“We’re in this historic moment where a world pandemic; racial tensions and a momentum for racial equity and justice, action, and change; and the polarized political situation coalesce into a perfect storm of human stress,” said Joseph G. Ponterotto, Ph.D., a professor of counseling psychology at Fordham.

Ponterotto and his colleagues in the Graduate School of Education described in phone interviews the struggles that students and school counselors across New York City have experienced throughout the pandemic and how they can be better prepared when schools reopen this fall. 

Losing a ‘Safe Haven’

School was once a “safe haven”—a place where some students could escape their unstable family lives, said school counselors. But when schools closed across New York City in March, students faced their struggles all the time. Some lost loved ones to COVID-19. And school counselors said that if students confided in them by phone or Zoom, it was difficult to offer comfort.

“You can’t offer that hug. You can’t give them that in a virtual platform,” said Michelle Santana, FCRH ’10, GSE ’17, assistant director of the Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP) for middle and high schoolers at the Rose Hill campus and a school counselor by training. “That was definitely challenging—finding ways to help with those little things that mean so much.”

But there are creative ways to come together, said Santana. This past spring, she hosted a virtual lounge where students could stop by—the same way they used to in her office at Rose Hill—to maintain a sense of community. 

In a school south of the Bronx, middle school students struggled with similar issues, said another school counselor. Some experienced isolation, especially those who didn’t have many close friends before the pandemic. Others slipped into unhealthy habits—sleeping into the afternoon and staying up late at night. When COVID-19 cases steadily decreased, students who were trapped in their apartments for months were allowed more freedom. But many chose to stay inside. 

“Something new that we’ve seen are kids who don’t know how to re-enter [society],” said Seth Kritzman, GSE ’12, a school counselor at Lower Manhattan Community Middle School and an adjunct instructor at Fordham. “Parents say they just don’t want to. Students are kind of in this shell.” 

Virtual counseling sessions can be tough, too, because of a lack of privacy. After a video chat, some students type messages to Kritzman that their families can’t hear. Kritzman said he’s trying to support his students by listening and offering coping mechanisms. But he says he’s worried about how to meet the needs of all students—and their families. 

“The whole family could be in crisis. Middle school stuff can be traumatic, but this is a whole other realm and not necessarily something we’re trained for as school counselors,” said Kritzman. “Because of the pandemic, everything that’s happening can be tied to school. Where do you draw the line? What is the role of school counselor versus when do you get outside help?” 

Juggling Two Pandemics: COVID-19 and Racism

The pandemic is one layer of stress for students. The other, counselors and faculty said, is the death of George Floyd and the ensuing national protests against police brutality and racial injustice over the past few months. 

“Students of color, particularly Black and Latinx … are also having to cope with how to process what they see on their screens and things that they themselves have experienced,” said Kip Thompson, Ph.D., clinical coordinator and assistant professor of counseling psychology. 

To draw strength, Black adolescents and young adults should get in touch with “their higher power,” nurture family relationships, and pursue what brings them joy, said Thompson, whose research interests include Black American college student mental health.  

“It’s really important that in these challenging, uncertain times, the young Black person really taps into what brings them power, joy, and inspiration,” Thompson said. 

Meanwhile, school counselors should reflect on their own identities to better serve their students, said Ponterotto. 

“[We need to] understand stages of racial identity, of what power and privilege is, and how to develop a nonracist identity as a white teacher or counselor,” said Ponterotto. “It’s white men in power, the heterosexual population, and the Christian population taking responsibility for their own history of oppressing others that we all have been guilty of, given the environment we were raised in, and deconstructing our own identity to help us be effective teachers and counselors for others.”

Advice on Remote Counseling from GSE Faculty

After reflecting on personal experiences with clients throughout the pandemic, GSE faculty shared tips on how to improve remote counseling and support for students of all ages. 

Play therapy is possible if you think outside the box. Elementary school students and counselors can play a game of charades during each counseling session. On Zoom, they can use the whiteboard feature to play pictionary or hangman. They can even play a game of Battleship or bingo, as long as they both have the hard materials in front of them. Or they can conduct a scavenger hunt around a student’s room to help the student practice emotional self-expression and self-awareness, said Alea Holman, Ph.D., assistant professor of school psychology. 

Privacy is key. It’s important to utilize HIPAA-compliant platforms in a quiet, safe space to help ensure confidentiality with a client. If a student is living in a home where they can’t speak comfortably about certain topics—an LGBTQ student living in a non-affirmative environment, for example—they can communicate via email or chat, said Eric C. Chen, Ph.D., professor of counseling psychology. 

Counseling on an online platform can be surprisingly effective. “Some people told me that they feel more comfortable expressing themselves with a remote format because it removes a layer of self-consciousness and exposure in the interaction,” said Holman. A phone call can also strip away a layer of self-consciousness from students who don’t want to see their faces on screen, she said. 

Parents can play a crucial role. “One thing I suggest to my school counselors is to have Zoom meetings with parents to demonstrate to them … how the school counselor talks to the kids about uncertainty, confusion, and giving voice to feelings,” said Ponterotto. “We have to be able to process kids’ fears.” 

Self-care is critical for counselors. It seems like a selfish thought, said Margo A. Jackson, Ph.D., professor of counseling psychology. But consider this analogy: If you’re on a plane and the oxygen masks drop, you have to put yours on before you can help your child or whoever is next to you, she said. “When [counselors]are stretched to the limit … then we cannot be of help to others,” Jackson explained. “In fact, we could do harm.”

Be compassionate to yourself and others. Resilience is a “muscle” that requires daily exercise. “Count your blessings. Reward yourself with simple daily pleasures, such as reading a poem, having a bike ride, watching clouds float by, that you enjoy in life. Recognize your strengths and think about a few individuals who have made a difference in your life over the years or those who have nurtured and supported you in the past,” said Chen. “And imagine what your future will be like a year from now—picture how you will remember that you have survived and thrived during those moments of darkness and anguish.” 

But now, thanks to a Fordham professor and her students, they might.

Margo A. Jackson, Ph.D., a professor of counseling psychology in the Graduate School of Education, along with GSE students or alumni, recently wrote “Career Development Interventions for Social Justice: Addressing Needs Across the Lifespan in Educational, Community, and Employment Contexts,” a vocational guidance book with chapters tailored to underserved groups and individuals.

“Career development has to do with figuring out your interests, abilities, and values—in other words, what you like or dislike, what you’re good at, or what you could become good at, and what is important to you,” Jackson said. “That process of identity development starts when we’re born, and doesn’t end until we die.”

The book, published by Rowman & Littlefield last January, also speaks to Latinx refugee youth, adults who work in remote rural areas, ex-offenders, laid-off workers, teenage girls in juvenile detention centers, and internationally educated immigrants who are underemployed in New York City.

Jackson and her co-authors aimed to capture what career development looks like for each of these communities. The book not only confronts common barriers faced by these groups but also provides customized interventions to help people better understand who they could become—or who they want to become—and how they can contribute to society in a positive way. These strategies, supported by science and psychological theory, can be used by both readers and those in the helping fields: counselors, psychologists, social workers, community center leaders, and educators. And, by integrating competencies for social justice advocacy, career development services can be used to expand access to educational and occupational resources, Jackson said. 

Guiding Children, Ex-Offenders, and Baby Boomers

The career guide devotes each chapter to a particular group of individuals—starting with the youngest. The first chapter, titled “Antibias Career Development for Evolving Identities in Elementary School Children,” describes a program that could improve antibias education for young students in the classroom.

“Children start to recognize gender roles, race, and ethnicity at an early age through play,” said Victoria Broems, GSE ’21, a contributing author and aspiring public school psychologist. “This intervention is aimed at challenging stereotypes that are put in place by the social structures that we have not only in the United States but also in other countries.”

In this intervention/program, students are exposed to jobs they may have never dreamed of. The theoretical program includes a “career day” that features guests who challenge the status quo.

“Someone will come in and discuss a career that they’re in, but [the program]purposefully brings in people who will challenge stereotypes,” Broems said. “For example, instead of hosting a white female nurse, we might have a male nurse [of color].”

Another chapter focuses on ex-offenders. When released from prison, many people face an onslaught of obstacles: their criminal record, limited formal education, little-to-no work experience, housing issues, and physical and mental health.

The chapter’s authors, Allyson K. Regis and Gary L. Dillon Jr.—both doctors of counseling psychology—proposed a program to help them return to the workforce. It includes a resume workshop, mock job interviews to help them answer questions about their ex-offender status, assigning a post-release peer mentor, and discussions to help them recognize “old behavior patterns, triggers, and toxic attitudes” that might throw them back in prison.

The last chapter speaks to baby boomers—those who have reached the end of their careers, but not the end of their productivity.

Contributor Ashley E. Selkirk, Ph.D., sketches out a career workshop for baby boomers who live in retirement communities. The one-day program is designed to help them understand how ageism impacts the identities of older people, help them gain access to psychosocial resources, and create meaningful goals.

“In order to fight against ageism,” Selkirk wrote, “the public and baby boomers themselves need to develop a new language and new stories to redefine the role and value of older adults in society.”

Confronting Their Own Biases

But what makes the book particularly unique are its intimate testimonials from its authors. In personal reflections, each of the 15 authors probes his or her own biases to better understand themselves and those they serve.

The authors of the book come from diverse backgrounds: Jackson is a middle-aged white woman who raised two biracial daughters with her husband; Jill Huang, Ph.D, is a queer, cisgender licensed psychologist; and Gary L. Dillon Jr., Ph.D, is an African-American psychologist who counseled male black inmates at Rikers Island.

Another author is Kourtney Bennett, Ph.D., GSE ’16, a staff psychologist at Loyola University Maryland’s counseling center, who also served as a co-editor. Bennett, a black woman raised in a household where education and professional development were prioritized, said she realized her background was both a barrier and a bridge to supporting youth.

“I quickly learned, in working with youth of color in diverse settings, that while my skin color may have, in some cases, served as a point of connection, my education status and that of my parents sometimes marked a line of privilege and difference,” Bennett wrote in the third chapter. “I needed to learn how to welcome the direct challenges of students wondering how I, a doctoral student at the time, who grew up in a suburban town, could understand their experience.”

Reflecting on her biases was challenging, yet rewarding, she said in a phone interview. But the actual book itself, she said, is perhaps the most eye-opening of all.

“Each chapter works hard to make the theory translatable to lived experience and considers populations that may not be fully represented in research or theory,” Bennett said. “I think that’s why someone outside of this field could learn from it—just to consider career development from a social justice lens, or to think about populations or communities that may be unfamiliar, that you haven’t worked with before.”

The GSE students were on hand to help their Lincoln Center campus peers interpret their results of Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) self-scorable personality assessments, which the law students had taken the week before.

The personality assessment is used to help people better understand which aspects of 16 distinctive personality types describes them best—knowledge which can improve any group interactions. The law students have organized themselves into six teams and each group works collaboratively throughout the semester on a project with an outside public interest legal organization on issues such as the school-to-prison pipeline, student debt, homeless youth, and refugees. The seminar, the capstone academic requirement of the Stein Scholars Program, is team-taught by Fordham Law Professor Bruce Green, the Louis Stein Chair, and Sherri Levine, associate director of the Law School’s Stein Center for Law and Ethics.

Levine said the public lawyering class requires more problem solving, project management, and collaboration than most law classes. So five years ago, Green and Levine asked Margo Jackson, Ph.D., professor of counseling psychology in the GSE’s Division of Psychological and Educational Services, if she’d be willing to visit their law class to help students develop their collaborative team-building skills.

“Learning how to read a court case and spotting the issues are very important, but all of these other [team-building] skills are important too,” Levine said. “The sooner that’s recognized and the more opportunities you have to operationalize them, the easier it will be to become a versatile and skilled practitioner upon graduation.”

As the law students shared one another’s results—such as ENTJ (extraversion, intuition, thinking, judgment), INFP (introversion, intuition, feeling, perception), or ISTJ (introversion, sensing, thinking, judgment) – the GSE students helped them consider how to better understand their own and their group colleagues’ personality preferences in ways to collaborate effectively with their particular community social justice projects.

In previous years, Jackson has recruited students from her Psychology of Career Development class to join her; this year two master’s students and two doctoral candidates are assisting from her Career Strength Research Team. The key to these sessions, she said, is focusing on strengths, not deficits, that the legal team members bring to the group. That’s because research shows that the more diverse perspectives you have when it comes to problem solving, the better the product.

“What always strikes me when we do this [with the law students]is that my own students also find out the limits and the strengths of their own approaches to assessment and helping with others,” she said. “If you take the perspective that you’re the all-knowing savior, you’re only focusing on others’ weaknesses, and not on their strengths.”

Liat Zabludovsky, a GSE doctoral candidate, found the session to be a “formative experience” that forced her to think more deeply about her path in counseling psychology. The field is facilitative, rather than solely diagnostic, an aspect it shares with the MBTI assessment, which posits that people exist on a spectrum of behavior depending on the setting they are in, be it work, home, or school.

“Explaining counseling psychology versus clinical psychology, and why I chose it, to a group of people who are competent in completely different areas, was much more interesting than I expected,” she said.

Marcella Jayne, a second year law school student who scored as ENTJ, said that her team’s project, designing workshops to help students avoid crippling student debt from for-profit schools, will require the contribution of all team members.

Jayne said that, prior to getting the assessment results, she would have never thought of giving her teammates positive feedback. “To me, that would almost feel condescending,” she said.

But when one group member said ‘I need positive feedback, or I’m going to disengage,’ she realized that each team member has different needs to feel motivated to contribute.

“In team environments, we each walk in with our own expectations. We don’t usually have these open-ended, touchy-feely conversations about what we’re each expecting and what our assumptions are,” Jayne said. “The openness to say something like that is good.”

For Levine, working with the GSE is an exercise in practicing what they preach about the value of collaboration and teamwork.

“We think [teamwork]definitely will serve you well in your future careers, and here we are trying to do just that. We’re working in a team with another part of the university, and collaborating with persons who do very different types of work,” she said.

Jackson has been studying the phenomenon, known as microagressions, since the mid-1990s—well before the term took hold in academia.

“Race is a difficult topic for anyone to talk about, but this is the kind of racism that’s more ambiguous and more chronic, so it’s harder to track,” she said.

Regardless of whether someone’s emotions are ambiguous or not, Jackson’s science demands evidence. As such, she has developed questionnaires and methods that produce hard numbers and compelling narratives in response to a variety of circumstances. Her subjects range from urban middle-school students trying to get into a good high school to veterans looking for work.

Jackson said that microagressions often shape the way her clients perceive themselves and can shade their ambitions. The insults can be racist, sexist, and/or classist. They are often unintentionally insulting.

“It’s not just ignorance that causes this; we all have biases and we all step in it,” said Jackson. “But we must find a way to deal with it in a manner that brings us closer rather than distances us.”

Jackson designed two training methods that involved a counselor interacting with a client and a third person of the same race and gender as the client. In one method using confrontation, the third person played the aggressor and challenged the counselor’s unintended stereotyping, giving voice to what the client might be thinking. This caught some counselors off guard and they responded defensively.

But in a stereotype reversal method, the third person used “Imagine if…” statements to reframe the stereotyping assumptions as if they might apply to the counselor’s own racial or cultural frame of reference.

“The study was to examine what was more effective in terms of empathizing with the client,” she said. “[And] it helped put the counselor in the other person’s shoes.”

Jackson is more than simply a casual observer. She is a white woman who is married to an African-American man, and she is the mother of biracial children. Through personal experience as well as research, she has come to learn that a lot of what she considered to be isolated slights were actually part of the daily grind for her subjects.

“A lot of people think that we’re post racial and that all the ‘isms’ are a thing of the past,” she said. “But systemically these subtle biases add to the achievement gap, untapped potential, and barriers to well-being for members of groups that are vulnerable, like women, homosexuals, people of color, and older people.”

In Jackson’s terms, people who work with people—like psychologists, teachers, and employers—need to identify the challenges facing members of groups vulnerable to discrimination and then identify strengths that could help them overcome those challenges.

“But first, we need to identify our own hidden biases, not only to challenge our blind spots, but also to build on our empathic resources as potential strengths for multicultural perspective taking,” she said.

In one study, Jackson and her team of graduate students interviewed New York City middle-school students who were struggling academically about their experiences with success and their personal accomplishment stories. Before the students began taking “gateway” courses in high school that could determine their access to college and careers, Jackson investigated whether “success learning experiences” could be linked to educational and career pathways.

The researchers hypothesized that identifying sources of self-efficacy might help the teens overcome the challenges partly brought on by microagressions. Four categories of self-efficacy were identified as: 1. One’s direct experience with success. 2. Vicarious effects, such as seeing someone else succeed. 3. Social persuasion, being encouraged to succeed. 4. Physiological arousal, such as the experiencing pride and joy in success.

A subsequent series of studies has culminated in a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project “For and By the Participants.” Jackson and her team of graduate students have collaborated with middle-school students from groups underrepresented in professions grounded in science, math, and technology. The middle-school student members of the PAR team are scholars in an enrichment program at the Fordham University Science and Technology Entry Program.

Together, they have developed a 72-item measurement tool of sources of self-efficacy and they are building scientific evidence for its utility in theoretical, psychometric, and cultural relevance.

The measurement tool has been “incredibly useful,” Jackson said, allowing her doctoral students to test the validity of self-efficacy theories and to make the process more culturally relevant.

She said it has been most effective in small, well-facilitated groups where, taking turns, each speaker’s success story can lead participants to hash out what they understand the speaker’s strengths to be.

Jackson integrates service and teaching in her research projects. For example, she has provided her PAR team with scientific training on how to evaluate the reliability and validity of items in psychological measurement. She has also trained and supervised her PAR team to provide individually tailored career counseling exploration experiences that help participants in small groups to strength-based career-related sources of self-efficacy.

The PAR team had its peer-reviewed proposal accepted to present a workshop to facilitate this exercise at the Winter Roundtable for Multicultural Psychology and Education held at Columbia University in February. The middle-school students (all but one who are now in high school) and their graduate student partners co-presented the findings. They explained and demonstrated how the exercise functioned, and helped lead workshops where participants could experience the exercise themselves.

“The middle-school students were able to name their sources of self-efficacy, name their strengths, and name what they wanted to learn about, as well as co-facilitate this process with workshop participants who were professional educators and psychologists in training or practice.”

“The power of psychology is really just helping people name, own, identify, and build on their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in constructive ways” said Jackson.

Measuring the hurt resulting from unintentional racial slights can prove difficult, but it’s just that sort of subtle undermining of an individual’s morale that drives the research of Margo A. Jackson, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology in the Graduate School of Education.

Jackson has been studying the phenomenon, known as microagressions, since the mid-1990s—well before the term took hold in academia.

“Race is a difficult topic for anyone to talk about, but this is the kind of racism that’s more ambiguous and more chronic, so it’s harder to track,” she said.

Regardless of whether someone’s emotions are ambiguous or not, Jackson’s science demands evidence. As such, she has developed questionnaires and methods that produce hard numbers and compelling narratives in response to a variety of circumstances. Her subjects range from urban middle-school students trying to get into a good high school to veterans looking for work.

Jackson said that microagressions often shape the way her clients perceive themselves and can shade their ambitions. The insults can be racist, sexist, and/or classist. They are often unintentionally insulting.

“It’s not just ignorance that causes this; we all have biases and we all step in it,” said Jackson. “But we must find a way to deal with it in a manner that brings us closer rather than distances us.”

Jackson designed two training methods that involved a counselor interacting with a client and a third person of the same race and gender as the client. In one method using confrontation, the third person played the aggressor and challenged the counselor’s unintended stereotyping, giving voice to what the client might be thinking. This caught some counselors off guard and they responded defensively.

But in a stereotype reversal method, the third person used “Imagine if…” statements to reframe the stereotyping assumptions as if they might apply to the counselor’s own racial or cultural frame of reference.

“The study was to examine what was more effective in terms of empathizing with the client,” she said. “[And] it helped put the counselor in the other person’s shoes.”

Jackson is more than simply a casual observer. She is a white woman who is married to an African-American man, and she is the mother of biracial children. Through personal experience as well as research, she has come to learn that a lot of what she considered to be isolated slights were actually part of the daily grind for her subjects.

“A lot of people think that we’re post racial and that all the ‘isms’ are a thing of the past,” she said. “But systemically these subtle biases add to the achievement gap, untapped potential, and barriers to well-being for members of groups that are vulnerable, like women, homosexuals, people of color, and older people.”

In Jackson’s terms, people who work with people—like psychologists, teachers, and employers—need to identify the challenges facing members of groups vulnerable to discrimination and then identify strengths that could help them overcome those challenges.
“But first, we need to identify our own hidden biases, not only to challenge our blind spots, but also to build on our empathic resources as potential strengths for multicultural perspective taking,” she said.

In one study, Jackson and her team of graduate students interviewed New York City middle-school students who were struggling academically about their experiences with success and their personal accomplishment stories. Before the students began taking “gateway” courses in high school that could determine their access to college and careers, Jackson investigated whether “success learning experiences” could be linked to educational and career pathways.

The researchers hypothesized that identifying sources of self-efficacy might help the teens overcome the challenges partly brought on by microagressions. Four categories of self-efficacy were identified as: 1. One’s direct experience with success. 2. Vicarious effects, such as seeing someone else succeed. 3. Social persuasion, being encouraged to succeed. 4. Physiological arousal, such as the experiencing pride and joy in success.

A subsequent series of studies has culminated in a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project “For and By the Participants.” Jackson and her team of graduate students have collaborated with middle-school students from groups underrepresented in professions grounded in science, math, and technology. The middle-school student members of the PAR team are scholars in an enrichment program at the Fordham University Science and Technology Entry Program.

Together, they have developed a 72-item measurement tool of sources of self-efficacy and they are building scientific evidence for its utility in theoretical, psychometric, and cultural relevance.

The measurement tool has been “incredibly useful,” Jackson said, allowing her doctoral students to test the validity of self-efficacy theories and to make the process more culturally relevant.

She said it has been most effective in small, well-facilitated groups where, taking turns, each speaker’s success story can lead participants to hash out what they understand the speaker’s strengths to be.

Jackson integrates service and teaching in her research projects. For example, she has provided her PAR team with scientific training on how to evaluate the reliability and validity of items in psychological measurement. She has also trained and supervised her PAR team to provide individually tailored career counseling exploration experiences that help participants in small groups to strength-based career-related sources of self-efficacy.

The PAR team had its peer-reviewed proposal accepted to present a workshop to facilitate this exercise at the Winter Roundtable for Multicultural Psychology and Education held at Columbia University in February. The middle-school students (all but one who are now in high school) and their graduate student partners co-presented the findings. They explained and demonstrated how the exercise functioned, and helped lead workshops where participants could experience the exercise themselves.

“The middle-school students were able to name their sources of self-efficacy, name their strengths, and name what they wanted to learn about, as well as co-facilitate this process with workshop participants who were professional educators and psychologists in training or practice.”

“The power of psychology is really just helping people name, own, identify, and build on their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in constructive ways” said Jackson.