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Multicultural Counselling is an important aspect of counselling. In terms of student counselling technique used by the teachers, multicultural counselling is a practice that offers effective remedial actions to culturally diverse students found in today’s all-inclusive classrooms. Multicultural counselling is derived from the term ‘multicultural awareness’ which refers to an understanding and appreciation of lifestyles, history, beliefs and values of all groups of people.

A culturally aware teacher will consider all the aspects of the student while providing him/her with the right kind of guidance and advice with the aim of providing a good mental health, and at the same time being aware of and recognising his/her own personal biases, beliefs and opinions, accepting the differences and providing guidance without any kind of prejudices.

Mental health can be defined from the seven criteria: absence of mental illness, (b) appropriate social behaviour (c) freedom from worry and guilt (d) personal competence and control (e) self-acceptance and self-realization (f) personality development and (g) open-mindedness and flexibility.

Each child is different and unique – for his background, his upbringing, his race, his culture, religion, socio-economic status, his gender and many other factors. The teacher needs to take into consideration all these factors and with the right school counselor skills, can effectively guide the children, without judging them on the basis of their differences.

Need for Multicultural Counselling Approaches

Due to globalisation, today’s classrooms have become more inclusive comprising of students from all backgrounds and this has created the need for the teachers to be trained to work with students with varied lifestyles and upbringing, all the more necessary. Multicultural counselling helps the trainees broaden their understanding of the student’s culture, identity, race, gender and other aspects of diversity. The three factors to keep in mind to effectively provide counselling and guidance are:

1. getting acquainted with culturally-competent counselling practices,
2. knowledge on current theoretical approaches
3. practicing self-reflection

It involves putting aside the provider’s beliefs, values, opinions and entering into the student’s world and looking at things and perceiving situations from his/her perspective. In other words, the teacher must shake off all his/her bias, if any, and possess enough sensitivity to be able to give solution and advice to any problem from a neutral point of view.

Religious Approaches Religious beliefs and practices play an integral part in the lives of majority people throughout their lives. Recent scientific studies show that practicing counselling for individual using religious approaches will yield the same result when compared to those counselling methods with no focus or importance on religious beliefs and practices of the individual.

Ethnic & Racial Approaches Ethnic and racial factors have come to play a significant role in the entire gamut of therapeutic work in different parts of the international community; student counselling in schools also being a part of this. The therapeutic goals, mode of communication between the teacher and the pupil, the perspectives of understanding based on cultural variations today play a significant role in student counselling.