Abstract
Multicultural Counseling (MCC) analyzes the social forces impinging on clients’ lives to inform skillful clinical interventions that take clients’ cultural identities and experiences into account. At its best, MCC education equips students to work with clients from an array of racial and ethnic backgrounds enriched – and stratified – by gender, sexuality, citizenship status, class, and ability. Implementing MCC pedagogy at a Brooklyn, New York community college responds to many of the urgencies stemming from living and working in a multiracial city. Because these students are the up-and-coming social workers and therapists of the city’s future nonprofit, for-profit, and government social service agencies, they will serve innumerable cultural groups. However, because most MCC teaching and research is conducted with graduate-level students, community college needs for multicultural counseling competence are left unaddressed. A participatory action research project asked how MCC pedagogy facilitates community college students’ ability to connect client cultures and clinical issues. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of student feedback forms in response to each other’s final presentations reveals how students make personal connections with culture manifesting in specific lives. The study further shows how students select and comprehend formal research studies in ways that contextualize lived experiences in their final presentations. Specific strategies are discussed which contributed to creating an MCC classroom that reworked dynamics of power between clients and counselors, nondominant and dominant cultural groups, and students and the professor.
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Billies, M., Heyliger, F.M.C. (2016). Personal Connection and Formal Research: Community College Students Develop Multicultural Counseling Competency. In: Schnee, E., Better, A., Clark Cummings, M. (eds) Civic Engagement Pedagogy in the Community College: Theory and Practice. Education, Equity, Economy, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22945-4_9
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