Multicultural Counselling Approaches In Counselling
10th September 2021
As a skilled & professional school counsellor, you come across a lot of people who seek counselling. Most of them usually come from diverse strides of life as well as from various backgrounds. As a result, the need for multicultural counselling rises as people become more miscellaneous.
According to the American Counselling Association, multicultural counselling is an advantage for counsellors. Multicultural counselling is the aptitude of any specialized school counsellor to approach counselling through the background of the learner’s circumstances.
Understanding The Multicultural Counselling
Multicultural counselling encompasses counsellors signifying an understanding of their students by comprehending their brawls with various social issues, racism, and other connected involvements. Generally, the multicultural apprehensions comprise wide-ranging subjects as well as identities counting race, religion, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, and/or special needs or customs, beliefs, and so on.
Multicultural counselling technique often has several slants, but it fundamentally is a process of therapeutic counselling. This is a very fresh development. In 1972, the American Personnel and Guidance Association (now the American Association of Counselling and Development) developed the Association for Non-White Concerns (now the Association for Multicultural Counselling and Development (AMCD)). The mission is to “recognize the human diversity and multicultural nature of our society” and “identify and work to eliminate conditions which create barriers to the individual development of marginalized populations.”
A school is a place that brings together people of numerous cultures. On the other hand, most people have a big misconception that “culture” denotes only race. The fact is culture also contains ethnicity, nationality, religion, language, gender distinctiveness, sexual identity, sexual orientation, and the socio-economic standing correlated to these countless characteristics.
Here are the factors of the RESPECTFUL model that are significant parts of the multicultural counselling method -
- Economic Class Background
- Religious-Spiritual Identity
- Sexual Identity
- Chronological Developmental Challenges
- Ethnic-Cultural-Racial Identity
- Psychological Maturity
- Trauma and Other Threats
- Location of Residence and Language Differences
- Unique Physical Characteristics
- Family History and Dynamics
To work effectively with miscellaneous learners, a school counsellor must recognize these aspects essentially.
What Are The Multicultural Counselling Skills?
This includes evolving the accurate skillset that aids counsellors to meet the distinct requirements of their students.
- Interpersonal aptitudes like conversational skills, good listening, and responding skills, asking considerate questions, etc.
- Cultural awareness.
- Respecting learners’ feelings is significant.
- A major skill that counsellors have is sensitivity.
- Aptitudes of understanding learners on a deep level.
- Empathy is also a high-level skill that is needed.
Skilled counsellors also need to set their own biases aside while delivering their sessions.
Conclusion
Pursuing a career in multicultural counselling with the online counselling course for teachers will give you a lot of opportunities to support a varied diversity of individuals. Counselling specialists who are ethnically accomplished are gifted to engross in communication eliminate preconception. They must also think about some additional learning opportunities to advance their understanding of different cultural inhabitants. With this, they will have worthwhile practices by making a difference among the students about the world.
Written By : Sheetal Sharma