Embracing Cultural Diversities Empowering Counseling Students with Multicultural Competence

Abstract

There is a rising concern on the educational needs of counseling students to work effectively with multicultural groups, and to respect cultural diversities. Professional counseling organizations, such as the American Counseling Association in United States and the Professional Counseling Association in Hong Kong require their professional counselors to be equipped with multicultural competency to work with clients from diverse backgrounds. A specialized training model, the multicultural counseling Therapy (MCT) is recognized as necessary training model for all counseling programs (Arredondo, 1999; Sehgal et.al., 2011). Sue (2012)'s model remains the most widely used for the MCT training, which has been conceptualized as having three multicultural competency components: attitudes, knowledge, and skills. This project integrates both teaching/learning and research components. 80 students enrolled in bachelor and master level counseling programs from the Department of Applied Social Studies will participate in the project. First, at the teaching and learning aspect, we aim to achieve the multicultural competence (attitudes, knowledge and skills) of counseling students through two teaching and learning activities, namely, the panel presentation and the web-based learning. These two strategies support the Discovery-Enriched Curriculum spelt out in the counseling related courses. Second, at the research aspect, qualitative and quantitative data will be collected to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies in helping students to achieve multicultural competence and overall learning objectives.