Multicultural Counselor Preparation: A Transformational Pedagogy

A multicultural transformational pedagogy based on existential and humanistic principles is applied to counselor education. C. E. Vontress's (1979, 1985, 1988) and J. A. Banks's (1981, 1993, 1998) cross-cultural counseling and multicultural education principles provide the framework for a new counselor education pedagogy. Suggestions for implementation are also provided. Recommendations for research are provided and discussed. Imagine that you are about to meet your first individual client at a community counseling agency. You get excited because you have prepared for this day for more than a year. You anticipate all of the questions you will ask, and you want to make sure that your tape of the session accurately displays all of the techniques that you know your professor wants to see and/or hear. You go out to the lobby to greet your individual client only to have an entire family stand up to be greeted. The client has a thick accent and tells you that the family has come to help. What do you do? ********** Sue and Sue (1999) and Trusty, Looby, and Sandhu (2002) have pointed out that counseling is largely based on Western European values and ways of seeing the world. The values often described include focusing on individuality and seeking an independent lifestyle. However, in the case above, the client is from a collectivistic culture that includes many family members. Vontress and Jackson (2004) laid out the responsibility for counselor educators to train future counselors in the development of therapeutic processes that would be relevant to all clients, including racial and cultural minorities. Additionally, Vontress (1985) pointed out that it is important, when seeking to establish a cross-cultural counseling relationship, to take a global view of humanity that is rooted in existentialism and humanism. The challenge faced by the counselor in the above scenario involves being able to break free of culturally encapsulated thinking and being able to develop the ability to view clients from their contextual perspective. The root of humanism, in the counseling profession, is found in the work of Rogers (1961), who noted the importance of understanding the phenomenology of clients. In a similar vein, Yalom (2002), an existentialist, provided the foundation for viewing clients as fellow travelers on a growth journey based on an egalitarian relationship that takes a holistic view of clients. Vontress (1985) tied together both the humanistic and existential philosophies and applied them in a manner that would make counseling culturally relevant. He made this point clear when he stated, "Existentialism is also global in its view of humanity. That is, it takes a perspective that transcends cultural and national boundaries" (Vontress, 1985, p. 207). The opening scenario suggests that if a counselor takes an existentialist perspective in developing a relationship with the client, the dilemma presented would not occur because the counselor would see the need to include family members as part of the process of meeting the needs of the client. Adams and Juhnke (2001) suggested that the advent of humanistic counseling has also led to professional counseling that includes culturally relevant counseling interventions that value clients' unique ethnic, historic, religious, and social compositions. From this perspective, it can be seen that "humanistically oriented counselors have a tradition of speaking forcefully about values" (Aspy & Aspy, 1998, p. 87) and of seeking to meet the needs of clients. The values indicative of counselors and the counseling profession cannot be placed in a vacuum. They must take into account the phenomenology of the entire person. Vontress (1979) indicated that for counseling to be relevant across cultures it must take into account three existential concepts that are tied to the individual's phenomenology: the Umwelt (the person in the environment or world), the Mitwelt (the world of interpersonal relationships), and the Eigenwelt (the personal or private world). …