2015 Association for Women in Psychology Conference

Peer education is an approach to psychoeducational learning through which students learn from and interact with their peers rather than faculty or staff. Peer educators may solidify their own learning through facilitating workshops and presentations with their peers on topics related to health and mental health (Boud, Cohen, & Sampson, 2011). Additionally, Williams reported, “Learning done in the context of community creates rich opportunities for complex interactions with students different from one another” (Williams, 2011). Interactive learning “in the context of community” lends itself well to focusing a peer education program on the intersections of mental health and social and restorative justice. Although students involved in social and restorative justice based peer education programs have reported profound and transformative learning experiences in terms of insights about others as well as themselves, these programs are rare on college campuses (Voorhees & Petkas, 2011). The Multicultural Immersion Program (MIP) at UC-Davis is celebrating its 18th year as a peer education program sponsored by the Counseling Center that focuses on social and restorative justice work and the intersections of mental health and oppression. This structured discussion will feature past and current MIP peer educators along with their Counseling Center staff coordinators, who will discuss the evolution of their feminist, social and restorative justice work on campus. In the first part of this discussion facilitators will share their experiences in the MIP program, the development of their multicultural dialogue skills through their collaborations with community partners on campus, and the impact the program has had on them both personally and professionally. The facilitators will then engage the participants in discussion and in generating ideas for bringing peer-led social and restorative justice programming to campuses and organizations in which participants are involved.

Women’s Therapy Center (WTC) is a feminist psychodynamic social justice oriented training clinic. Our faculty wants to talk with people from other training agencies about creating more racial/ethnic diversity among faculty, supervisors and trainees. We have created a diverse training cohort, and hope to learn more about attracting faculty and supervisors. WTC was founded in 1978 as a place for experienced women therapists to train beginning therapists in work with female clients. Although WTC has always had small numbers of women of color affiliated with our training programs, our organization has historically been predominantly White. Our agency has served a diverse client population for many years. We have successfully turned a corner over the past six years, so that people of European descent are no longer the majority of people training with us. This was not an easy thing to achieve. There were many conversations and many mistakes. We made changes to our admissions criteria that expanded access to us, and we changed our curriculum to be more inclusive. We had many diversity trainings aimed at both students and faculty. We have stopped seeing people of color as the only carriers of culture, and begun to recognize the culture of Whiteness that our organization embodied. Having an all-volunteer faculty and supervisory staff added to our challenges for diversifying. In our early years, we were most interested in the way that sexism, within the gender binary, shaped women’s lives. We now include an understanding of the ways that all social location shapes our internal and external lives. Although we continue to be predominantly a women’s organization, our understanding of gender has expanded and we now serve and train transgender/genderqueer people as well as women. We hope our conversation can also include the complexity of this shift.

Many of the participants at AWP are committed to efforts to reduce prejudice and discrimination of all kinds. And many of us have been frustrated when those efforts seem to go nowhere, or to create huge psychological reactance, or even to blow up in our faces. Conversely, many of us have participated in diversity trainings that leave us underwhelmed or feeling ashamed but with no tools for moving forward. Frustrated by these sorts of experiences, we went back to the drawing board to try to figure out what approaches might be more productive. We were excited by the emerging research on implicit attitudes and how much that research helped to explain about what does and does not work when purple tackle challenging learning at implicit as well as at explicit levels. We have been developing and applying a model based on the implicit attitudes research. We have used the model in a number of contexts, including general diversity training, work with academically at-risk college students, individual and group therapy, trainings on oppression and privilege, teaching at different levels, and consultation and outreach. The model has shown great promise, and we have received uniformly positive evaluations from a large variety of participants. We would like to use a structured workshop to share this model with AWP participants and to find out what approaches and methods they have been finding helpful. We propose offering a brief introduction about the challenges of creating spaces in which participants can feel safe enough to work to undo prejudicial attitudes and behaviors. We want to introduce them to the approaches we have been developing and we want to hear what approaches they have been finding useful in whatever contexts they do their work.

Feminist multicultural therapists assert that contextual factors, such as oppression and discrimination, contribute to psychological distress, limit access to resources and information, and isolate individuals from sustaining communities (e.g., Brown, 2010). They suggest that participation in social justice activism contributes to psychological wellbeing, such as increased empowerment, social connectedness, and resilience (e.g., Arczynski, 2014; Worell & Remer, 2003). Activism is also a way people may nurture and care for themselves as well as others in their community(s) while reducing oppression, harassment, and marginalization. Hagen (2013) demonstrated that individuals with diverse circumstances, with varied social identities, and from various social contexts may prefer different types of social justice activism. Further, the different activisms people reported preferring and engaging in held different socio-cultural-political meaning and relevance based on their beliefs, values, and experiences of oppression and privilege (Hagen, 2013). The purpose of this structured discussion is to cultivate participants’ empowerment to create positive social change in their varied communities. We will encourage a broad conceptualization of activism in order to include behaviors and strategies on micro, meso/community, and macro levels. We will give attention and sensitivity to different socio-cultural perspectives on oppression, power, and privilege. First, we focus on discussing specific concerns and experiences of oppression and marginalization relevant to participants’ communities (e.g., home, work, churches, families, friend networks). Then, we anticipate dialoguing about specific social justice activisms that participants presently engage in or have interest in doing in order to target oppression observed in participants’ local and national communities. Last, we will encourage participants to brainstorm strategies for collaborating with other people to increase social support; challenge discrimination, and increase access to opportunities, information, and resources. In this structured discussion, we will address challenges and benefits associated with engaging in activism.

As psychology continues in its journey of multicultural awareness and inclusion, academic programs strive to make their faculty more diverse, particularly recruiting women of color psychologists. However, some women of color academics might argue that the academe is still an unwelcoming environment and that fosters “ambiguous empowerment” (Turner, 2002). Women of color often experience being treated as a “token” and feel pressured to assimilate while also serving as sole ambassadors for their culture and cultures of other minority individuals (Kanter, 1977). These can lead to increased levels of stress and job dissatisfaction for women of color as they try to navigate authenticity between their person and professional selves (Hume, 1998). The purpose of this roundtable is to provide an opportunity for women of color to share their experiences in professional psychology (both practice and academic) and provide safe space for psychologists to brainstorm how to make counseling psychology a more inclusive environment for women of color. In particular, the discussion will be centered around experiences of multiple marginality, making academic and professional programs more aware of the unique challenges that women of color face and to help make campuses more inclusive for this unique population.

Given the growing number of women of color in clinical, teaching, administration and leadership positions in higher education, it is imperative to explore how women of color may be perceived and treated in these roles. We plan to facilitate a discussion that addresses (a) the navigation of maintaining and asserting one’s multifaceted identity in the workplace in the midst of assumed identities and stereotypes based on physical appearance, (b) the intersection between cultural identities and (c) workplace dynamics and positions of power. This structured discussion targets the growing number of women of color in institutions of higher education. The increase in women of color in these positions has presented university environments with novel multicultural challenges and opportunities. The conversation will provide a forum for participants to discuss multicultural and social justice issues experienced across different settings and contexts in higher education as well as opportunity to learn and share strategies to address challenging and distressing experiences. The facilitators will have pre-designed questions and 1-2 vignettes to stimulate a critical dialogue. We will provide insights from our experiences as women of color with other intersecting identities, and encourage participants to self-reflect and share their experiences, as well. We hope that this structured discussion will be conducive to greater understanding, awareness and personal reflection.