Shaun Sowell
Associate Professor
About
As a Counselor Educator and Licensed Mental Health Counselor Associate my goal in research is to find evidence to help support the work I do with both clients and students in training.
At WWU I train graduate students to become School and Clinical Mental Health Counselors. My teaching and research focus is multicultural counseling, with an emphasis on power and privilege, consequences of structural racism (access to opportunity and mental health), social, historical, and political impacts on counseling outcomes, and training anti-racist and culturally competent counselors. Prior to joining the faculty at Western, I was a school counselor and worked to identify, remove, challenge, and change policy within the schools I worked, especially those policies which disproportionately affected students from current and historically under-resourced populations. I have over 10 years’ experience in creating and implementing anti-racist and anti-oppressive interventions within P-12 and higher educational institutions. Two of my current CCCR projects evaluate racial, ethnic, and linguistic barriers in the Psychology Counselor Training Clinic and the experiences of BIPOC &/or LGBTQ+ high school students’ experiences and satisfaction with their school counselor.