Throughout my research and time in my Master's program, we studied the ASCA Model up and down. We learned the Mindsets and Behaviors and how ASCA's domains of academic, career, and social/emotional development. When reading articles on these and the standards themselves, at first I did not notice anything missing. As I think about a student and all of the domains a school typically addresses and impacts them, quite honestly, these were the only three that came to mind. However, as I entered into my class concerning a spiritual perspective on school counseling I realized something was missing. ASCA has no plan to neutrally address a student's spiritual and religious development.
I never thought about integrating spirituality and religion into the schools as a part of making a student’s experience holistic. To me, I have always felt like we get to somewhat touch base on those things with the student, but not in a way that could truly have an explicit meaningful impact. In this article from 2014 on ASCA's website they address student spirituality as a natural aspect of human development. So although they do not have an official domain or plan to address it, they recognize as an important aspect of the student.
This article goes into the domains that may be missing from the ASCA model in regards to the Spiritual and Religious aspects of a student that we do not address. Getting approval to incorporate spirituality material into a public school would be a trying feet in my opinion. I have many questions as to how getting parent approval would go, if you would even need it and so on. I think most of my concerns with implementing the spiritual aspect into the school is what precautions and legal measures would need to be taken. The article mentions how this uneasiness is why most educators and counselors have avoided the “fifth force” (Kimbel and Schellenberg, 2019).
This article addresses the need to incorporate spirituality and religion into school counseling to develop a students whole self. The article mentions how spirituality can and does play a role in socializing, gender roles, and culture.
They authors also go into listing out the domains of spiritual and religious competence. I thought the six domains they provided were a good start to creating a spiritual domain for ASCA. I liked that in the domains, there were several different religions and types of religions listed. I think it was also important that the domains mention the counselor's need for self awareness. We see this in ASCA's model of a culturally sensitive counselor, so considering religion as a part of one's culture, understanding our personal bias is very important.
I think the article about Spiritual Safe Zones they go into the reasons for addressing spirituality in the schools. One of the reasons they mention was school, community, or world tragedies. I had previously not thought about how handling these events could become more healing for certain students if there was the ability to talk freely about how their religion or spirituality impacted how they viewed the circumstance. There would also be the potential for the students to begin to learn from each other and how to cope with the tragedy. This could also open up room for the school counselor to bring local religious leaders that the students might know into the school to help the different groups think through the circumstances.
I also like how the article talks about religion as an aspect of diversity within the school, not a “touchy subject.” I like the concept of spiritual safe-zones. I think it could be really powerful for the students to know there is an area, group, time of day, or something where their spiritual thoughts, questions, and musings are celebrated and welcomed. I think the school counselor getting to be the one facilitating this also helps the students to see the counselor as a spiritual and religious safe zone. This could potentially help students to open up in individual counseling as to how they are being impacted by their spiritual or religious settings. Something the article mentions that I think is important to note is how there could be potential for community or school bias as to what religions and discussion are accepted in the zones. I think it would be hard to create zones that are unbiased and have a healthy representation of different religions. When also considering some of the fear involved in how different people perceive different religions it could create problems for these zones.
I think all together incorporating religion and spirituality into school in a safe, respectful, and legal way could better holistically serve students. How can we teach them to have these conversations if we never give them space to practice?
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