Let's talk about class: A peer-to-peer social class workshop for psychotherapy trainees

There is a growing consensus that effective psychotherapists and counselors require antioppressive, social-justice-oriented, culturally and structurally responsive training (e.g., Neville et al., 2021; Singh, 2020; Vera & Speight, 2003). The field has a long way to go to answer this call (Wilcox et al., 2024), including with social class topics (Liu, 2012) and peer-to-peer initiatives (Stigmar, 2016). Thus, the current qualitative study examined five student facilitators' perspectives on a counseling psychology graduate program's antioppressive peer-to-peer social class workshop (SCW). The SCW was originally grounded in the Social Class Worldview Model-Revised (Liu, 2012) and the multicultural orientation (MCO) framework (Davis et al., 2018) and later incorporated ideas from liberation psychology (Comas-Díaz & Torres Rivera, 2020) and decolonial pedagogies (Goodman et al., 2015). To illuminate the factors that affect student facilitators' SCW experiences, and how this work can inform culturally and structurally responsive psychotherapy training more broadly, we collected student facilitators' collaborative autoethnographic reflections. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we constructed two core themes: (a) nurturing growth: ingredients and orientations and (b) navigating barriers: oppressive structures manifest at multiple levels. Even as student facilitators acknowledged ways that they and the SCW fell short, they remained optimistic about growth both achieved and hoped for. We discuss limitations and implications for the promotion of peer-to-peer and/or social class initiatives in psychotherapy training. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).