The International Handbook of Consultation in Educational Settings

Chryse Hatzichristou, Sylvia Rosenfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317746744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Psicología educativa

The rapid changes in the composition of school-age youth around the world have catalyzed a growing concern about how to address children's mental health and education. Grounded in this increasingly global perspective, The International Handbook of Consultation in Educational Settings is designed to provide a multicultural/transnational approach to consultation theory, research, training, and practice in educational settings. With chapters written by geographically diverse and prominent scholars across the field of school psychology, this handbook captures the range of ways in which consultation services are trained, implemented, and researched internationally. Written for practitioners, researchers, faculty members, and graduate students in the fields of school psychology, school counseling, special education, and educational psychology, this volume is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive look at consultation in learning environments across the world.

The International Handbook of Consultation in Educational Settings offers various perspectives on models, implementation, training, and research on school consultation. After an introduction to the volume by the editors, contributors to Part II examine school-based consultation around the world to explore how consultation services are implemented in different countries. Part III addresses cross-cultural issues in consultation, particularly at a systems level. Part IV presents themes related to processes and issues in the implementation of consultation by focusing on approaches in various countries. The chapters in Part V focus on consultation training, offering insights into the development of students and professionals into effective consultants in cross-cultural and systemic contexts. Part VI describes how practitioners can contribute to the body of research on consultation through careful planning and implementation of their work. Finally, the editors summarize key concepts and findings in a concluding chapter.

Part I
Introduction

1
Consultation Services in Educational Settings

A Global Perspective

Chryse Hatzichristou and Sylvia Rosenfield

Education policy, practice, and training around the world are undergoing change at every level. Increasing demands on schools have emerged to stress staff and students alike. The composition of school-age youth around the world has become increasingly diverse in terms of culture, race, ethnicity, and language. These rapid changes have caused a growing concern about how to address children’s mental health and education in developed and developing countries alike.

Given this context, consultants in educational settings make unique contributions to systems and to supporting educators and caregivers. Combined with a scarcity of direct service providers across the globe, there is a special role for educational and psychological consultants in the promotion of children’s well-being in all aspects of their development. With strong training and a solid empirical base, their contributions are even more powerful.

Consultation Defined

Consultation is a functional competency required for all psychologists (Fouad et al., 2009) and a major one for psychologists working in education. According to Fouad et al. (2009), the key competencies in this domain include: (a) identifying the appropriate consultant role in context, (b) selecting assessment tools and interventions to address the identified problem, (c) providing recommendations and feedback relevant to the situation, and (d) basing practice on research. Multicultural competence is viewed as a foundational competence for all practice, and it has a particularly strong role in consultation.

In addition to multicultural competence, the Society of Consulting Psychology (APA Division 13), which developed a set of consultation guidelines (APA, 2007), specified that one of the broad competencies for all consulting psychologists is competence in the international area. Much of the work on diversity in consultation thus far has been limited to an emphasis on multicultural dimensions of consultation training and practice models in the United States. However, over the past decade, consultation has enlarged the focus from concerns about multicultural issues to recognition of the importance of a more international/global perspective, which requires a more nuanced understanding of culture (Christopher, Wendt, Marecek, & Goodman, 2014).

School Consultation Services: An International Background

Although consultation practice in educational settings has a long-standing history in some countries, including the U.S., the United Kingdom (UK), Israel and Sweden, as well as more recently Greece, a lack of training and practice models and relevant research has been consistently emphasized in the literature (see, e.g., Erchul & Sheridan, 2014). Early efforts to examine consultation practice and training models in different countries were initiated by Nadine Lambert, who had a pioneering role in initiatives supporting consultee-centered consultation in schools in California and across the U.S. (Lambert, 1961, 1963, 1965); she also was a pioneer in implementing consultation as a core domain of training in the UC Berkeley School Psychology Program (Lambert, 1974, 1986). In the mid-1990s, Lambert, Hylander, and Sandoval organized International Seminars on Consultee-Centered Consultation. The initial meetings were held in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1995; seminars were later conducted seminars in Stockholm in 1999 and in San Francisco, California, in 2001(Lambert, 2004). These meetings were followed by a book titled Consultee-Centered Consultation: Improving the Quality of Professional Services in Schools and Community Organizations (Lambert, Hylander, & Sandoval, 2004), which included chapters by a variety of authors from multiple countries, many of whom had participated in the earlier seminars.

Since then, relatively few papers on school consultation in various countries have been published in professional journals. More specialized journals, such as the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation (JEPC), have rarely included a focus on the international dimension of school consultation research, training, and practice, although a special issue of JEPC included papers about consultation work of American colleagues in international settings (Worrell, 2014). This volume is the first since the book edited by Lambert et al. (2004) to focus on consultation in educational settings from an international perspective.

Multicultural/Transcultural Competence: Central to School Psychology Practice

Increasing diversity of student populations across the world has brought to the foreground the need to emphasize and promote multicultural competence in the training, theory, and practice of school psychologists. Current research has noted the lack of knowledge regarding the interventions that are most effective with ethnic minorities, migrants, and refugees in the U.S. (e.g., Abe-Kim et al., 2007; Fazel, Doll, & Stein, 2009; Kia-Keating & Ellis, 2007; Leong & Lau, 2001; Weisz, Doss, & Hawley, 2005) as well as in other countries (e.g., Carta, Bernal, Hardoy, & Haro-Abad, 2005). For example, the number of immigrant and refugee families and children, as well as the population of people of ethnic minority backgrounds, living in the U.S. continues to rise (Martinez-Fernandez, Kubo, Noya, & Weyman, 2012). Similar findings and themes are identified across different countries, as immigration has been an integral part of many countries’ histories (Banks, 2008; Hollifield, 2013; Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007).

Culturally competent practices are required for school psychologists to effectively respond to the needs of students and families from various culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Incorporating such a training philosophy requires, to a great extent, multicultural training and integration of content into courses (Newell et al., 2010). However, limited consideration has been given to multicultural issues in current school psychology graduate programs worldwide. In the U.S., even though more graduate school psychology programs have incorporated multicultural training, either as a separate course or in the form of references and/or readings, programs continue to lag in integrating multicultural content into core training areas (Newell et al., 2010). Further, there is little evidence that multicultural training has been integrated with consultation skills (e.g., Sirmans, 2004).

An additional barrier includes a limited evidence base on the prerequisite professional competencies for working with culturally and linguistically diverse populations (Braden & Shah, 2005; Jones, 2009). There is a need for a meta-cultural or culturally synthetic approach to school psychology that focuses on similarities of cultures and individuals (common needs and adversities) and builds on positive potential, competencies, and strengths as a means of enhancing resilience. This view/philosophy implies mutual valuing of perspectives and cognitive exchange across cultures (Hatzichristou, Lampropoulou, & Lykitsakou, 2006).

Others have focused on transcultural competence, which is “the ability to successfully deal with and develop solutions to issues and problems created by cultural differences within any cultural setting” (Glover & Friedman, 2015, p. 8). Such competence, especially valuable in the emerging global community, is thought to consist of four elements: recognizing cultural differences, respecting the differences, reconciling the differences through creative problem-solving skills, and implementing the reconciliation into practice (Trompenaars, 2015). Learning how to do that is a necessary competence for consultants in education.

Beyond Multicultural/Transcultural Competence: A Global Context

Globalization is the process of change structured by postnational forms of production and distribution of goods and services, information, communication and media technologies, worldwide migration, and the resultant cultural transformation and exchanges that challenge traditional values and norms (Arnett, 2002; Suárez-Orozco & Qin-Hilliard, 2004). Professionals around the globe are engaged in enhancing the education and mental health of children and families, as well as working with their school personnel. In this environment, psychologists need to be well prepared to respond to and consider the current major global challenges (i.e., telecommunications and media, poverty, migration and refugees, urbanization, global warming, war, health and disease, well-being and mental health, human rights violations) as well as the global resources (e.g., equal access to knowledge, advances in sciences and humanities, advances in medical knowledge, improvements in human rights, citizen activism, spirituality, growth of psychology); these challenges and resources are shaping and influencing children, families, and systems around the world (Marsella, 2007).

Given these challenges of today’s world, a “new” psychology—a global psychology that recognizes and acknowledges the major global forces and events that are shaping the context of our daily lives and prizes the cultural variations in psychologies across the world—is required (Diaz & Zirkel, 2012; Marsella, 2007, 2012). Various alternative psychologies emerging around the world reflect the paradigmatic adjustments in psychology and a need for a new global or international perspective in psychology (Moghaddam, Erneling, Montero, & Lee, 2007). New directions in school-based multicultural competence focus on transnational and transcultural differences as professional psychologists attempt to provide services in a global community (Ehrhardt-Padgett, Hatzichristou, Kitson, & Meyers, 2004; Hatzichristou, 2002, 2004; Jimerson, Oakland, & Farrell, 2007; Nastasi & Varjas, 2011). The globalization of psychology theory, training, practice, and research is well underway, and this has significant implications for the field of educational and psychological consultation.

The Globalization of School Consulting

The American Psychological Association (APA) Division of School Psychology, responding to the current multicultural and global challenges in school psychology, formed the Globalization of School Psychology Working Group (WG) three years ago; the goal was to further develop transnational/multicultural domains in school psychology science and practice (Hatzichristou, 2012; Hatzichristou, Nastasi, Jimerson, & Woods, 2012; Nastasi, Hatzichristou, & Hart, 2012; Nastasi, Hatzichristou et al., 2012). The initial objective of the WG was to develop a database with transnational/multicultural readings and material on basic areas of school psychology science and practice with the help of faculty members and their graduate students both internationally and within the U.S. The major thematic subgroups in the WG are (a) assessment, (b) prevention and school-based prevention programs, (c) transnational/multicultural school psychology, (d) consultation, (e)crisis intervention, and (f) evidence-based intervention.

The annotated bibliography of the Globalization of School Psychology Working Group (2012) examines important issues in theory, research, service delivery, education, and training for school psychology at national/multicultural and international/global levels with the optimal goal of promoting future partnerships and professional collaboration among faculty, graduate students, and practitioners in this field. The consultation subgroup within the Globalization of School Psychology project (Lopez, Rubinson, & Hatzichristou, 2012) focused on (a) identifying subthemes representing major areas of practice and science under consultation, (b) summarizing readings addressing consultation practice and research, and (c) highlighting multicultural and transnational themes in the summaries for each of the readings. Implications for multicultural practices and research are addressed, and transnational perspectives are discussed in the context of several international readings (i.e., Greece, Spain, Sweden, and Estonia).

Purpose of this Handbook

Given the increasingly global perspective of psychology, this handbook is designed to provide a multicultural/transnational approach to consultation theory, research, training, and practice in educational settings. While other international handbook authors (e.g., Jimerson et al., 2007) have “provided a description of the specialty of psychology devoted to the provision of services to children and youth, their teachers, and parents” (p. 1), the goal of this book is to capture the range of ways in which consultation services are trained, implemented, and researched across the globe. While there have been international handbooks on other topics, none has provided an in-depth look at consultation in educational settings across the world. Although an earlier book explored the area of consultee-centered consultation (Lambert et al., 2004) with an international group of editors and authors, this is the first comprehensive international handbook on educational consultation.

Structure of the Handbook

An array of international practitioners and researchers on school consultation contributed to this book; they represent a sampling of major conceptual and applied expertise in educational/school consultation. This book includes the following sections, which provide various perspectives on models, implementation, training, and research on school consultation.

After this introductory chapter, Part II, School Consultation Services across the Globe, examines school-based consultation in different countries to provide some perspective on how consultation services are implemented in a variety of international contexts. In Establishing Psychological Consultation Services to Promote Student Well-being in Schools and Preschools (Chapter 2), Ingrid Hylander describes the task of introducing teacher consultation as a student psychosocial health–promoting service to school management, principals, and teachers. Examples are drawn from 30 years of experience with psychological and psychosocial consultation to Swedish preschools and schools and from Swedish research on school consultation and student health teams. In the next chapter, Revisiting Canadian Consultation Models in School Psychology: Just the Same, Only Different (Chapter 3), Ester Cole and Judith Wiener describe how children’s mental health is the focus of school-based consultation in Canada. Consultation is seen as part of a continuum of direct and indirect services, with the multidisciplinary team having a central role. Online resources are discussed as an important adjunct to the services. In the following chapter, Consulting in School Settings in Australia: Challenges, Positive D...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II School Consultation Services across the Globe
• Part III Crossing Cultures
• Part IV Implementing Consultation Services in the Schools
• Part V Educating Effective Consultants
• Part VI Researching Consultation
• Part VII A Final Word
• Contributors
• Index