The Multiculturally Responsive Versus the Multiculturally Reactive: A Study of Perceptions of Counselor Trainees

Make It Personal: A Qualitative Investigation of White Counselors’ Multicultural Awareness Development

In this qualitative research study, we explored the multicultural awareness development of 12 multiculturally adept non-Latino White counselors. Using a grounded theory approach, we found that early personal experience with diversity was the most important contributing factor in developing understanding and empathy for oppression among White counselors. This factor appeared to lay the foundation for an ongoing personal initiative to develop multicultural awareness. Subsequently, counselors tried to maximize what they could learn from their culturally diverse clients, work environments, coursework, supervision, and mentoring opportunities. Their personal initiative also inspired them to persevere despite the difficult emotions and conflict inherent in this developmental process. Results suggest the need to incorporate personally transformative experiences in counselor training and to prepare counselors for the emotional challenges of multicultural awareness development.

Multicultural Counseling Training

This article provides a selective review of the multicultural counseling training (MCT) literature. A brief historical account of multicultural counseling (MCC) is followed by three other sections detailing current models of MCT, conceptualization of training objectives, and empirical research. Within these sections, critical issues for the present and future development of MCT are highlighted and discussed.

Theory and Research on Stereotypes and Perceptual Bias

This article presents theory and selected research on stereotyping and cognitive automaticity as a didactic resource base for multicultural counselor educators. Multicultural trainers can use this information in the classroom to establish the existing scientific evidence indicating that perceptual processes taking place outside of conscious awareness give rise to biased perceptions involving racial or ethnic categories. The objective of this didactic resource is to impress upon counseling trainees the importance of coming to terms with racial prejudice and biases often hidden from conscious scrutiny. In addition to the didactic material, several experiential exercises designed to elicit awareness of biases in personal attitudes and beliefs toward culturally diverse groups are presented. Suggestions for future research are also included.

Integrating cultural competency in rehabilitation curricula in the new millennium: keeping it simple

Pre-service rehabilitation education programmes in the United States still prepare future professionals in cultural competency primarily through one required course in multicultural counselling, though there is an expectation that such content will be woven into all graduate rehabilitation coursework. These authors believe that there is still a need in these dawning years of the 21st century to offer more guidance to rehabilitation educators on how to integrate cultural competency into each course at the graduate level. This discussion reviews the literature to date on cultural competency within rehabilitation education in the United States, then concludes by proposing a four-strategy framework for use by rehabilitation educators that is simple, comprehensive, multi-dimensional (i.e., it addresses faculty awareness, student coursework, the student clinical experience and lifelong learning for the student after exiting the pre-service educational programme), and that offers clear guiding parameters without being overly prescriptive.

A Qualitative Investigation of Graduate-Student Changes Associated With Multicultural Counseling Courses

The critical incidents technique was used to gather information from graduate students about the changes they experienced connected to their participation in multicultural counseling courses. Trainees were also asked what course elements were linked to their personal changes. Racial and ethnic differences in response frequencies were analyzed. A diverse sample of 124 trainees from a variety of graduate programs participated in this Web-based qualitative survey. Trainees reported changes in terms of increased knowledge, increased self-understanding, attitude, and behavior and attributed these changes to didactic, interactive, and reflective activities, the influence of the instructor, and the course as a whole. The identified themes are illustrated through the use of the trainees' own words. Chi-square analyses found no differences between students of color and White students in types of changes reported or elements reported as catalysts for changes. The implications of these findings for the future of multicultural counseling training are discussed.