Experiential Approach for Developing Multicultural Counseling Competence

Mary L. Fawcett, Kathy M Evans

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781452289274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Experiential Approach for Developing Multicultural Counseling Competence by Mary L. Fawcett and Kathy M. Evans is an ideal companion text for students preparing for a career in counseling or mental health. Mental health workers-in-training need to learn to work effectively with clients from diverse backgrounds, and this text helps them develop these key skills by providing a ready-made resource of multicultural and diversity activities that instructors can assign to enhance student learning in class. It is applicable to all of the core courses in the counseling curriculum and it is developmentally designed to help students build multicultural and diversity competencies from the beginning level to an advanced level.

PART I

 

 

Rationale and Foundation

1

Using an Experiential Approach

 

There is no doubt that most counselors will see clients who differ from themselves culturally and that multicultural skills are essential. Most of the mental health professions have embraced sensitivity to diversity and multicultural competence and have developed written expectations as to how their members are to address differences. However, the multicultural competencies developed through the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (AMCD) and authored by Arredondo et al. (1996a, 1996b) may be the most user-friendly because only this set of competencies provides specific (operationalized) behavioral expectations. The AMCD Multicultural Counseling Competencies outline nine competency areas. These areas are organized within three broad categories:

 

1. Counselor Awareness of Own Cultural Values and Biases
2. Counselor Awareness of Client’s Worldview
3. Culturally Appropriate Intervention Strategies

Because of its thoroughness and specificity, we have chosen this model as our focus for multicultural/diversity training.

In Chapter 2 we present an in-depth look at the AMCD Multicultural Counseling Competencies. The goal of this book is to provide you with experiences that will not only help you develop awareness and knowledge of diversity and multiculturalism but also assist you in developing skills to meet the needs of a culturally diverse clientele.

How to Use This Book

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As you progress through your counseling program, it is almost certain that you will receive formal training in sensitivity to diversity and multiculturalism. The activities in this book are designed to provide you with opportunities to bring that learning to life and make it personal. This experiential approach helps you go beyond what you have read or discussed in class. An experiential approach (a) helps to put you into what you are learning, (b) solidifies what you have learned, and (c) enables you to retain what you have learned. It is our hope that these experiences will have a powerful impact on your learning and your development as a counselor.

You may want to use this book throughout your training to incorporate multicultural competencies into all of your courses. Although we have broken down the competencies according to the format outlined by Arredondo et al. (1996a, 1996b), we also provide you with information about how you might tweak an exercise to fit several classes in your curriculum. Some exercises are also designed for specific courses in your curriculum.

Risk Levels

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Because there is so much variation in the experiences of trainees, we present each competency with three levels of risk to you as a student: low, medium, and high. None of the exercises is dangerous—that is not what we mean by “risk.” Rather, the risk you take to complete any of these exercises is related to the courage and daring you must have in examining your deficits to develop your competence. You are welcome to engage in all three levels of activity; however, the descriptions below may guide you in deciding on risk levels.

Low-risk activities typically are those that provide factual information. You may get new information from texts, novels, movies, the Internet, or other mass media. You may have a mild reaction to the information—usually in the form of questioning its veracity—but overall, the low-risk exercises require a minimum level of self-reflection that may or may not challenge you.

Medium-risk activities are labeled as such because they will require you to do some self-reflection that may cause you to rethink some of your ideas and beliefs. When our beliefs and ideas are challenged, we tend to have an emotional reaction, however mild it may be. These activities may also involve personal contact with individuals from a group that is culturally different from you. These activities are not designed to cause distress, but they may not sit particularly well with you. The goal in multicultural training is not to make you feel bad but to stimulate growth, and sometimes growing multiculturally requires facing some uncomfortable or painful realizations.

High-risk activities require greater introspection. You will be challenged to dig deeper and look for areas of denial. In addition, you may be encouraged to develop closer relations with people who differ from you to deepen your understanding of those groups of people. We label these activities as high risk because of the extra courage it takes to open yourself to these experiences.

If you are unsure of where you are in regard to a specific competency, you should start out with a low-risk exercise and work your way up to a high-risk exercise. It is probably not a good idea to jump to a high-risk exercise as your first exposure to any of the competencies. If you have had some diversity training, you should still find the medium-risk exercises challenging. We recommend that you start with medium-risk exercises if the low-risk exercises will duplicate your previous knowledge or experience. Of course, if you are using this book as an assigned text in a class, you should follow the directions given by your instructor.

The intervention exercises will help you transfer what you learn in class to your work with clients. This is usually the step after the high-risk activities. In fact, you probably should not move to the intervention stage until you have successfully completed the high-risk activities.

Definitions of Terms

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The definitions below are offered as a reference point for the discussion in the remainder of this book. It is not our intention to imply that these are the only possible definitions for these terms. On the contrary, these terms are defined in a variety of ways by many different authors. This glossary is intended to clarify how we interpret these terms when we use them in this book.

Advocacy: “An empowerment stratagem that counselors and psychologists use to fully empathize with their clients to exact social change” (Green, McCollum, & Hays, 2008, p. 15).

Bias: Preference for or likes, dislikes, interests, and/or priorities.

Cultural bias: Preferences, likes, and dislikes passed from one generation to another within one cultural group.

Intercultural bias: Preferences, likes, and dislikes that members of one group have for their own culture over the cultures of other groups.

Within-group bias: Preferences, likes, and dislikes of the members of a subculture for their own subgroup over other subcultures of their larger group.

Culture: Patterns of learned thinking and behavior of people communicated across generations through traditions, language, and artifacts. McAuliffe and Associates (2008) state that these traditions, language, and artifacts “express a group’s adaptation to its environment” (p. 8). These combined statements reflect the meaning of the term as used in this book.

Diversity: “The existence of variety in human expression, especially the multiplicity of mores and customs that are manifested in social and cultural life” (McAuliffe & Associates, 2008, p. 14).

Ethnicity: “A characterization of a group of people who see themselves and are seen by others as having a common ancestry, shared history, shared traditions, and shared cultural traits such as language, beliefs, values, music, dress, and food” (Cokley, 2007, p. 225).

Microaggression: “Brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights and insults that potentially have harmful or unpleasant psychological impact on the target person or group” (Sue, Bucceri, Lin, Nadal, & Torino, 2007, p. 72).

Oppression: “Inequity is often a consequence of oppression, in that a group in power uses its advantages to keep other groups from accessing resources. Oppression is the condition of being subject to another group’s power”; “It’s common meaning is to burden or to keep in subjugation” (McAuliffe & Associates, 2008, pp. 56, 57).

Prejudice: Typically negative attitudes toward individuals or identified groups of individuals that are formed prior to the gathering of information or knowledge about the individuals or groups.

Privilege: “An advantage based solely on an accident of birth” (Evans, 2008, p. 63).

Race: “A group of people of common ancestry, distinguished from others by physical characteristics, such as hair type, color of eyes, and skin stature, etc.” (Sinclair, 2000, as cited in McAuliffe & Associates, 2008, p. 13). There is great controversy in the social sciences regarding the use of this term, which we will address later in the book. For now, we have opted to use a traditional definition of the word.

Racism: Acts of oppression based solely on race.

Social justice: The state in a “society where all hungry are fed, all sick are cared for, the environment is treasured, and we treat each other with love and compassion” (Medea Benjamin, quoted in Kikuchi, 2005, para. 2).

Worldview: Presuppositions and assumptions an individual holds about the makeup of his or her world; how a person perceives his or her relationship to the world (nature, institutions, other people, things, and so on) (Ibrahim, 1991). An individual’s worldview is culturally learned.

Summary

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Experiential learning tends to solidify what one learns from textbooks and lectures. This book is designed to solidify your learning in multicultural diversity. The exercises are designed to accommodate individuals wherever they may be in developing their multicultural competence through low-, medium-, and high-risk choices. We hope that you will find the activities in this book beneficial, informative, and interesting and that your multicultural competence will be greatly enhanced by your use of them.

2

The Multicultural Counseling Competencies

In this chapter, we present an introduction of the Multicultural Counseling Competencies (MCCs) developed by Sue, Arredondo, and McDavis (1992) and conceptualized by Arredondo et al. (1996a, 1996b) to provide an overview of skill development that typically occurs in counselor education training programs. This training is specific to counseling competencies required of all professional counselors and prepares counselors to work with diverse others. Students unfamiliar with the MCCs should spend time with this introductory chapter before moving on to subsequent chapters. Students already familiar with the MCCs may benefit from a review.

Multiculturally competent counselors understand their own world-views and how they are the products of their cultural conditioning (Sue et al., 1992). Additionally, culturally skilled counselors are intentional in their attempts to understand the worldviews of diverse others without negative judgments. Culturally sensitive and competent counselors understand that a culture is not to be “blamed” for a person’s problems, “nor does the presenting problem have to be based on culture or race for a person of color” (Arredondo et al., 1996b, p. 49). Finally, culturally competent counselors recognize that traditional counseling theories and methods may not be effective in their work with diverse others and that the counseling approach should be consistent with the cultural values of the client (Sue et al., 1992).

Counselors-in-training are encouraged to be advocates for their own education, competency training, and practice. This book is designed to work within a framework of instruction that encourages students’ independent learning. Students beginning a counselor education program may find multicultural counseling competency development challenging, especially when looking at their own values and biases.

This book is not designed to familiarize you with the history and development of the multicultural counseling competency, but rather to serve as an accompaniment to your diversity course texts. Recommendations for further reading accompany each description of a competency area to connect the basic understanding of the competencies with skill development.

Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs

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A unique aspect of this text is the recommended applicability of each activity to specific required core areas outlined by the accreditation body of most counselor training programs: the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs. CACREP (2009) requires accredited counselor training programs to offer courses in the following areas: Professional Orientation and Ethical Practice, Social and Cultural Diversity, Human Growth and Development, Career Development, Helping Relationships, Group Work, Assessment, and Research and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Rationale and Foundation
• 1. Using an Experiential Approach
• 2. The Multicultural Counseling Competencies
• 3. Dimensions of Personal Identity and Racial Identity Models
• Part II. Counselor Awareness of Own Cultural Values and Biases
• 4. Attitudes and Beliefs
• 5. Knowledge
• 6. Skills
• Part III. Counselor Awareness of Client’s Worldview
• 7. Attitudes and Beliefs
• 8. Knowledge
• 9. Skills
• Part IV. Culturally Appropriate Intervention Strategies
• 10. Beliefs and Attitudes
• 11. Knowledge
• 12. Skills
• 13. Goals and Plans for the Future
• References
• Index
• About the Authors