Power and privilege can be difficult concepts for some students to embrace, yet an experiential learning exercise such as Star Power allows students to hold various socially privileged or oppressed identities that could be different from their real life experiences, thereby increasing awareness about inequitable systems and their roles in such systems ( Dundes & Harlow, 2005). To understand oppression from an ecological perspective, students have to be open to understanding the function of power within systems of privilege and oppression. One of the major components to addressing social justice is through a comprehensive understanding of macro-level phenomena like oppression. A critical, ecological perspective raises students’ consciousness about the social, historical, and political processes that collectively influence individual wellness.Ĭommunity psychologists’ focus on addressing social problems from an ecological perspective also promotes a social justice ideology (Dalton, Elias, & Wandersman, 2006). Community psychologists’ commitment to combating status justifying worldviews that maintain systems of oppression inform their desire to integrate ecological perspectives into the classroom. Unfortunately, these worldviews perpetuate social problems, and in turn, lead to victim blaming practices ( Furnham, 2003). These individual worldviews suggest that society is fair, that hard work results in greater access to social resources, and that people are solely responsible for their destiny. The failure to incorporate an ecological framework also leads to the adoption of worldviews such as “belief in the just world” ( Dalbert, 2009) and the meritocracy myth ( McCoy & Major, 2007). Thus, students typically focus on simple, individual level explanations to understand complex social problems. individual, micro-, exo-, and macro level). As a result, students are not consistently exposed to using an ecological framework to understand social problems from a multilevel perspective (i.e. Many students have limited exposure to community psychology within psychology departments ( Stoloff et al, 2010).
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