Enhancing Training and Practice in the Context of Poverty

Laura Smith
Teachers College, Columbia University
While the importance of multicultural competence among practitioners and clinical supervisors has been
explored in the psychological literature, these examinations give little attention to issues of social class
and poverty. The author suggests five interrelated areas for supervisory action to enhance supervisee
competence in the context of poverty. Supervisors may (a) provide supplemental curricula on social class,
(b) help supervisees explore class privilege, (c) process supervisees reactions to poverty, (d) apply social
justice tenets in supervision, and (e) teach flexible approaches to interventions. These suggestions are
framed within the fields growing emphasis on competencies and its larger service commitments to
people living in poverty.
Keywords: supervision, poverty, multicultural, social justice
Describing the efforts of their work to develop a feminist multi-
cultural perspective for clinical supervision, M. L. Nelson et al. (2006)
wrote, We decided that a crucial piece of the work of supervisors is
to open up the Pandoras box of gender, race, privilege, and privileged
roles in supervision. . . (p. 107). Over the past decade, significant
scholarly attention has been directed toward multicultural and social
justice issues as they relate to training and practice, how those issues
might be addressed most effectively with supervisees, and the com-
petencies required of practitioners in this undertaking (Toporek, Ger-
stein, Fouad, Roysicar, & Israel, 2006). Some of the most important
contributions have presented conceptual models and frameworks for
multicultural supervision (DAndrea & Daniels, 1997), empirical data
supporting the benefits to supervisees when supervisors utilize a
multicultural approach (Ladany, Inman, Constantine, & Hofheinz,
1997), and innovative multicultural training techniques such as the
creation of student portfolios to convey training goals and accom-
plishments (Coleman, Morris, & Norton, 2006). One of the findings
that emerges from this literature is that supervisees competence to
treat diverse groups of clients is enhanced (e.g., Salzman, 2000) by
multiculturally competent supervisors who can guide the clinical
focus toward issues of race and ethnicity (Estrada, Frame, & Wil-
liams, 2004).
This Pandoras box, however, contains other identities and oppres-
sions toward which many supervisors are not yet fully guiding their
supervisees, and prominent among them are considerations of social
class and poverty. Calls for attention to poverty and the psychother-
apeutic needs of poor clients have been heard sporadically in the field
of psychology throughout the last four decades, with one of the most
notable early voices being that of former American Psychological
Association (APA) president George Albee. Albee spoke explicitly of
the need for psychologists to address the suffering of the poor and
disenfranchised through innovations in practice and to train psychol-
ogists in settings in which poor clients were more likely to be seen
(Albee, 1969). Psychologists subsequent participation in the commu-
nity mental health center movement of the 1970s represented a
flourish of activity in this direction whose promise was, unfortunately,
never realized because of changes in political agendas and funding
opportunities (see Humphreys & Rappaport, 1993, for an overview).
Attention to poverty has remained alive within the field as
evidenced by the APAs recent Resolution on Poverty and Socio-
economic Status (American Psychological Association, 2000) and
the APA Task Force Report on Socioeconomic Status (American
Psychological Association [APA], 2006). Nevertheless, social
class is barely acknowledged within the major counseling journals,
as was revealed in a recent content analysis conducted by Liu et al.
(2004); between the years 1981 and 2000, only 18% of the articles
reviewed incorporated social class as a variable, and then it usually
received only passing mention in the method section. The unsur-
prising corollary of these observations is that many therapists,
largely unaware of the potential impact of classism on their work
and unprepared to assimilate the life experiences that accompany
poverty, may find that their work with poor clients is critically
compromised (Javier & Herron, 2002; L. Smith, 2005).
Although poor clients do not often find their way to the private
offices of independently practicing psychologists, they are not
infrequently among the caseloads of psychology interns and other
trainees who may be completing internships or practicum in com-
munity mental health centers, counseling centers, hospitals, or
training clinics. How can supervisors guide trainees in conceptu-
alizing and implementing their work with these clients, whose life
circumstances and social experiences are often vastly different
from their own? In this article, I present an overview of such
supervisory considerations after clarifying my conceptual frame-
work and some central terms.
LAURA SMITH earned a PhD in counseling psychology from Virginia
Commonwealth University. She is currently an assistant professor in the
Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College,
Columbia University. Her research interests include social class, classism,
and poverty, as well as participatory action research.
THE AUTHOR would like to express her appreciation to Debbie-Ann Cham-
bers for the helpful conversations that contributed to the writing of this article.
CORRESPONDENCE CONCERNING THIS ARTICLE should be addressed to
Laura Smith, Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, Teachers
College, Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street, Box 102, New
York, NY 10027. E-mail: ls2396@columbia.edu
Training and Education in Professional Psychology 2009 American Psychological Association
2009, Vol. 3, No. 2, 8493 1931-3918/09/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0014459
84
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Use of Terms
A Social Justice Framework
In discussing social class and the circumstances of the poor, I
use a social justice framework (L. Smith, in press). Exactly what
is a social justice framework? Social justice psychology itself has
been explicated by a number of authors in recent years (e.g.,
Albee, 1996; Mays, 2000; Prilleltensky, 1994; Speight & Vera,
2004; Strickland, 2000). Most of these conceptualizations con-
verge generally on a few central tenets. Goodman et al. (2004)
explained that social justice psychology rejects the artificial sep-
aration of individual well-being from the sociocultural forces that
can affect it critically and comprises research and action designed
to change societal values, structures, policies, and practices. In
their introductory chapter to the Handbook for Social Justice in
Counseling Psychology, Fouad, Gerstein, and Toporek (2006)
emphasized that social justice refers explicitly to the fair and
equitable distributions of advantages and disadvantages within a
society. In another chapter from this volume, Toporek and Wil-
liams (2006) referred back to the proceedings of the 2001 National
Counseling Psychology Conference in adding that social justice
implies the involvement of all individuals as coparticipants in the
decisions that affect their lives.
These tenets suggest a fundamental premise for a social justice
framework. This premise begins with the acknowledgment that the
current societal status quo is characterized by an inequitable dis-
tribution of power, resources, and access to same, within which we
(as individuals and as a field) are inevitably located. Not only are
we within this system, the system is within us: It is the medium in
which current professional fields were conceived and from which
their practices evolved. We inevitably participate in it, therefore,
even if unintentionallyexcept when we take purposive action to
the contrary. Importantly, this implies that doing nothing is not a
neutral position. When we choose to avert our gaze and leave
oppression unacknowledged, we implicitly support inequity by
helping to obscure its existence.
Building on this premise, application of a social justice frame-
work to any professional endeavor begins with the identification of
dominant-culture assumptions and actions that may be embedded
within and perpetuated by a fields practices, even if unintention-
ally. Action toward the creation of new, socially-just practices,
policies, theories, and procedures can then be initiated and inte-
grated within the fields activities and knowledge base. With
regard to counseling and psychotherapy, this process leads to such
considerations as the damaging impact of all forms of oppression
on emotional and interpersonal well-being, the implications of
relying on interventions that target the individuals interior while
leaving sociocultural origins of distress unaddressed, and the pos-
sibility that conventional psychotherapeutic roles and practices
reproduce power-over relationships in the lives of clients from
marginalized groups. A later section will further address the im-
plications of such a framework within clinical supervision.
Classism and Class Privilege
The language and conceptual formulations that surround issues
of social class are notoriously wide-ranging (Baker, 1996), and
disparate ideas exist as to precisely what classism is (or whether it
even exists). To be clear about my usage of this term, I follow Lott
(2002) in referring to classism as a form of structural oppression
that intersects with the other -isms (e.g., racism, sexism, hetero-
sexism, and ableism). Again, within a social justice framework, the
underlying supposition with regard to any form of oppression is
that it is considered to exist in a real (as opposed to a relative)
sense and that these broad systems of power relations exist as a
backdrop for discussions of the circumstances and well-being of
members of dominant and subordinated groups. A social justice
conceptualization of classism, therefore, corresponds to the third
of three approaches to class-related inequalities as described by the
APA Task Force on Socioeconomic Status (APA, 2006). These
categories were identified as (a) materialist approaches, or those
that correlate differences in socioeconomic status (SES) with dif-
ferential access to resources, goods, and services (materials); (b)
gradient approaches, or those for which status is constructed as a
continuum along which relative differences in class position may
be considered; and (c) reproduction of power and privilege, or
approaches that treat class inequity as a form of sociopolitical
dominance by which some groups are systematically advantaged at
the expense of others.
This third approach has not been extensively explored by psy-
chologists, with the few substantive treatments of class privilege
coming primarily from social psychologists (e.g., Lott & Bullock,
2007), community psychologists (e.g., Prilleltensky & Nelson,
2002), and feminist psychologists (e.g., Hill & Rothblum, 1996). A
definition of classism that embodies this approach has been offered
by Bullock (1995), who defined classism as the oppression of the
poor through a network of everyday practices, attitudes, assump-
tions, behaviors, and institutional rules (p. 119). Lott and Bullock
(2007) further elaborated this definition to encompass institutional
classism, through which social institutions function to perpetuate
the deprivation and low status of poor people, and interpersonal
classism, which is characterized by prejudice, stereotyping, and
discrimination.
If classism is conceptualized according to the definition pre-
sented above, then social class privilege can be understood as the
advantageous net effect of all the everyday practices, attitudes,
assumptions, behaviors, and institutional rules that operate to the
benefit of people with higher class status. Social class privilege is
made visible through such material advantages as increased edu-
cational opportunities and increased access to health care. Better
civic protection also accrues to those with social class privilege;
for example, dirty industries and services such as waste dumps
and bus depots are less likely to be located in neighborhoods where
middle-class and wealthy people live (Bullard, 2005). In addition,
cultural attitudes and images tend to reflect and perpetuate ap-
proval of people with higher class status. Popular media demon-
strate the widespread fascination with the lifestyles and habits of
wealthy people (Lott & Bullock, 2007), whereas an analysis of
televised representations of the poor indicated that, when they are
seen at all, they are likely to be portrayed as dysfunctional,
ignorant, unruly, promiscuous, drug users, or any combination of
these (Bullock, Wyche, & Williams, 2001). Such considerations
begin to sketch out the parameters of social class privilegebut
they also underscore Lott and Bullocks (2007) call for more
research attention to fundamental questions of class, power, and
privilege.
85
TRAINING, PRACTICE, AND POVERTY
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Poverty
In the context of the current discussion, the term poverty is not
used with reference to specific numerical cut-offs such as the
federal poverty line. As the National Poverty Center (2006) ex-
plains, indices used by different U.S. government agencies vary
among each other and have been criticized for overlooking numer-
ous factors that affect a familys financial status. Moreover, except
for inflation-related adjustments, these formulas have not been
revised or updated in four decades. Therefore, this discussion will
follow Leondar-Wright (2005) and others, who refer to poverty as
a condition of living experienced by people who do not have
enough income to support basic, essential individual and family
needs such as shelter, safety, food, clothing, and health care.
It should be noted that, limited as they are, numerical indices do
provide a glimpse of one of the most persistent characteristics of
poverty and social class in the United States: their deep intersec-
tions with race and ethnicity. People of color are overrepresented
among those living in poverty. The U.S. Census Bureau (2007b)
reported that the poverty rate for non-Latino White Americans was
8.62% in 2006, whereas it was 24.3% for Blacks, 20.6% for
Latinos, and 10.3% for Asian Americans. For respondents who
indicated that they were American Indian or Alaskan Native and
no other race, the poverty rate was 27% (U.S. Census Bureau,
2007a). The racial wealth divide is equally striking: for every
dollar owned by the average White family, the average family of
color owns less than a dime (Lui, Robles, Leondar-Ross, Brewer,
& Adamson, 2006). There are signs that these equity gaps may be
narrowing. For example, the poverty rates reported above for one
group, Latino respondents, represents a statistically significant
decline of 1.2% from 2005. In other regards, however, the rate of
change is not promising. According to Collins and Yeskel (2005),
Blacks earned 55 cents for every dollar of White income in 1968.
In 2004, they earned 57 cents for every dollar of White incomea
pace that will result in racial income parity in 581 years.
Enhancing Competence in the Context of Poverty:
Five Areas for Action
Aponte (1994), a family therapist with a career-long commit-
ment to poor families, noted that some poor communities are able
to maintain a spirit of love, hope, and courage despite the obstacles
that they face. He emphasized, however, that this spirit persists in
spite of larger trends that appear to operate to their detriment, and
national economic data support his contention. We are living at a
time during U.S. history that is characterized by what Collins and
Yeskel (2005) have called economic apartheid, a widening equity
gap in which increasing numbers of Americans are being left
farther and farther behind economically. The Economic Policy
Institute (EPI), for example, conducted a state-by-state analysis
that concluded that since the late 1990s, incomes have declined by
2.5% among the poorest fifth of American families, while it has
risen 9.1% among the wealthiest fifth (Bernstein, McNichol, &
Nicholas, 2008). Increasingly, poor Americans do not include just
the unemployed or people who receive public assistance of some
kind; they include people with jobs. In 2003, a quarter of all
American workers could be described as working poor; that is,
they earned poverty-level wages (Tait, 2005).
Describing the wide range of challenges faced by people who
live in poverty, Aponte (1994) went on to explain that therapy
with the poor must have all the sophistication of the best psycho-
logical therapies. It must also have the insight of the social scientist
and the drive of the community activist (p. 9). Few psychologists,
however, have received training that integrated the development of
their therapeutic skills with a sociocultural analysis of social class
and an ability to incorporate and address the needs of poor com-
munities. Many of us have benefited from multicultural training as
part of our own graduate work and can draw upon the rich
multicultural literature in supervising our students, but supervisors
and trainers who wish to integrate issues of class and poverty into
their work with students may not know exactly where to begin.
This was certainly true for me, and as a psychologist who contin-
ues to supervise students work in poor communities, I offer five
interrelated areas for action that continue to be important to the
development of my work with trainees and also to my own
learning. They are areas and issues that supervisors and their
students should be ready to encounter and explore as poverty and
social class gain salience within the context of their work.
Recommend Supplemental Readings on Social
Class Issues
In a society that embraces the notion of itself as classless
(Zweig, 2000), it is not surprising that psychology, like many other
disciplines, is largely silent on topics of social class and poverty.
Along these lines, Lott (2002) commented on the near invisibility
of the poor in psychology (p. 101), even in circumstances under
which there is a direct focus on multiculturalism and diversity.
This invisibility extends to graduate curricula, which may prepare
trainees for challenges in the areas of therapeutic, diagnostic, and
multicultural competence, but usually not for encounters with the
deprivations, humiliations, and crises that characterize the lives of
the poor. In turn, these encounters can trigger a dawning awareness
of something for which trainees may not even have words: social
class privilege.
Helpful resources exist by which trainees and their supervisors
can deepen their understanding of social class, the circumstances
faced by poor Americans, and the implications of both for clinical
work. With regard to the former, publications associated with the
nonprofit resource center Class Action (www.classism.org) pro-
vide a comprehensive, accessible overview of the parameters of
social class. Their publications include the books Class Matters
(Leondar-Wright, 2005) and The Color of Wealth (Lui, Leondar-
Wright, Brewer, & Adamson, 2006), the second of which ad-
dresses the historical and present-day intersections of classism and
racism. Another book with the same titleClass Matterswas
compiled from a series of articles by correspondents of the New
York Times (2005) and covers a wide range of class experiences
derived from both rural and urban settings. Newman and Chen
(2007) chronicled the struggles of working people attempting to
survive just above the poverty line through a series of case studies
in The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America.
Perhaps one of the most evocative treatments of social class is
contained in the book, Where We Stand, by feminist scholar and
social critic bell hooks (hooks, 2000). Telling readers of her
struggle to make sense of class in her own life, hooks goes on to
explore the intersections of class with race and gender as well as
the moral and ethical implications of contemporary class realities.
86
SMITH
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Understanding the classist attitudes that greet poor people is
another important component of students knowledge base, and
empirical validation of these attitudes can be found within the
social psychological literature. Lott (2002) provided a review of
much of this research, weaving it into her explication of classism
as cognitive distancing from the poor. Included within this review
is, for example, a study by Cozzarelli, Wilkinson, and Tagler
(2001) in which participants endorsed traits such as lazy, stupid,
dirty, and immoral more often for poor people than for middle-
class people; in another (Hoyt, 1999), the most common stereo-
types listed for poor people were uneducated, lazy, dirty, drug/
alcohol user, and criminal.
With regard to classism and psychotherapy, a special addition of
the Psychology of Women Quarterly that was published as a book
(Hill & Rothblum, 1996) contains several chapters that address the
impact of classism on both therapists and their clients within a
feminist psychology framework. A small number of counseling
psychologists (e.g., Liu, Pickett, & Ivey, 2007; L. Smith, 2005)
and vocational psychologists (e.g., Blustein, Chaves, Diemer, Gal-
lagher, Marshall, Sirin, et al., 2002; Heppner & OBrien, 2006;
Juntunen et al., 2006) have also published work that explicitly
addresses social class and its implications for applied work. Fi-
nally, family therapists, both social workers and psychologists,
have made a number of distinguished contributions to our under-
standing of the psychotherapeutic experiences of poor clients,
though poverty itself is more the focus of these works than is social
class or classism (e.g., Aponte, 1994; Boyd-Franklin & Bry, 2000;
Minuchin, Colapinto, & Minuchin, 1998).
Meriting special mention is a comprehensive new resource
recently made available by the APA Task Force on Resources for
the Inclusion of Social Class in Psychology Curricula (American
Psychological Association [APA], 2008). This task force, chaired
by Bernice Lott and Heather Bullock, prepared a compendium of
scholarly references, classroom exercises, course syllabi, and pop-
ular media resources related to issues of social class. It presents,
therefore, an opportunity for a multidimensional exploration of
class, classism, and poverty that should not be missed by psychol-
ogists and trainees interested in the fullest development of their
multicultural and social justice competence.
Help Supervisees Consider Their Class Privilege
(as You Consider Your Own)
As people with privileged identities begin to expand their
awareness of oppression, they often find that one of the more
intuitive parts of the work is to feel sympathy for the plight of the
oppressed. The more demanding and important part of the work,
however, is to locate oneself within the larger system that advan-
tages some groups as it disadvantages others and to locate the
attitudes and beliefs that support that system within oneself. Ex-
ploring a privileged identity for the first time can be challenging
under the best of circumstances; exploring class privilege presents
added difficulties related to the aforementioned absence of class
awareness in American society. This exploration must go beyond
sympathy or guilt regarding those who are impacted by classism
though, certainly, those feelings are an understandable part of the
process. Rather, comprehending classism and class privilege
means identifying the policies, procedures, attitudes, beliefs, and
taken-for-granted social mechanisms that place obstacles in the
paths of poor and working-class people as they simultaneously
advantage middle-class and wealthy individuals (L. Smith, in
press).
Becoming aware of ones class privilege in this way is analo-
gous to other aspects of multicultural training with which super-
visees may be more familiar. For example, multicultural compe-
tence requires that White clinicians not only understand the
damaging impact of racism on the well-being of people of color
but also that they address the advantageous effect that skin color
privilege has had in their own lives. Peggy McIntoshs (1988)
groundbreaking Wellesley College working paper on White priv-
ilege paved the way for countless White psychologists and others
to begin unpacking the invisible knapsack of privileges that
accrued to them merely through the accident of having been born
with White skin. While McIntoshs examination of White privilege
contained many vital insights, perhaps the most powerful and
viscerally moving portion for many White readers was her list of
46 concrete examples of unearned privileges that she enjoyed on a
daily basis. Clearly, an in-depth analysis of class privilege is a
complex undertaking, but a similar listing or other straightforward
resource with regard to the privileges associated with class mem-
bership could serve as a springboard for such discussions between
supervisors and supervisees.
A small number of authors in the social sciences and other
fields have offered inventories and other training resources that,
together, begin to make manifest the experience of class priv-
ilege. One of the earliest was a 1997 pamphlet called The
Invisibility of Upper Class Privilege published by the Wom-
ens Theological Center (WTC) in Boston (available at www
.thewtc.org/Invisibility_of_Class_Privilege.pdf). Citing McIn-
toshs work as their inspiration, the authors presented an ex-
tensive list of class privileges that included I can hide family
secrets and family failures behind the doors of my home
(Womens Theological Center, 1997, p. 1) and I have the
freedom to be unaware of the living conditions of others (p. 2).
More recently, Liu et al. (2007) addressed counselors specifi-
cally as they developed a list of self-statements corresponding
to White middle-class privilege. These statements included I
can be assured that I have adequate housing for myself and my
family and My family can survive an illness of one or more
members (p. 205). The authors furthermore presented a case
example to illustrate the incorporation of class-related consid-
erations within counseling practice.
As was described earlier, the APA Task Force on Resources
for the Inclusion of Social Class in Psychology Curricula (APA,
2008) contains a section of classroom exercises that allow
students to explore issues of class privilege. These exercises
would lend themselves easily to implementation among a group
of trainees such as a practicum class or supervision group, but
they could also serve as discussion prompts for supervisor
supervisee pairs. Along these lines, Yeskel and Leondar-Wright
(1997) presented a four-module curriculum to guide personal
exploration of classism and class privilege. The curriculum
includes a class-background inventory exercise that, rather than
present class privileges outright, derives them from a series of
discussion prompts; a second workshop curriculum was offered
in 2005 by Leondar-Wright (2005).
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Support Supervisees in Processing a Realm of Trauma
Prior to 2005, I was practicing in a community-based organiza-
tion where I met with clients and offered outreach and other
programming in one of the poorest urban communities in the
United States. Sometime during my first year there, I remember
having the impression that the life stories of every single client
whom I had seen were marked by tangible, life-altering, safety-
threatening disruptions and crisesstints in the shelter system, the
up-close witnessing of one or more murders, run-ins with the
judicial system or incarceration itself, and physical victimization
or assault. Suspecting that this must be an exaggeration, I reviewed
my progress notes and discovered that it was completely accurate.
I was particularly struck by the fact that, often, these crises were
not what brought the clients to counseling. Rather, they were
simply features of life in the poorest communities, recounted
during the taking of the clients history. To say the least, these had
not been common milestones in the lives of the clients with whom
I worked during the first decade of my career, spent in college
counseling centers and independent practice. I was accustomed to
working with clients whose presenting problems were largely
relational, emotional, developmental, or psychological in nature;
now I had clients who spoke of food running out and sleeping in
cars.
Few psychologists have written about the personal experience
and clinical implications of working with clients who live in
poverty. One of the few who has is Altman (1995), who described
the unfamiliar realm of trauma (p. 1) that psychotherapists enter
when they go to work in poor communities. In particular, social
worker Janna Smith (2000) described the trauma of poverty as
having two overarching themes. The first of these involves the
literal, dire, survival-oriented, day-to-day crises faced by poor
families who are without basic resources and adequate protection
from danger. The second is more psychological in nature:
[W]hen poverty exists in a context of affluence, people tend to feel
alienated, shamed, and angered by their marginalization. Attempting
to survive in extreme circumstances, people without money make
decisions which are difficult for outsiders to comprehend and thus are
subject to simplistic maligninga process which increases alienation.
(J. Smith, 2000, p. 74)
Another part of this sense of shame, Smith went on to explain,
derives from the humiliating, continuous involvement with bureau-
cracies that poverty necessitates; poor families are evaluated and
reevaluated for eligibility through a never-ending succession of
office visits and unannounced inspections. Moreover, in my expe-
rience, these visits can be additionally frustrating in that they
frequently prove fruitless in the end. Because necessary files
cannot be located in the crowded office, or the appointments have
fallen so far behind schedule that ones turn never comes, people
find themselves constrained to repeat the entire process, often
under time pressure and with children in tow. My other anecdotal
observation is that these visits can be the occasion of overtly rude
treatment, as welfare offices often seem understaffed by exhausted
workers who themselves feel harassed from every direction.
These are not, typically, the situations faced by the hypothetical
clients portrayed in graduate students textbooks. Furthermore, as
Altman (1995) pointed out, most therapists have been able to avoid
specific knowledge and direct experience of poverty in their own
lives. The result of this encounter, then, can be a personal and
professional shock to the sensibilities of supervisees as they are
faced with presenting problems and client narratives to which their
training seems to bear little relevance and which are moreover
profoundly distressing on a human level. Beginning as well as
more experienced clinicians can find themselves feeling disori-
ented, overwhelmed, and useless as clients leave their offices to
resume the daily struggles that therapists may wonder if they
themselves could surmount.
Supervisors can help supervisees stay oriented and engaged by
emphasizing certain aspects of the process. The first is fairly
concrete and involves pursuing missing information and knowl-
edge regarding their poor clients lives, the acquisition of which
can help students feel less overwhelmed by the unfamiliar terrain
of poverty. Psychologists are often not well-informed about the
policies and procedures surrounding such issues as low-income
housing and food-stamp eligibility; however, their colleagues who
are social workers often are. These colleagues, who may even be
coworkers within the same clinic setting, can be valuable resources
for learning about benefits and community issues. Needless to say,
community members themselves are also excellent sources of
knowledge; I became acquainted with a senior citizens group in the
community where I worked who became my informal advisory
board.
Second, supervisees need to understand that their feelings of
helplessness in the face of poor clients struggles must be exam-
ined critically. Although the survival-related obstacles faced by
poor clients are indeed towering and life-shaping, therapists can
find them so disorienting that they fail to address sufficiently the
emotional, existential, and self-reflective dimensions of clients
experienceswhich are often what clients have come to talk
about. As Janna Smith (2000) explained, therapists who work with
poor clients bear witness to a grim, unrelenting reality that can
blindside them with grief and consternation: When people have
so little and are suffering so much, it is hard not to feel both
horrified and guilty. Unrecognized, such feelings distort the ther-
apists judgment (p. 86). I have encountered versions of this
stumbling block many times myself. Elsewhere (L. Smith, 2005),
I have described the feeling that, as a psychologist, I had little of
value to offer my poorest clients, which undermined my ability to
connect with them in session. A senior citizen in the community
with whom I discussed this impression came right out and told me
that he considered it to be classist: Why would I not think it
valuable to offer them the same space for reflection and analysis
that I offered all my other clients?
Third, the humanitarian distress that is engendered in many
supervisees through contact with poverty must be processed in
supervision. Many supervisees will experiences stages of reaction
characterized by disbelief, helplessness, grief, and anger, for which
supervisors need to listen actively. In my experience, supervisees
sometimes hesitate to fully explore these feelings with supervisors
because they are not certain that their reactions to the sociocultural
context qualify as clinically relevant supervisory material or be-
cause they believe that clinical supervisors expect them to just
deal with it, as one student said to me. Still other students may be
embarrassed by the flood of emotions that they experience in
session, in that such a response may not seem sufficiently profes-
sional. Beyond the sharing of these feelings, what framework for
analysis can we offer supervisees? As was described earlier, a
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social justice framework for psychological practice integrates con-
textual considerations with individual issues, and the implementa-
tion of such a framework within supervision is the subject of the
next section.
Implement a Social Justice Framework
Within Supervision
When supervisees go into poor communities to work, the com-
fort of not knowing how poor people live is stripped away. Also
undermined are the assumptions that derive from and help main-
tain that comfortable oblivion, such as the notion that people are
poor because they do not wish to work (or at least, to work hard
enough). Through their clients, supervisees witness the precarious-
ness of life without health insurance; they observe the impact on
poor communities of opportunistic businesses such as check-
cashing stores and rent-to-own furniture companies (Eckholm,
2006); they see first-hand the consequences of the environmental
racism and classism that make poor communities the waste-
dumping grounds for the nation (Bullard, 2005). For many super-
visees, these revelations inspire more than sympathy for clients.
They also inspire observations and questions about the social,
cultural, and political systems that maintain these conditions. How
is it that adequate health care is not available for all American
families? Why does the minimum wage level allow an adult to
work full-time and still live in poverty? Why are schools in poor
communities overcrowded and underresourced at the same time
that education is promoted as the pathway out of poverty for poor
children (Kozol, 2005)?
Similar spoken and unspoken questions are often present in the
supervisory context whether the form of oppression in question is
based on class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or physical ability.
The pivotal supervisory decision is in choosing how to address
them: If we talk about systems of oppression during clinical
supervision, are we getting off track? The decision to conceptual-
ize and treat clients impacted by oppression without consideration
of oppression itself is a values-based political choice; so is the
decision to consider systems of oppression within the practice
framework. The latter choice, which I suggest here, is consistent
with the social justice psychological perspective explicated earlier.
How can supervisors and their students enact this perspective
within their work together? A new edited book, Advancing Social
Justice Through Clinical Practice (Aldarondo, 2007), offers both
conceptual and how-to guidance with regard to socially just prac-
tice and, in particular, contains a chapter addressing social justice
supervision contributed by Arredondo and Rosen (2007). These
authors argue that the multicultural competencies, along with
social justice principles and leadership, are essential components
of the supervisory process, in that this process shapes the next
generation of practitioners. Furthermore, they point out that failure
to include social justice topics within graduate curricula perpetu-
ates practices that are irrelevant for clients from oppressed groups
and moreover leaves the profession unprepared for work in a world
characterized by inequity. The authors propose nine specific strat-
egies by which supervisors and others can bring a social justice
paradigm to life within their professional roles. These strategies
include developing a personal paradigm for social justice leader-
ship in consultation with other advocacy groups (the Southern
Poverty Law Center is given as an example), engaging in visible
social justice actions, and bringing social justice topics into teach-
ing and supervision.
At a basic level, the application of a social justice model to
supervision makes room within the case conceptualization and
treatment design process for supervisees observations, feelings,
and questions about systemic sociocultural aspects and origins of
client distress and does not consider these conversations to be
digressions from the clinical work. In so doing, social justice
supervision can accomplish three interrelated ends. One is simply
a more complete and accurate case conceptualization. Writing of
their work with poor and marginalized women, Fels Smith, Good-
man, and Glenn (2007) described the nature of mental health issues
among their clients:
Much of poor and marginalized womens suffering represents the
nexus of failed social policy, overstressed families or communities,
individual vulnerabilities and illness, and poor judgment exercised at
critical moments. As such, rarely is the cause or the cure found solely
within the individual or within external realities . . . . Yet, low-income
women who present to the mental health system with symptoms of
depression or anxiety are often offered treatment that assumes that
with the right medication and increased insight achieved through
counseling, their lives will improve significantly . . . . Women then
blame themselves for their suffering and are taught, once again, to feel
ashamed of their situations and their emotional distress. Eventually,
the external brutalities of poverty may become internalized as self-
loathing. (p. 492)
The last sentence in the previous quotation illustrates the sec-
ond, related advantage of social justice supervision. Not only can
poor clients circumstances and symptoms be understood more
comprehensively when contextual elements are considered, super-
visors and students who do so can better avoid unintentional
collusion with internalized oppression among these clients. Fi-
nally, the third advantage of social justice supervision exists on a
broader, more abstract level. If one agrees that silence regarding
injustice ultimately contributes to its perpetuation, then the explicit
identification and labeling of sociocultural factors constitutes ac-
tion in the other direction. When supervisors and students reject
strictly individualized conceptualizations of the damage done by
poverty, racism, and other forms of oppression, they create a
moment of alliance with socially-just movement for all people.
Importantly, a social justice model for supervision should not
require that supervisors provide elaborate responses regarding all
issues and questions, or even that absolute answers exist in every
case. Writing about postmodern multicultural supervision, Gonza-
lez (1997) described the effectiveness of a stance that he called
supervisor-as-partial-learner (p. 367). Gonzalez further ex-
plained this position as one of informed uncertainty that allowed
him to work with supervisees from within the context of his own
style, cultural context, and personal vision while providing equal
space for the exploration of supervisees own questions and con-
victions. This stance has much in common with good supervision
generally but is particularly relevant for supervision related to
social justice issues. Interwoven issues of systemic inequity and
personal identity are complex, controversial, and anxiety-
provoking, and many of us have had little practice in exploring and
articulating them. It is important that supervisors honor and sup-
port students as they venture into this little-known territory but
also that they not overwhelm students exploration with their own
views and declarations.
89
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Support Flexible Approaches to Treatment
Multicultural psychologists have long contended that the con-
ventional roles and behaviors of psychological practice are at best
culture-bound and at worst oppressive to clients from marginalized
groups (D. W. Sue et al., 1998). Certainly, poverty is not a true
cultural designation, yet the parameters, landmarks, and challenges
of life in poverty are far enough removed from middle-class
existence that therapists must be willing to use their mainstream-
derived skills flexibly. Dumont (1992), a psychoanalytically
trained psychiatrist practicing in a poor urban community, ob-
served the pathological social and environmental forcesracism,
pollution, involuntary unemployment, and malnutritionthat
caught patients up in their currents. Dumont (1992) found that, in
such terrain, the 50-minute hour of passive attention, of pushing
toward the past, of highlighting the shards of unconscious material
in free association, just does not work (p. 6). Janna Smith (2000)
described the importance of flexibility around issues such as
scheduling, pointing out that it is sometimes better to marvel with
poor clients that they manage to come at all than insist on pro-
cessing their resistance.
It is one thing to agree in theory with multicultural experts (e.g.,
Helms & Cook, 1999; Sue & Sue, 2007) and others who advocate
flexibility in treatment approach when working with clients out-
side the White middle-class mainstream; it is quite another to
actually exercise that flexibility. Most supervisors and students
have received conventional psychotherapeutic training, and there
are few applied psychologists who are willing to openly present
nontraditional approaches that they have used. In addition to
relying upon the multicultural research literature, therapists can
find helpful inspiration for socially just modifications of conven-
tional therapeutic techniques from feminist psychologists (e.g.,
Goodman et al., 2004; Miller & Stiver, 1997), community psy-
chologists (e.g., G. Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2005), radical psychi-
atry (Roy, 2007), and narrative therapy (e.g., White, 2007).
Along with this guidance, participatory approaches to interven-
tion development may help bridge the gap between social justice
principles and the conventions of mainstream psychotherapeutic
practice. Most generally, such approaches derive from action re-
search, which refers to a cycle of inquiry involving planact
observereflect (Herr & Anderson, 2005). Participatory action
approaches add to this cycle of inquiry by incorporating the
collaboration of local community members. In this way, the best of
psychologists skills and the best of local wisdom can come
together in the planning, launching, evaluation, modification, and
relaunching of new therapeutic interventions.
At the most basic level, participatory development and modifi-
cation of therapeutic technique can simply mean incorporating
local wisdom regarding how to make the best use of ones skills in
a particular community or with a particular client. Earlier, I re-
ferred to a group of local senior citizens who advised me in
shaping the program of services that I eventually offered, which
included individual sessions according to a fairly traditional model
but also group discussions offered as part of community gather-
ings, psychoeducational groups in classrooms, and collaborations
with a local homeless shelter. Some of the other interventions that
I have seen evolve from participatory collaborations between ther-
apists and community members include group interventions com-
prising poetry writing and spoken-word performance, and pro-
gramming that combined personal counseling, career counseling,
and readings such as Paulo Freires The Pedagogy of the Op-
pressed (L. Smith, Chambers, & Bratini, 2007). I do not mean to
suggest that every supervisorsupervisee pair should create brand
new interventions for use in particular communities. Rather, I hope
to encourage supervisors to support their students in listening to,
respecting, and incorporating what community members, local
service providers, and clients themselves have to say about what
works in their communityeven if the answer sounds like some-
thing other than the conventional psychotherapeutic dyads repre-
sented in most training curricula.
Poverty- and Class-Related Supervisory Competence:
Implications for the Profession
As supervisors and their students work to increase their aware-
ness of social class and poverty, they can understand the broad
implications of their efforts as falling into two general categories.
One is specific and practical and corresponds to ongoing efforts in
the field of psychology to better specify the parameters of profes-
sional competence. The other is broader and sheds light on the
fields general stance regarding poverty, oppression, and the mean-
ing of service in a social justice context.
Increasing Professional Competence in Core Domains
The previous suggestions for the enhancement of supervisory
effectiveness in the context of poverty are in good accord with the
current national emphasis on the delineation and assessment of
competencies within professional psychology (Rubin et al., 2007),
an undertaking that was recently the subject of a multisponsored
national conference (Kaslow et al., 2004). According to Rodolfa et
al. (2005), competency refers to a professionals qualifications and
ability to practice a profession safely and effectively within the
various domains that compose that fields spectrum of practice.
These authors furthermore specified that these domains may be
either foundational or functional in nature. Foundational compe-
tency domains are understood to be the knowledge- and skill-based
underpinnings of psychologists professional activities and include
(a) reflective practice and self-assessment, (b) scientific knowl-
edge and methods, (c) relationships, (d) ethicallegal standards
and policy, (e) individual and cultural diversity, and (f) interdis-
ciplinary systems. Functional competency, on the other hand,
refers to the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to actually
perform these activities, which include (a) assessment, diagnosis,
and case conceptualization, (b) intervention, (c) consultation, (d)
research and evaluation, (e) supervision and teaching, and (f)
management and administration. Rodolfa et al. (2005) conceptu-
alized these dimensions of competency as two of the axes within
a cube model, with the third axis corresponding to advancing
stages of professional development.
With this model in mind, it is reasonable to relate considerations
of social class and poverty to the foundational competency area of
individual and cultural diversity, a superordinate competency that
is relevant to all other domains (Rubin et al., 2007). As this article
has contended, although social class does not denote culture in the
truest sense of the term, social class differences do correspond to
wide gulfs in lived experience that are arguably comparable to the
differences more commonly addressed in diversity education and
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training. Moreover, if we accept that identities and oppressions
interact in an interlocking fashion, it becomes clear that leaving
class out of the picture compromises our full understanding of
those dimensions that we do currently address in our efforts to
facilitate multicultural competence (hooks, 2000).
In addition, supervision itself has been characterized as an area
of core functional competence, the implications of which were
explored by Falender et al. (2004). After affirming clinical super-
vision as a distinctive professional competency, the authors de-
scribed the lenses through which the supervisory process is most
commonly viewed, one of which is diversity and cultural compe-
tence. A primary limitation of this framework, the authors con-
tended, is the historic emphasis on isolated, unitary identity vari-
ables to conceptualize individuals. Instead, they argued, an
expanded, more complex conception of diversity is needed by
supervisors to better facilitate competencya point that parallels
the one made above regarding the necessity of addressing diversity
at its many intersections, including class. Even the acknowledg-
ment that social class awareness may be a missing piece within the
supervisory framework is significant: Falender et al. (2004) also
proposed the role of metaknowledge in the establishment of su-
pervisory competence. Metaknowledge was described as an aspect
of the professional self-assessment process that involves knowing
what one knows as one undertakes professional development as a
lifelong, cumulative process. Given that comprehensive awareness
of social class and poverty is not, perhaps, a typical component of
what one knows when one is a psychologist, embarking on the
journey described in this article may represent a meaningful ad-
vance in the professional development of many supervisors.
Addressing Economic Injustice
On a broader level, this article has offered suggestions by which
supervisors and trainees can improve the competence of their
practice in the context of poverty, placing particular emphasis on
the addition of a social justice framework for poverty and social
class. These suggestions derive from the more general contention
that the consistent application of a social justice framework prom-
ises to lend greater depth and impact to our fields continuing
efforts to serve the poorest Americans. To illustrate this point, I
conclude my discussion by referring once again to George Albees
(1969) call to action. Albee did not just call psychologists to serve
the poor. He emphasized that part and parcel of this work was the
establishment of a social platform by which the causes of poverty
themselves could be addressed. Such work, he maintained, re-
quired identification of and confrontation with established power
structures. How much longer, he asked his readers, will psychol-
ogists remain silent on these issues? Although the language of
social justice psychology had not yet become current, Albee was
articulating what contemporary social justice psychologists are
teaching us today: that empathy and competent services for the
oppressed are vital, but unless we frame these within an analysis of
power relations and a willingness to address our own participation
within them, our efforts may not reach their full potential. While
such efforts are charitable, charity itself does not constitute social
justice.
As a field, psychologys generosity and commitment on
behalf of the poor is well-established. Statements such as the
Resolution on Poverty and Socioeconomic Status exemplify
this commitment, and the altruistic motivations represented
therein are shared by many of the psychologists and trainees
who currently work in poor communities. By framing this work
within a larger social justice analysis, however, we can go even
further in enacting these commitments. We can create a critical
context in which our service to the poorwhether it is coun-
seling, soup kitchens, or coat drivesstands in contrast to what
Paulo Freire (1970) called false generosity (p. 29). This
generosity, according to Freire, is the help offered by privi-
leged people to the oppressed in the absence of any attempt to
acknowledge or address the sources of oppression.
While charitable impulses clearly spring from the best inten-
tions, the sociocultural systems that place life-shaping obstacles in
the paths of poor and working-class peoplecultural, attitudinal,
economic, educational, judicial, and political systemsare not
diminished by those intentions in the least. Moreover, these socio-
cultural systems derive support from the silence surrounding their
operation. Integrating issues of poverty and social class within
psychologys multicultural/social justice agenda is essential, there-
fore, to the fullest ability of psychologists to contribute their
research, practice, and advocacy efforts toward greater equity and
opportunity for Americans living in poverty.
Conclusion: A Call for Research
In affirming supervision as a core competence, Falender et al.
(2004) noted that many current supervisors have not received any
formal, systematic training in this area, probably because supervi-
sion was not viewed as a core competency within their own
training programs. Correspondingly, there is a need for focused
evaluation of supervision models, approaches, and procedures, as
well as their impact on clinical effectiveness and the supervisory
relationship. Moreover, such research should be conducted within
real-world clinical settings so that the everyday realities of practice
and training are encompassed (Falender et al., 2004).
These suggestions have particular significance for the explora-
tion and refinement of the five areas for action presented in this
article, areas which emerged from the lived experience of practic-
ing and supervising students within the context of poverty. This
experience forced an analysis of my own metaknowledge, to bor-
row the term from Falender et al. (2004) it forced me to
encounter what I did not know. The initiation of focused, system-
atic, contextualized research examination of these areas now be-
comes vital to further illuminate them for future supervisors and
their students. The survival of individuals and communities amid
poverty, the usefulness of mainstream psychological roles and
approaches when clients live in poverty, and the most effective
methods of incorporating these and other aspects of social context
into the supervisory processall are issues that invite the attention
of researchers as professional psychology develops a model of
diversity that more fully incorporates dimensions of social class.
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Received January 22, 2008
Revision received September 17, 2008
Accepted September 29, 2008
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