First Advisor

Cardona, Vilma

Document Type

Dissertation

Date Created

8-2017

Department

College of Education and Behavioral Sciences, Applied Psychology and Counselor Education, APCE Student Work

Abstract

With the growth of multicultural populations in the United States, counselors-intraining are called to provide multiculturally competent counseling services (Estrada, Poulsen, Cannon, & Wiggins, 2013). In 2015, the Multicultural Social Justice and Counseling Competencies (MSJCC) was formed in response to a call to revise the dated Multicultural Counseling Competencies (MCC) developed in 1982 (Ratts, Singh, NassarMcMillan, Butler, & McCullough, 2016). The MSJCC now addresses the roles of advocacy, social justice, and privileged and oppressed identities and their impact on the multicultural counseling relationship (Ratts et al.), and coverage of these important topics is expected in counselor preparation programs. For this study, the researcher examined three different models of delivering a multicultural counseling class (i.e., didactic, experiential, and community service learning focused) to determine the impact on the ratings of counselors-in-training on perceived multicultural awareness, knowledge, skills, and counseling relationship; social justice advocacy readiness; and levels of perceived privilege. Sixty graduate-level counseling and psychology students completed one of three weekend format multicultural counseling courses with distinctly different pedagogical approaches. Due to low power, mean differences and partial eta squared were conducted to indicate the size of the v difference between participants who had received the different pedagogies. There were no statistically significant differences between the three pedagogical approaches for the independent dimensions of MSJCC. The variables of multicultural counseling relationship, levels of privilege, multicultural skills, and social justice advocacy provided large to medium effect sizes, emphasizing large to medium differences between pedagogical groups for this sample. Conversely, both multicultural awareness and multicultural knowledge produced small effect sizes, further emphasizing minimal difference between groups for this sample. The present study provides practical significance towards the intentional use of multicultural pedagogy. Counselor Educators must decide the best use of pedagogy in cultivating multicultural competency. This intentional selection incorporates a focus on the learning environment, delivery of content, and the process of knowledge acquisition. The findings suggest that students benefit from each of the methods and each provides its own strengths and limitations. It may be that utilizing all three offers a way to counteract the inherent weaknesses and highlight the strengths of each.

Keywords

Multicultural competency, Pedagogy, Social justice advocacy

Extent

221 pages

Local Identifiers

Killian_unco_0161D_10579

Rights Statement

Copyright is held by the author.

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