in the vocational realm. Given evidence that “privilege checking” is associated with diverging outcomes for people in different social locations (Egan Brad et al., 2019), efforts to incorporate understanding of privilege and oppression should be grounded in the evidence base. In a recent study, Cadenas and Kiehne (2021) integrated Intersectionality, LatCrit, and UndocuCrit in a model to predict CC and academic performance among undocumented Latinx students and U.S. citizens. They found that indeed, identification with groups experiencing greater marginalization (i.e., undocumented immigrants, older age, lower income, and female) was predictive of greater CC, and higher achievement in turn. Along the same lines, a recent test of a model of CC among graduate students (Cadenas et al., 2021a), found evidence for CC development among students with high educational privilege (i.e., pursuing graduate education) who simultaneously experienced marginalization based on social class. Recent research on critical reflection points toward the possibility and importance of developing awareness of injustice across multiple domains, such as racism, classism, and sexism (Shin et al., 2016). Expansion and further investigation of how varying degrees of privilege and oppression may facilitate or hinder CC in conjunction with education and career development outcomes is warranted.
Related scholarship within the vocational domain has operationalized the vocational hope and its benefits for minoritized youths’ career development (Diemer & Blustein, 2007). Research has also more broadly operationalized notions of vocational hope and work hope through social cognitive and racial identity development frameworks, as well as through measurement of its underlying components (i.e., goals, agency, and pathways; Jackson & Neville, 1998; Juntunen & Wettersten, 2006; Brown et al., 2013). Similarly, the construct of political outcome expectations may tap onto some dimensions of critical hope, and these outcome expectations have been found to result from the interplay between reflection and action (Cadenas et al., 2018, 2020a, 2021). Evidently, there is great promise and cultural relevance in further operationalizing critical hope in vocational psychology research, career development intervention, and policy
Critical Consciousness in the Future of Vocational Psychology Practice
Conceptualizing Oppression and Liberation in the Vocational Realm
Fostering CC through vocational psychology practice must include explicitly naming and describing the forms of oppression that are being addressed. For example, Hooley and Sultana (2016) offer strategies to address five types of oppression in the workplace: Exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. In their review of social justice efforts in vocational and industrial/organizational psychology, McWhirter and McWha-Hermann (2021) identified five marginalizing conditions that serve as structural roots of social injustice experienced by people in their work lives: Group bias, forced movement of people, poverty, unemployment, and lack of decent work. Precarious work, defined as “work that is unstable and insecure in the continuity and quantity of work, restricts the power of workers to advocate for change, and does not provide protections from workplace abuses and unsafe working conditions” (Allan et al., 2021, p. 2) is an increasingly pervasive dimension of oppression salient to vocational psychology. Scholars recently have described the way that the COVID-19 pandemic and pre-existing health disparities have impacted the work and mental health of workers (Autin et al., 2020; Blustein et al., 2021).
Along with identifying sources and roots of oppression (fostering critical awareness), or what Prilleltensky (1997) would refer to as “denunciation”, it is important to articulate a vision for moving forward, or “annunciation,” which aligns with critical action. The field of counseling psychology has recently started to embrace liberation terminology in more mainstream fashion, defining it in relation to the many underserved groups that counseling psychologists engage with to support their mental health and well-being (Singh, 2020). Liberatory or emancipatory practices are increasingly highlighted within career interventions, policy, and scholarship. Examples can be found in Jackson et al.’s (2019) compilation of career development interventions for social justice, providing intentional alignment between social justice macro-level issues, theories of vocational psychology to conceptualize interventions, practice competencies for individual and group-level practice, and the designing of interventions as tools for liberation. Emancipatory career guidance practices that address systemic oppression are elaborated by Hooley and colleagues (Hooley, 2019; Hooley et al., 2018). For example, they recommend that career guidance professionals challenge oppression by incorporating the following ‘signposts’ into guidance practices: Build critical consciousness, name oppression (acknowledge how systems marginalize), question what is normal (de-ideologize, interrogate White middle class assumptions), encourage people to work together (build solidarity and communality; support collective action), and work at a range of levels (attend to systems and policies as well as individuals) (Hooley et al., 2018). Defining oppression and liberatory practices in vocational psychology can support the development of CC among scholars, practitioners, and educators.
CC Development as an Aim of Career Counseling
Although the call to foster critical consciousness within career counseling practice is relatively recent, the counseling literature offers decades of support for this endeavor. A model of counseling to foster empowerment was proposed by McWhirter (1991; 1994) in which empowerment was defined in parallel with critical consciousness, including enhancing awareness of power dynamics and systemic constraints, development of agency, and taking action to address barriers and inequities for self and others. The model was applied to the training of counselors and psychologists (McWhirter, 1998; McWhirter & McWhirter, 2007). This model influenced the development of the ACCESS program (Chronister & McWhirter, 2006), which utilizes dialogue, group identification, problem-posing, identifying contradictions, power analysis, and critical self-reflection to enhance critical consciousness in a career intervention for women survivors of domestic violence. Integration of critical consciousness as a process and outcome of counseling is intrinsic to Comas-Diaz’ (2000) ethnopolitical approach to working with people of color.
There is also increasing potential for integrating mental health counseling interventions and career counseling interventions using techniques to foster critical consciousness. In the latest iteration of Helping Skills, fifth edition (Hill, 2009), a text that serves as a guide to mainstream training of foundational counseling skills, critical consciousness is embraced, along with cultural competence and humility, to integrate multicultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes as a helper. The recently published Liberation Psychology text (Comas-Diaz & Torres Rivera, 2020) offers many examples for fostering critical consciousness in psychological practice. Additionally, the practical framework for healing ethno-racial trauma (HEART) among immigrant communities, describes how providers may use strategies that foster sanctuary, liberation, and resistance to enhance interventions aimed at developing strengths-based coping (Chavez-Dueñas et al., 2019). To illustrate, aspects of this model could be manifested within career guidance and counseling with undocumented students by (a) creating physical spaces in which undocumented students experience support, (b) raising critical awareness of undocumented student assets and the barriers and risks they face, via Ally trainings for staff, instructors, and students, (c) providing resources including scholarships and information about career options that are open to those without documentation, and (d) advocating for systemic change at multiple levels to make possible studying, working, and participating in society without threat of deportation (Cadenas et al., 2018; McWhirter, Cendejas, et al., 2021).
Furthermore, career counseling practitioners may find it helpful to devote more attention to K-12 schools as sites of vocational guidance practice that are ripe for critical consciousness interventions. There is special promise among schools that are situated in neighborhoods and regions with high numbers of youth who experience intersecting forms of oppression, and schools that utilize critical pedagogies. As evidenced by longitudinal research (Seider et al., 2020; Seider & Graves, 2020), critical consciousness interventions may take many forms that are suitable to the needs of the community, the cultural characteristics of students, and the structural supports available within the school. Additionally, strategies for school principals to enhance staff and student critical consciousness in the service of equity are presented by Lash and Sanchez (2022). Many of their recommendations can be adapted for school counselors such as promoting community-embedded exploration of occupations and pathways via service learning or YPAR projects, modeling how to have conversations about topics such as racism and systemic barriers, and fostering family awareness of career and education resources and avenues for advocacy and resistance of inequitable practices.
Collective Action for Systems Level Change
As noted earlier, CC theory and research have been critiqued for overemphasizing the critical reflection/analyses dimensions of critical consciousness, and neglecting the critical action dimension as a means to promote the structural change to address oppression (Watts & Hipolito-Delgado, 2015). Given that transformative action is intrinsic to CC, and that collective action can prompt systems level change, we agree that a re-centering of action in CC research and theory is warranted (Diemer et al., 2021). CC development has been a precursor and key component in social change movements that have sought liberation from oppression for many groups of people across time (Louis & Montiel, 2018). Importantly, research about CC development suggests that engaging in critical reflection and action may promote agency and other positive developmental outcomes (Diemer et al., 2016), which in and of themselves improve the short-term conditions of those who are marginalized.
Vocational psychologists may deliver programmatic interventions, such as career education programs, that center on social-action projects that address community issues (Cadenas et al., 2020; McWhirter et al., 2021a, 2021b). Vocational psychologists can promote structural change and foster CC within institutions and as part of larger systems (e.g., education, healthcare, law, workforce), and advocate with and on behalf of clients, students, and communities that are impacted by social oppression in their career development. Prioritizing critical action in vocational psychology research can include utilizing YPAR and CBPR methodologies, using research findings to support policy change and equity efforts. Furthermore, vocational psychologists may partner with community-based organizations and political action groups that are seeking to improve the livelihood of minoritized workers. Groups such as Lucha Arizona (luchaaz.org) provide a number of programs (e.g., political education, legal immigration support) that promote the empowerment and workforce development of Latinx and immigrant workers, while working on statewide campaign to raise wages and secure workers’ rights.
Critical Consciousness in the Future of Vocational Psychology Training
Recommendations for Critical Reflection in Training
Incorporating critical consciousness into vocational psychology training and education requires attending to context in conceptualizing educational and vocational development, noting marginalizing conditions and structural constraints, and broadening the role of vocational psychologists and career counselors beyond individual consultants and counselors. Students can learn to recognize how neoliberal ideology permeates assumptions about workers (e.g., workers are responsible for failure to obtain work that provides access to the privileges of healthcare and education), the market (e.g., it is a neutral force assuring that people get what they deserve), and the role of the career professional (e.g., fitting workers to jobs so as to meet demands of the labor market). This lays a foundation for questioning the status quo and who benefits from maintaining it, and may help stimulate considerations for multi-level action that addresses not just the career concerns of individual clients, but transformative system changes.
The vast amount of un-curated information about the world of work available via the internet and social media has long been recognized as a challenge to acquiring accurate knowledge about options and pathways. The rising politicization and polarization of information, the motivated rejection of science, the widespread of misinformation, and narratives that de-humanize and blame marginalized people for their situations have compounded this challenge (Wang et al., 2019). For instance, recent research presents evidence for the predictive role of social media misinformation on work performance and turnover intentions among healthcare workers, and the mediating role of COVID-19 threat and psychological distress (Khan, 2021). Martín-Baró (1994) responded to the El Salvadoran government’s distortion and control of information during the civil war by launching a national poll system. His efforts to de-ideologize by revealing the attitudes and experiences of the impoverished majority countered state messaging that obscured violence and oppression. Unveiling ideological underpinnings of approaches to career development, and contesting how various narratives contest or reinforce the status quo, will help build trainees’ critical consciousness and their capacity to foster it in others. We find it more important than ever that vocational psychologists are able to critically evaluate the validity of widely available information, to question the motivations and political aims of the sources of such information, and that they are able to model these critical analyses skills for trainees and for the individuals they serve in career guidance and counseling.
Recommendations for Critical Action in Training
In addition to fostering critical reflection and awareness, trainees would benefit from opportunities to engage in action-oriented outlets that would allow them to practice social justice behaviors and develop critical agency or critical hope. Focused training that promotes development of multicultural and social justice counseling competencies (Flores & Heppner, 2002; Nassar & Singh, 2020; Singh et al., 2020; Vespia et al., 2010) will provide important scaffolding to support critical action. Exposure to national and international efforts to support and protect workers, such as the UN sustainable development Goal eight and the International Labour Organization statement on Decent Work (United Nations, 2015), as well as policy making efforts (e.g., Blustein et al., 2012; 2017), may help students envision pathways forward and open up avenues and possibilities for critical action. Such big picture framing requires shifting some class time from the traditional focus on how to help individual clients navigate and adapt to circumstances.
Trainees may also be alerted to or generate their own local opportunities for critical action in support of, for example, economic justice, living wages, decent employment options for persons with disabilities, rights and resources for undocumented workers, and workplace safety for survivors of intimate partner violence, transgender workers, or essential workers. Consistent with liberation psychology’s de-ideologization, trainees may learn interventions to counter myths about COVID-19 to increase workplace safety (e.g., Challenger et al., 2022) or partner with educators to support critical consciousness (Parkhouse, 2018) or foster critical media literacy skills (Lyiscott et al., 2021; Talib, 2018) in the service of students’ college and career readiness (McWhirter, Cedenas et al., 2021). Trainees might initiate YPAR projects with students to assess whether and how CC is fostered via curricular and co-curricular activities, and how this relates to educational and vocational outcomes.
Numerous resources for teaching and practicing in a manner that enhances critical consciousness are offered in the blog Career Guidance for Social Justice (https://careerguidancesocialjustice.wordpress.com/). To further illustrate, we offer two examples from our own teaching. The first author teaches a course titled, “Culture-centered Career Intervention,” which is focused on the career development experiences of several groups experiencing forms of oppression (e.g., sexism, racism, classism/economic marginalization, ageism, ableism). The course begins with a broad overview of how social oppression affects career development and opportunities, to motivate the need for interventions aimed at social justice and centered on culture. Next, the course engages with career theory, career counseling interventions, and group and systems level interventions using a critical lens, and using group dialogues led by students themselves. To move from reflection/awareness into action, the course includes the development of a community project, in which students learn how partner with local organizations to structurally address underserved career needs.
The second author used critical consciousness as a framework for teaching a course on mental health among immigrants and refugees from the Northern Triangle and Mexico. Critical awareness is fostered via readings and discussion focused on causal factors and conditions in the countries of origin, the traumas of the journey North, and apprehension and detention in the U.S. Critical agency is supported as psychologists, lawyers, and other professionals share their experience in roles such as interventions to support healing from trauma, legal advocacy, and conducting evaluations for immigration hearings. Students created critical action projects that translated their learning into concrete possibilities for action in response to the multiple oppressions. For example, one student created and later conducted a group intervention for immigrant Latino men; another student developed a workshop for teachers of immigrant students. A similar class structure could be applied to support critical consciousness development in career counseling coursework.
Conclusion
In this manuscript, we articulated the need for vocational psychology to re-engage its social justice and social reforming roots to better serve minoritized communities (e.g., BIPOC communities, immigrants) who remain largely neglected in vocational psychology research, practice, and training. The surge in attention to critical consciousness over the past 20 years holds great promise for vocational psychology. Over the next decade, we see great potential for amplifying a focus on critical consciousness. To do this, vocational psychologists may draw from broader frameworks encompassing critical consciousness (e.g., liberation psychology, critical pedagogy, critical race theories) as well as applied vocational psychology frameworks that include or may be adapted to incorporate critical consciousness (e.g., Psychology of Working Theory, Social Cognitive Career Theory). The infusion of critical consciousness into vocational psychology research may include interrogating our assumptions, processes and aims, embracing research as a transformative act for and with BIPOC communities, refining measurement, clarifying the CC formation process, taking an intersectional approach that attends to systems of oppression and privilege, and linking critical hope and critical action with vocational outcomes. In the practice domain we envision further development of language to integrate notions of liberation, and expanding techniques for critical consciousness development in vocational guidance and career counseling. Lastly, we see critical consciousness playing a needed role in the training of future vocational psychologists who can challenge misinformation and dehumanizing narratives. We offered examples for integrating advocacy and community-based projects into coursework to bring to life what is learned through critical analyses, and to support students in developing critical agency and taking action to address social injustice using the tools of vocational psychology.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Research Council of University of Sri Jayewardenepura.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
