Why Blame Me? Interpreting Counselor Student Resistance to Racially Themed Course Content as Complicity with White Racial Hegemony
type: CreativeWork
description: Counselor educators commonly experience resistance from students when the classroom focus turns to issues, literature, projects, or discussions involving race. Recognizing this resistance as an obstacle to learning, scholars developed strategies to address it. These strategies, however, have been based largely on individualistic conceptions of student resistance that obscure its possible sociopolitical influences and overlook the potential for formulating strategies to address its sociopolitical underpinnings. To expand the view of student resistance as more than simply individual behavior and thereby assist in developing and improving tools to overcome it, this project interprets student resistance as a sociopolitical phenomenon by connecting it to a complex of general behaviors that reinforce the sociopolitical context of White racial hegemony. For this purpose, I define student resistance as an issue of emotion which I explicate with a cognitive appraisal emotional process model. To begin the project, I went into five regularly scheduled counselor education classrooms to screen a video presentation addressing two topics that frequently evoke resistance from students: White racial group advantage and oppression of racial minority groups. Thirty-seven masters level counseling students participated in the project by providing certain demographic information and describing their experiences of the video presentation on questionnaires and in classroom discussions. Applying my definition, I identified the following manifestations of resistance in the students' descriptions of their experiences: harm-related appraisals, beliefs rationalizing the appraisals, negative emotions, and defensive coping actions. Analyzing these manifestations of student resistance in light of critical whiteness studies and social dominance theory, I found that beliefs underlying students' harm-related appraisals and resulting coping actions connected most readily to behavior that reinforces Wh…
abstract: Counselor educators commonly experience resistance from students when the classroom focus turns to issues, literature, projects, or discussions involving race. Recognizing this resistance as an obstacle to learning, scholars developed strategies to address it. These strategies, however, have been based largely on individualistic conceptions of student resistance that obscure its possible sociopolitical influences and overlook the potential for formulating strategies to address its sociopolitical underpinnings. To expand the view of student resistance as more than simply individual behavior and thereby assist in developing and improving tools to overcome it, this project interprets student resistance as a sociopolitical phenomenon by connecting it to a complex of general behaviors that reinforce the sociopolitical context of White racial hegemony. For this purpose, I define student resistance as an issue of emotion which I explicate with a cognitive appraisal emotional process model. To begin the project, I went into five regularly scheduled counselor education classrooms to screen a video presentation addressing two topics that frequently evoke resistance from students: White racial group advantage and oppression of racial minority groups. Thirty-seven masters level counseling students participated in the project by providing certain demographic information and describing their experiences of the video presentation on questionnaires and in classroom discussions. Applying my definition, I identified the following manifestations of resistance in the students' descriptions of their experiences: harm-related appraisals, beliefs rationalizing the appraisals, negative emotions, and defensive coping actions. Analyzing these manifestations of student resistance in light of critical whiteness studies and social dominance theory, I found that beliefs underlying students' harm-related appraisals and resulting coping actions connected most readily to behavior that reinforces Wh…
author: Olson, Evonne Denise
language: English
keywords: student resistance, counselor education, race-related education, social dominance theory, whiteness studies, ethnocentric monoculturalism, White supremacy, cognitive appraisal theory
date published: 2013-07-11T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:26:22Z
provider: University of New Mexico
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of New Mexico

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1928/23146