Imagining Liberatory College Futures: A Culturally Responsive Counseling Intervention

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Friday 9:45am
  In Poster Session: Counseling Poster Session A

Abstract

This study evaluates a 10-week school counseling intervention designed to enhance college readiness among urban high school students using Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth framework. Grounded in counseling psychology and culturally responsive practice, the intervention affirmed students’ aspirational, familial, linguistic, and resistant capital to promote identity development, motivation, and postsecondary planning. A quasi-experimental design with 673 students revealed significant gains in financial literacy, career decision-making self-efficacy, school belonging, and aspirational capital. Results highlight how school counselors can support students’ psychological and academic development by leveraging cultural strengths and disrupting deficit narratives. This study contributes to the counseling psychology field by modeling a healing-centered, equity-focused intervention that affirms student identity and advances a liberatory vision for postsecondary access and success.

Authors

• Christine Jean Yeh, University of San Francisco

• Sabita Shrestha, University of San Francisco

• Brenda Diaz Ortega, University of San Francisco

• Kimberly Hong, University of San Francisco

• Shreya Rao, University of San Francisco