From cultural encapsulation to cultural competence: The cross-national cultural competence model.

Abstract

The percentage of international students enrolled in American Psychological Association (APA) accredited counseling psychology programs increased from 5. 3% in 20023% in to 8.3% in 20093% in (APA, 2010. In 2002, there were 148 international students enrolled in APA-accredited counseling psychology programs, and this number increased to 248 in 2009, which is a 68% growth in 7 years (APA, 2010). Along with this increasing trend, counseling psychology also has a higher percentage of international students enrolled compared with other psychology fields. In comparison, the percentage of international students in APA-accredited clinical psychology and school psychology programs has been stable or declining with 4. 9% and 3.2% in 2009, respectively.

A Cross-Cultural Immersion Program

“…To guide our work, we utilized the CNCC model (Heppner et al, 2012, see Figure 1). In that model, CNCC is defined as follows:…”

“…Such cultural awareness, knowledge, and skills are developed with an understanding of the ecological systems and subsystems in which one is living as well as for a specific cultural group in a particular country. Moreover, the second circle, immersion experiences, was hypothesized to be "one of most powerful cultural learning mechanisms" (Heppner et al, 2012). Heppner et al (2012) postulated that the first three inner circles of the model intertwine to affect the development of the awareness, knowledge, and skills associated with the development of cross-cultural competencies.…”

“…As a result, there has been a growing internationalization of counseling and counseling psychology (see, for example, Gerstein, Heppner, AEgisdóttir, Leung, & Norsworthy, 2009;Heppner, AEgisdóttir, et al, 2009;Moodley, Gielen, & Wu, 2013). Moreover, following the earlier work of the dedicated pioneers in multicultural psychology, scholars have begun to focus on training the next generations to become culturally competent to work with individuals across cultural contexts spanning different countries (e.g., Heppner, Wang, Heppner, & Wang, 2012;P. B. Pedersen, 1991).…”

“…(p. 77) Consequently, the purpose of this article is to describe the pedagogical outcomes of a non-traditional method of graduate instruction designed to promote the development of cross-national cultural competencies. The second purpose of the article is to use the Cross-National Cultural Competence (CNCC; Heppner et al, 2012) model to not only illustrate major factors involved in crossing national borders, but also link those factors to student learning outcomes. However, not many programs offer live multicultural counseling courses and immersion experiences.…”

“…A number of training programs have been developed to promote the development of multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills (see, for example, Abreu, Chung, & Atkinson, 2000). Moreover, as the cultural immersion process has been hypothesized to be one of the most powerful factors in promoting cross-cultural competence (Heppner et al, 2012), we will more closely examine the hypothesized elements involved in cultural immersions in terms of student learning outcomes. Thus, there tends to be a large experiential gap between learning about another culture from afar as opposed to being an active agent in another cultural context.…”