What do you think multiculturalism

We have a great distance to go in terms of understanding what skills foster multicultural competency while promoting client and student welfare. In addition, most of what we know in terms of changes in counselor multicultural competency is self-report from counselor trainees. It is important that we involve supervisors, school administrators, clients, parents and other stakeholders to contribute to our understanding of counselor multicultural competency.

Degree of economic security within families and communities has a far-reaching impact on academic, social, occupational and physical well-being. While privilege and oppression related to other cultural group memberships certainly matters, socioeconomic status often has a moderating effect that perpetuates social injustice.

Finally, we need to constantly attend to diversifying our profession and expanding our experiences, whether this involves recruiting students of color and males into our counseling programs or practicing in settings that might challenge us culturally. The type of counselors and experiences they have as trainees ultimately provide a model for the public that counseling could be useful to them, no matter their background or concern.

Kevin Feisthamel is the director of counseling, health and disability services at Hiram College in Ohio. Talk about the importance of multicultural supervision. What does it mean to be a multiculturally competent supervisor, and what will that mean for the counselor being supervised?

Multicultural supervision is crucial to the advancement of the counseling profession in producing future mental health counselors who have gained the knowledge, awareness, values, beliefs and practical skills to become competent multicultural counselors. What it means for me in becoming a multiculturally competent supervisor is being aware of diversity, race, ethnicity and LGBTIQQ concerns as they relate to the supervision process. Being a multiculturally competent supervisor also includes being culturally sensitive in assigning DSM diagnoses to certain races.

Euro-Americans are often diagnosed with more mood disorders. Supervisors also have so many roles, including monitoring client welfare, professional development [and] being a teacher, mentor, advocate and facilitator of self-awareness and self-exploration, that we need to integrate multicultural competencies in all of these roles for our supervisees.

How would you describe the current state of multicultural supervision within the field of counseling? More clinical research and practical techniques need to be implemented within the educational and field placement settings. I think supervisors lag behind supervisees in multicultural awareness and knowledge.

For example, the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs requires only one multiculturalism course that is basically an overview of the various types of cultures and what future counselors should particularly pay attention to. Thus, as graduates become licensed and obtain their supervisory credentials, there is usually no requirement of obtaining CEUs related to multicultural understanding. If a supervisor has been in the field for 15 to 20 years, only their clinical experience may help with understanding multicultural issues, but more formal training may be needed.

She has been studying multiculturalism since the late s and is a founding member of the National Institute for Multicultural Competence.

Why is being multiculturally competent as a counselor so important? First and foremost, we are here to serve all people. By , just six years from now, authorities state that at least half of youth in the U. In short, if we are to be the central helping profession, it is our moral duty to refocus our thinking and practice. And, for mere survival as a counselor, it becomes essential that one is able to work with people of all colors, ethnic groups, genders and sexual orientations, physical and mental abilities, rich and poor, and all forms of diversity.

This is quite a challenge for many of us. Given this challenge, how does the field need to proceed? All students, professionals, professors and textbook authors need to examine all theory and practice so that we come to terms with the present and future. Individually, we each need to make a commitment to learning and change, but this is not enough, as we cannot do all this alone.

Then how? First, each school, counseling center, and local and regional counseling association needs to establish action plans and serious in-service training to make this important leap. Getting out of the office and into the community and its many multicultural events is important, as is becoming active in working toward positive change in social issues.

Where is the intersection between multiculturalism and social justice? If all counseling is multicultural, then we need to maintain awareness that all counseling inevitably involves issues of social justice. If that environment includes poverty, racism, sexism, ableism or other form of injustice, we have two obligations. First, we need to help clients become aware of the system surrounding their concerns and issues. Is the problem in the client or the system? This awareness frequently helps clients understand issues more fully and can take away feelings of guilt and self-harm.

The second dimension of action is working against oppression in the community and society. This can range from helping parents understand and work with social benefits, to working in a soup kitchen, to direct participation in social justice action groups within a church or community.

Social justice action is central to meaningful multicultural competence. What responsibility do counselors have to find continuing education on multiculturalism, and how do they go about doing that?

As all counseling is now defined as multicultural, all of us need to make that central in our educational efforts. Counseling Today articles such as this one have been important in building awareness and teaching some level of skills.

All of us need to read and learn more, but especially we need to get out in our communities and learn face-to-face. All continuing education programs need to have meaningful correspondence with the multicultural competencies. This seldom happens. If the CE is specifically oriented to these issues, that is helpful. But when you attend a session on the DSM-5 , CBT [cognitive behavior therapy] theory and practice, family therapy, etc. This means that we as professionals have to start challenging our teachers and workshop leaders.

Are they really engaged in teaching multicultural competence and walking the talk? Carlos Zalaquett is a professor and coordinator of the clinical mental health counseling program at the University of South Florida. He is also the associate editor of the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development.

As awareness, knowledge and skills suggest, becoming multiculturally competent requires learning and practicing, as well as seeking exposure to diverse races, cultures and worldviews. A commitment to action is needed too.

Many of us have some multicultural awareness, knowledge and skills but fail to bring them to action when working with others [who] are different from us or when we face situations that are unacceptable to us.

The infamous knowing-doing gap becomes painfully evident when it relates to multicultural skills. Intentional practice is the best approach. Knowledge will set in as we practice what we have learned about multiculturalism and multicultural competencies. We accomplish this by using and teaching these competencies to others.

The more we understand this and the more we practice with the intention to master what we have learned, the more we will implement what we know and the more we will close the gap. Perhaps the challenges are around ego and vulnerability. We all like to think of ourselves as caring individuals, but we have blind spots and hot points that trigger our emotions. These matters have to get addressed as we work on our multicultural competency. To be an ethical and effective counselor, one must continuously push to learn more about others and oneself.

Richard Henriksen Jr. He has been researching and working in the area of multicultural counseling for almost 20 years and has written extensively on counseling multiple-heritage clients. What are some practical examples of ways practitioners can go about being multiculturally competent? There are many ways, and the one I believe is most important and most challenging is to make genuine friends with others who are culturally different from you.

Many times, you hear things like go to cultural events or read books or talk to someone about their culture. We even teach in counseling programs to ask your client to tell you about his or her culture so that you can learn about [it]. I say make a friend because then you get to really know someone and, oftentimes, his or her family. When you are able to make friends with those from different backgrounds, our fears are removed and doors are open to new adventures and opportunities to learn.

I also believe that multicultural competence comes from our experiences in being with other groups, so service-learning projects can be integral to learning about diverse cultural groups. It is more than just volunteering. It is about joining with a new group of people and sharing with them [in] their experiences. You suggest making friends with people of different cultures. How do counselors avoid the trap of thinking that because one new friend is a certain way, that he or she represents the characteristics of the wider culture?

While befriending others from diverse cultures, it would be important for counselors and counseling students to remember that meeting just a few people is not enough to make one culturally competent. Our relationships give us insights into what it means to be different or to come from a cultural background different from our own. It is not enough to give us insight into the world of a different cultural group, nor does it give a definition of the experiences of others.

It does help us to become comfortable meeting people from diverse cultures and helps to take away our fears of getting to know people from diverse backgrounds.

We still need to remember that limited experiences and friendships give us limited information, so [we] need to always be meeting new people, finding new experiences to engage in and allowing clients to teach us about their cultural experiences. With limited information, we need to be aware that we cannot generalize our limited knowledge to entire cultural groups.

If we forget this, we can easily fall into the trap of stereotyping diverse groups of people. We need to always remember that the experiences we have help us to be able to approach others and give us the opportunity to stretch our experiences so that we can stretch ourselves when we meet new clients from diverse cultural backgrounds. Lynne Shallcross is the associate editor and senior writer for Counseling Today.

Letters to the editor: ct counseling. Thank you so much for those answers about multicultural diversity… It was too Effective for me. Very informative indeed. Multicultural diversity is something everyone should be aware of. Students whose first language is not English may struggle to comprehend the simplest tasks in class. As a result they may not be performing well in a specific subject, not because they do not work hard but because they lack appropriate support from schools.

Culturally diverse students have their own set of challenges in a given school environment. In order to help these students overcome these challenges, it is not enough to give all students equal opportunities but, more importantly, teachers provide specific help to have better academic achievements.

In addressing these challenges into the future Sleeter states:. But what educators from dominant groups think are the key issues and best solutions are not necessarily the same as what students, parents, and community members from non-dominant groups think. Some of the most difficult but most necessary work in multicultural education involves helping those who are used to being in charge learn to listen to and take seriously those they have learned to dismiss.

Teachers are responsible for sharing knowledge with their students. Furthermore, the authors suggest that there is a need for change in both the position and terminology related to pedagogical theory and practice. They offer CSP [Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies] as a solution, as CSP implementation seeks to accept, support, and sustain pluralism on cultural, literate, and linguistic levels. Accordingly, teachers should be highly aware that there are individual differences in the classroom Basbay , ; teaching plans and personal teaching styles may need to vary to cater to different cultural groups.

To better facilitate multicultural education in a school setting, it is salient for school authorities and faculty members to know how culturally diverse that school is. It would be extremely difficult to offer help to different cultural groups in school without identifying what groups there are within their school community.

Technology is a useful tool to bridge these groups together and provide cultural-related knowledge. One innovative tool that can achieve this is Diversity Atlas.

It is an analytical tool to measure types and extents of cultural traits in an organisation or school community. It is easy and quick for users to input their information, yet the tool provides in-depth and multifaceted analysis.

This is especially effective for schools as it has a complex structure that consists of different levels of authority and departments, and breaks down the languages spoken, and cultural groups that otherwise may remain hidden within the school environment. After receiving such analysis, schools are able to gain a better understanding of themselves.

They may want to tackle issues such as diversity in certain departments by applying the tool of Diversity Atlas. If asked about these cultures, how many unique, culture-specific points can you come up with in a few minutes?

Use your answers to place yourself on this dimension, using the spectrum of possibilities listed below. Your level of multicultural knowledge is particularly useful for accomplishing cross-cultural tasks. So if you have in-depth knowledge of more than one culture, you can use it to enable cross-cultural understanding in your firm.

When someone criticizes these groups, do you feel personally offended? Use your answers to place yourself on this identification dimension. Identification with more than one culture can help facilitate connections with others, including relationships across firms. For example, compared to British employees of a U. The trusting relationships Chinese-British employees created with employees from both their British employer and the Chinese partner firm ultimately helped them build successful alliances between their firms.

If you identify with more than one cultural group, you can draw on your network to connect people across your cultures. To answer this question, examine your values, beliefs, and assumptions. This is hard; we are often not aware of how culture shapes these deepest parts of ourselves. To what extent do different cultures influence your value systems?

Do you think about issues from the perspective of more than one culture? Do they influence how you feel? How much do you use values, beliefs, and assumptions from more than one culture when making decisions? Do you find yourself unconsciously engaging in different cultural behaviors depending on the situation?