Social Justice, Multicultural Counseling, and Practice: Beyond a Conventional Approach

Dr. Heesoon Jun was born in Seoul, South Korea and was socialized by a family which valued honor, commitment, religious and intellectual freedom but held implicit bias on race and class.  She came to the US as a young adult to study psychology as an undergraduate.  There, her sense of self shattered as her status changed from majority to minority, privileged to oppressed, and self-confident to self-doubting student. Dr. Jun’s bicultural and bilingual experiences, being an academician and practitioner, searching for balance between two world-views have been instrumental in emphasizing providers’ awareness of their own cultural values and biases in order to understand clients’ world views; paradigm shifts in thinking (from conventional to holistic); and learning (from conceptual to transformative) cognitive neuroscience and mindfulness practice in order to walk the walk of social justice and multicultural counseling competencies. Dr. Jun has a Master’s degree in clinical psychology from Radford University and a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Washington.  Currently, she resides in Washington State where she is a licensed psychologist with a part-time private practice and is a professor of psychology at Evergreen State College.