Social Justice, Disability, and Rehabilitation Education

The academic field and the professional practice of rehabilitation counseling focuses on one aspect of social justice, assisting individuals with disabilities to attain full community inclusion. Nonetheless, social justice focuses on many marginalized groups and in the related fields of counseling and psychology, those with disabilities are rarely considered to be a group experiencing social injustice. Therefore, rehabilitation counseling focuses on a single marginalized status, disability, while counseling and psychology tend to ignore disability. The goal of this article is to argue for more comprehensive training in graduate rehabilitation counseling training programs. To this end, four topics are presented: (1) a review of the social justice literature; (2) possible explanations for the findings of this review; (3) obstacles to the inclusion of social justice in the rehabilitation curriculum; and (4) recommendations for incorporating social justice into the graduate rehabilitation curriculum.