Multicultural Competence Essay

UNIT 3, Question 2: A counselor has practiced in a non-diverse community for more than 20 years. He moved to a new community and accepted a position at an agency that serves diverse populations. How can the counselor develop multicultural competence? Explain and describe a process the counselor could utilize.

Introduction

Multicultural counsellors are those counsellors who are aware of cultural assumptions they have learnt, able to articulate the relevant information and facts about the culture of a client and can skillfully go between and bring out a positive change. As a result of behaviors being learnt and displayed in different contexts, multicultural counsellors should be able to address the cultural context of each client. Nevertheless,

Multicultural competence should not be seen as a short cut. Hence, the first step of multicultural competency is to assess the needs of an individual in the awareness areas, skill, and knowledge. Awareness can be said to be the skill of describing a condition by a counsellor from his perspective and others’ perspective. Awareness includes concerns for other persons in different cultures, ability to see good and bad in different cultural contexts, stress limits and roots, interpreting different communication styles within different cultural settings, multicultural education, non-verbal-language among

As we grew up, we learnt that our culture was just one on the many ways of doing things. We thought we had the most superior culture to the extent that we were not ready to adopt or embrace other cultures.

Therefore, a multicultural competent counsellor is expected to have good knowledge of different societies and cultures. Ideally, a counselor is able to think and feel like one of his clients, this includes social, economic and political comprehension, and psychological understanding. The knowledge is not only found in textbooks but also mostly through interactions with people from different cultures.

Developing Multicultural Skills

For developing multicultural skills, a counselor must be aware of cultural bias (learning, reading about different groups), cultural encapsulation, favoritism towards his/her worldview (practicing self-criticism/insight) and he/she must be able to practice professional self-regulation (i.e. monitoring own behavior to avoid unintentional statements - verbal as well as non-verbal - towards clients). To get competent in multicultural issues a counselor must examine codes and standards about multicultural issues, complete training programs in multicultural competence and the counselor might even travel to foreign countries to study different ways of life. Another way is to look out for counselors