Multicultural Counseling Competence: History, Themes, and Issues

Comparing Multicultural With General Counseling Knowledge and Skill Competency for Students Who Completed Counselor Training

“…With the demand for counselors to be culturally knowledgeable, it is important to focus on multicultural content, either by requiring additional courses or increasing infusion (Arredondo & Arciniega, 2001). If additional course work is not an option, incorporating assignments and projects into more courses on topics such as racial identity development, current multicultural research findings, or important terminology and concepts may be useful strategies for increasing accountability in multicultural knowledge competency (Ridley & Kleiner, 2003). Program evaluation can be improved by assessing the multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills of counselors in training as well as evaluating other factors involved in MCC, such as relationship skills, multicultural terminology, and racial identity development (Holcomb-McCoy, 2000).…”

Culturally competent interventions in schools for children with physical health problems

“…Culture does not necessarily have to become a focus in the treatment or educational intervention. Rather, cultural competency means possessing the knowledge, skills, and awareness to know if, when, and how to integrate cultural issues into the treatment planning and implementation process (APA, 2003;Ridley & Kleiner, 2003). Liu and Clay (2002) have presented a decision-making model to guide education and health practitioners when working with diverse children.…”

“…In fact, cultural competency has become a focus for psychologists (American Psychological Association [APA], 2003), medical professionals (Genao, Bussey-Jones, Brady, Branch, & Corbie-Smith, 2003) and education professionals (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 2006). Cultural competency involves the ability to demonstrate knowledge, awareness, and skills (Ridley & Kleiner, 2003) with children from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. Likewise, it involves creating an educational environment characterized by culturally relevant and congruent interventions (Shade et al, 1997).…”

Assessing Multicultural Competence: Perceived Versus Demonstrated Performance

“…However, the aforementioned instruments also have inherent weaknesses that may diminish their utility in accurately quantifying counselors' and students' multicultural competence. Ridley and Kleiner (2003) noted that one of the major questions about the instruments that have been developed to assess counselors' multicultural competence involves the degree to which the scores generated by these self-report measures accurately reflect the competencies that counselors actually demonstrate when working in multicultural counseling situations. Speaking more directly to this question, Ridley and Kleiner asserted that social desirability may lead to inflated scores when individuals complete one of the selfreport instruments currently available to measure their level of multicultural competence.…”