The+Making+of+a+Culturally+Competent+Counselor

="The Making of a Culturally Competent Counsellor” by Paul B. Pedersen = = =

The ** framework of multicultural competence ** is described in a three-level developmental sequence (Sue et al, 1998):
 * 1) Competence begins with ** awareness ** of your own culture in relationship with other cultures around you, and an awareness of the culturally learned assumptions which control your life, with or without your permission. Accuracy depends on making right assumptions.
 * 2) Once you have achieved awareness, the next level is to gather the ** knowledge, ** facts, and information required for comprehending the meanings behind your own and your client's behavior. Comprehension depends on having the right facts and information about the cultural context.
 * 3) Once you have achieved awareness and comprehension, the third level is to develop appropriate ** skills ** for bringing about change in the right direction. Competent skill depends on an accurate assessment of the situation and meaningful understanding to bring about positive change in each cultural context.

** Step 1: **** An Assessment of Awareness Needs ** Each person's level of awareness is determined by their ability to judge a situation accurately both from their own viewpoint and the viewpoints of members in other cultures. Becoming aware of culturally learned assumptions as they are both similar and different from members of other cultures is the essential foundation of counseling competence. Gilbert Wrenn described counsellors as "culturally encapsulated" when they define reality according to one set of cultural assumptions, become insensitive to cultural variations, disregard evidence disproving their assumptions, depend on technique-oriented or quick-fix solutions to problems and judge others from their own self-reference criteria.

** First ** aspect of developing multicultural competence in counseling is an assessment of that individual's needs in the areas of awareness, knowledge and skill (Pedersen, 2000a). Accurate awareness is the ability to describe a situation accurately from both the counsellor’s own viewpoint and the viewpoints of people from other cultures. Counsellors can judge their degree of accurate awareness by evaluating their abilities in the following characteristics:
 * Ability to interpret both direct and indirect communication styles
 * Sensitivity to nonverbal cues
 * Ability to recognize cultural and linguistic differences
 * Sensitivity to the myths and stereotypes of other cultures
 * Concern for the welfare of persons from other cultures
 * Ability to articulate elements of the individual's own culture
 * Appreciation for multicultural education
 * Ability to recognize relationships between and among cultural groups
 * Ability to accurately distinguish "good" from "bad" in other cultural contexts
 * Becoming aware of your own stress-limits when working with members of other cultures

** Second ** aspect is the need to assess an individual's knowledge. If awareness helps persons to ask the right questions then meaningful knowledge helps them get the right answers to those questions. Knowledge leads to understanding the complex alternatives and ambiguity in each cultural context. Learning the language of another culture is a good example of how new knowledge facilitates counseling. Knowledge about culture presumes the following specific competencies:
 * Knowledge about the histories of cultures other than your own
 * Understanding the role of education, money, values, attitudes and behaviors in other cultures
 * Knowing the language and slang of another culture
 * Knowledge about the resources available for teaching and learning in other cultures
 * Understanding how each individual's own culture is perceived by members of other cultures
 * Developing a professional expertise relevant to persons in other cultures
 * Possession of information that persons in other cultures will perceive as useful
 * Knowing about social services and how they are delivered in other cultures
 * Knowing about culture shock and acculturative stress
 * Knowing how members of other cultures interpret their own rules, customs and laws

** Third ** aspect of this needs assessment is assessment of an individual's skill. If awareness and knowledge are lacking, the counsellor will have a difficult time becoming skillful. If awareness is lacking, the counsellor will make wrong assumptions. If knowledge is lacking then gaining a meaningful understanding will be difficult. Some indicators of a counsellor’s multicultural skill will include the following competencies:
 * The ability to use the teaching and learning techniques of other cultures
 * The relevance of an individual's natural teaching and learning style in other cultures
 * The ability to establish empathic rapport with persons from other cultures
 * The ability to analyze feedback accurately within the context of other cultures
 * The ability to develop new ideas in the context of other cultures
 * Gaining access to appropriate service agencies and resources
 * Coping with stress in new cultural contexts
 * Anticipating consequences of events in other cultures
 * Functioning comfortably in the new culture
 * Finding common ground with members of other cultures without losing integrity

Counsellors can benefit from this awareness-needs assessment in several ways:
 * Reviewing the influence of their own multicultural identities will help the counsellor already living in another culture understand their own constantly changing viewpoint.
 * Be better able to anticipate the right questions to ask as they adapt their lifestyle to multicultural alternatives.
 * Provide more freedom of intentional choice as the counsellors become more aware of their own multiculturalism.

** Step 2: The Development of Multicultural Knowledge Resources ** One culture-centered perspective that has developed from the awareness-knowledge-skill framework is a list of propositions about "multicultural theory" or "MCT" (Sue, Ivey & Pedersen, 1996). These six propositions about theory demonstrate the fundamental importance of a culture-centered perspective for appropriate comprehension in the multicultural context. The multicultural competent counsellor also needs to be aware of the positive consequence of a culture-centered perspective (Pedersen et al., 2002). There are at least a dozen examples of the "up-side" from a culture-centered perspective:
 * Recognizing that all behavior is learned and displayed in a cultural context makes possible accurate assessment, meaningful understanding, and appropriate interventions in each cultural context.
 * People who express similar positive expectations or values through different culturally learned behaviors share "common ground" that allows them to disagree in their behavior while sharing the same ultimate positive values.
 * By recognizing the thousands of "culture teachers" each of us has internalized from friends, enemies, relatives, heroes, heroines, and fantasies, we can better understand the sources of our identities.
 * Just as a healthy ecosystem requires diversity in the gene pool, o a healthy society requires a variety of cultural perspectives for its psychological health.
 * Given our natural tendency to encapsulate ourselves, cultural diversity protects us from imposing our self-reference criteria inappropriately by challenging our assumptions.
 * Contact with cultures other than our own provides us with opportunities to rehearse adaptive functioning skills that will help us survive in the diversified global village of the future.
 * Social justice and moral development require the contrasting cultural perspectives of multiculturalism to prevent any one dominant group from holding the standards of justice hostage.
 * By looking at both cultural similarities and differences at the same time, according to a quantum metaphor, we are able to identify nonlinear alternatives to rigidly absolutist thinking.
 * We are able to continue our learning curve to match the rapid social changes around us by understanding all educational experiences as examples of culture shock.
 * In seeking spiritual completeness, we must complement our own understanding of Ultimate Reality with the different understandings by others.
 * The untried political alternative of cultural pluralism provides the only alternative to absolutism on the one hand and anarchy on the other.
 * A culture-centered perspective will strengthen the relevance and applicability of psychology by more adequately reflecting the complex and dynamic reality in which we all live.

Much knowledge is available in the counsellor’s own community through contact with resource persons who are both authentic to one or more particular culture and articulate in their ability to describe that culture as it is both similar to and different from the counsellor trainee's culture. Immersion into unfamiliar cultures is an important learning experience for both students and faculty when that contact occurs under favorable conditions. This contact might occur either through sending student into the community or by bringing resource persons from the community into the classroom. Multicultural awareness of culturally learned assumptions and multicultural knowledge leads to a meaningful comprehension at the third level in developing multicultural appropriate skills

** Step 3: **** Developing Multicultural Skills ** Multicultural skill competence involves finding the // common ground // between culturally different individuals or groups as the foundation of intrapersonal and interpersonal “harmony”. This can be found through understanding the intension of the behavior whether different or not. The Interpersonal Cultural Grid provides a visual example of this process of two persons or groups who might disagree without either one being "wrong". The Grid (table bellow) includes four quadrants. Each quadrant explains parts of a relationship between two individuals or groups, recognizing that the salience of each quadrant may change over time and across situations and also recognizing that some part of the relationship will be in each of the four quadrants.


 * "Expectations" : Why it was done |||| "Behaviors" : What was done ||
 * || Same Action || Different Action ||
 * Same Intention || 1 || 2 ||
 * Different Intention || 3 || 4 ||

** First quadrant **, the two show similar behavior and also similar expectations. The relationship is congruent and harmonious; there are no differences perceived in action or intentions. Both persons are smiling (behavior) and both persons see one another as friends (expectation). While this quadrant is comfortable and free of conflict, little multicultural skills are being developed.

** Second quadrant **, the two show different behaviors but still shares the same expectations. Both persons have the same intention; however each one is likely to interpret the other one's very different action incorrectly, when that action is interpreted out of context by the other. For example, both persons have thought of one another as friends (positive expectation) but one is talking softly and the other is shouting (different behavior). This quadrant is characteristic of "cross-cultural" relationships where each party is applying their own "self-reference criterion" to interpret the other's behavior and disregarding the other's different cultural context. The conditions of this second quadrant are very unstable and, unless the shared positive expectations are quickly found and made explicit, the salience is likely to change toward the third more hostile quadrant. Multicultural skill is the ability to find common ground of shared expectations expressed through different behaviors as in quadrant two.

** Third quadrant **, the two show the same behaviors but at least one now has a different expectation. This quadrant has less to do with culture and is more of an "interpersonal" conflict. The similar actions give the "appearance" of harmony but the different intentions will ultimately create conflict. If the actual difference in their expectations is ignored or undiscovered, the conflict will ultimately move to the fourth quadrant.

** Fourth quadrant **, the two show differences in behaviors and expectations. It is very difficult to mediate conflict in this quadrant. Unfortunately conflict frequently is not discovered until it reaches this fourth quadrant. The culturally competent can prevent conflict by early intervention when the conflict is in the second or third quadrant, allowing both to build on their shared common ground without forcing either one to lose integrity.

The interpersonal Cultural Grid demonstrates how culturally different people may share expectation even though their behaviors are quite different. To identify the expectations of culturally different clients the culturally competent counsellor needs access to the hidden messages a client is thinking but not saying. One training design to identify the "hidden messages" in culture-centre counseling is The Triad Training Model (Pedersen, 2000b). When two people communicate there are three conversations going on at the same time: (1) the verbal exchange, (2) the counsellor’s internal dialogue and (3) the client's internal dialogue. The more cultural differences between the counsellor and client the less likely that a counsellor will accurately comprehend the client's internal dialogue. A culturally competent counsellor will be able to "hear" the messages that a culturally-different client is thinking but not saying.

Multicultural skill builds on multicultural awareness and knowledge toward taking right actions at the right time in the right way and it provides the final test of a culturally competent counsellor. Multicultural skills are difficult to evaluate because the same suggested action may not be credible to all persons in the other culture. Skill requires framing the solution in the client's cultural language and context. Skill requires testing stereotypes against the real and present situation and then modifying the stereotype accordingly. Skill requires culturally appropriate evaluation of the context so that resulting change will be constructive with positive consequences.

Along with these three components mentioned above, The Diversity Training University International (DTUI) and many others organizations have added another essential component towards Cultural Competence: Attitudes towards cultural differences. To explore in depth this idea, please see "Six Stages of Intercultural Sensibility" by Milton Bennett.

=BACK TO THE PROCESS OF BECOMING CULTURALLY COMPETENT=