Paul pedersen multicultural competence model

Cultural Competence

Read the “Multicultural Competence, Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills” transcript in the attachment

Create a cultural competence assessment tool for human services professionals.

Include an introduction to the tool that discusses cultural issues and how they relate to the delivery of service. The tool should contain 30 original items that will be used to assess a human services professional’s knowledge, skills, and experience regarding multicultural factors in human services.

MICROTRAINING ASSOCIATES (888)505-5576 www.emicrotraining.com MICROTRAINING ASSOCIATES PRESENTS Multicultural Competence: Awareness, Knowledge and Skills Paul B. Pedersen Professor Emeritus Syracuse University Visiting Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii

Paul B. Pedersen All behaviors are learned and displayed in a cultural context. Therefore, accurate assessment, meaningful understanding, and appropriate intervention, are the, the foundations of confidence require awareness to that multicultural context. The best multicultural competencies, the basic multicultural competencies have been best described in a book by Derald Wing Sue, 1998 called the "Multicultural Counseling Competencies: Individual and Organizational Development." The three, the 34 competencies described in that book had been described in three dimensions that could be summarized as follows: First dimension, the awareness to mention, counselors' awareness of their own assumptions, values and basic, ah, biases. That means awareness of cultural heritage, awareness of their own limits and working with, ah, different cultures. Knowing about oppression, racism, discrimination as it exists and being skilled in self-improvement in changing those assumptions into a direction that they want to change to. Second dimension is understanding the world view of the culturally different client. The second dimension focuses on knowledge, facts, information that the counselor must have to be competent in another culture. It involves awareness of emotional reactions towards other racial ethnic groups, knowing the culture of the client's population and its influence on counseling and society and being skilled in mental health issues of other cultures and actively involved with other, in minority groups. The third dimension is the skill dimension, developing appropriate intervention strategies and techniques. This dimension involves awareness of religious and spiritual indigenous mental health resources. What are the resources in each cultural context in the culture of each client that is, ah, being served? Knowing how counseling fits with other cultures, institutions and assessments and being skilled in culturally appropriate counseling of indigenous people. So, the way they work with this client is going to be significantly different from the way they work with these other culturally different client. This presentation will be available to the viewer, you the viewer in a hand-out, in a, in a script that you could follow as we talk. And as, ah, the information that we cover will be a, available in this Multicultural Handbook For Developing Multicultural Awareness, Third Edition, from the American Counseling Association in Alexandria, Virginia. Okay let's start with, okay let's start with the first, the awareness training, awareness indicators. What are the indicators of multicultural self-awareness? First, familiarity with culture and language. Language is very important. Interest in and sensitivity to other cultures. It's not enough to just know. You need to be motivated to do something with that knowledge. Awareness of the myths and stereotypes, concern for the welfare of the people in those other cultures. Ability to articulate your own culture so that you can articulate what you believe in. Appreciation for the importance of cultural orientation. Awareness of the relationship between cultural groups among themselves. Knowing how culture influences the psychological process. Recognizing the limits of cultural expertise; and being comfortable, so that you are able to accommodate all of these different cultural groups in our society. And so be comfortable. I often talk to mystudents and say that, ah, culture is the 1,000 people that are sitting in your lap that you've collected all over a lifetime. Of friends, enemies, ah, mentors, mentees,fantasies, and these are your culture, these 1,000 people as they speak to you.Multicultural awareness has been, become popular for several reasons. First, there is a, what, growing interest in what other third world developing countries are doing in terms of psychological support; There's a search for a postcolonial of, a global or perhaps even a post-global future in ah, ah, how society is organized. Ah, internationalization has become more popular. The radicalization of third world has become more prevalent. There's ah, been a paradigm shift in the sciences that no one can quite, ah, understand but everyone agrees that there has been a big change. And activists from the 60's are now what, in control of the developing country in the post-World War II world that we, ah, that we've grown up in. There's more interdisciplinary cooperation across disciplines. There's accelerated migrations resulting from technology. Increased transfer of science and technology and the absence of a World War that gives us the luxury to try and focus on awareness, increasing our awareness of people from other cultures. If you have questions as we go along please don't hesitate. Cultural exclusion is also popular and there's a lot of, of, of works in a variety of ways to make the world seem more simple. Biased evaluations with unflattering comparisons where you make yourself feel better by making others feel bad. Derogation, disparagement and de, de, ah, denigration. We've got dissing, when they talk about dissing in other cultures. It, it's making them, putting them down in order to increase your own status. Dehumanizing. If you could make the enemy, the outsider, less than human then it doesn't matter what people do to it. They have no rights. Fear of contamination and threat as though they, they're being strangers and outsiders as catchy and contagious. Redefining the outsiders as a legitimate enemies as Hitler did in Nazi Germany.Acceleration of harm-doing and des, with destructive acts where you gene, having justified that you're being destructive towards the other people then you are able to become still more destructive. Approving and condoning destructive behavior or at least not standing up for the rights of people that are being victimized. In the name of objectivity, counseling's probably the most guilty of this, okay? Presuming that an objective counselor would not advocate, would not take an active role, they would be distanced by their objectivity and this is a problem when you're working with multicultural clients. Blame the victim. That's been, a lot have been, a lot have been written on that in terms of women and women's rights where they ah, a, ah, ah, there's a tendency to blame the victim for being a victim. Rape victims often encounter that kind of, of, ah, ah exclusion. Making self-righteous comparisons to justify retaliation. Ah, then desecrating others to demonstrate your contempt for anyone who is not the same as you. There are certain, there are social consequences to these examples of cultural exclusion, and cultural exclusion is the opposite of multicultural as we're using it. There's group think where you force the group to think as though they were one person. There's de-individualization to replacing ethical standards where you don't deal with the unique and co, especially complicated situation of the individual. You treat everybody alike which is a, an example of racism itself. Psychological distancing, ah, unflattering comparisons as a result of exclusion. Double standards, dependency on technology, simple answers could be a test that will help me know exactly what to do so I don't have to worry about this ambiguity. Euphemisms to give respectability to those that are doing harm. "No, I was only following orders. I, I follow the rules, even the rules of ethics of our professional organizations," that's not enough. That won't get you off the hook. Displacing and diffusing responsibility, "It's not my fault. I didn't do anything. I didn't have slaves. So, why should they get after me for being, for slavery?"Concealing the effects of exclusion, you know, everything is fine. You can't help your being different and, ah, ah, the world is going along with "There's no need to make any changes" would be an example of that. Glorifying and normalizing violence. TV is the best example of that. Watchers, listen to yourself as you watch violence on TV. It's like a narcotic. It, it, and TV, the media has glorified violence to an enormous extent especially in recent years. And temporal containment and a short-term perspective. Nobody wants to hear long-term answers. Everybody wants to focus on short-term answers. Uhm, I've, I've been looking at multiculturalism as a fourth force in dealing with, in trying to describe the impact, sort of like of, threedimensional space is interpreted through the fourth dimension of time. Ah, the, while the three dimensions of, you know, psychology or of counseling, the humanistic, the, uhm, behavioristic, and the phenomenological is of, ah, are examples of where a fourth dimension of multiculturalism can give additional meaning to these standard typical conventional theories of, ah, Psychology.

Kimberly Wagner Uh-huh.

Paul B. Pedersen Okay, we know that change is happening. We don't know what direction it's in. We know that there is change happening. We know that multiculturalism is a power, become a very powerful force. We know, in some countries, Australia, perhaps, ah, South Africa, for sure, multiculturalism has been used to justify oppression. So it's not always used the same way. We know that multiculturalism that are maybe a little pre-mature to declare multiculturalism as a fourth force. We not, we may not be there yet, even though we're headed in that direction. We know that the U.S. version of multiculturalism is very individualistic.

Shelly Savage Uh-huh.

Paul B. Pedersen We know that culture is being defined broadly to include not just ethnographic variables, but demographic variables such as age, gender, place of residence, status variables such as social status, economic status, educational status and affiliation variables such as formal affiliations to your family, to your church, to your, ah, notion of who you are and informal affiliations to an idea you believe in.We know that multiculturalism tries and threatens to change not just the process but the very way we think about the process of counseling and mental health. We know that attacks on multiculturalism has increased, indicating to some extent that the growing power of multiculturalism that it's attracted those kinds of attacks andenemies. We know that the, ah, glor, goal of multiculturalism is not to weaken psychology, not to compete with anybody but to strengthen all theories ofpsychology, all theories of counseling. So that by making culture central rather than marginal, they will become more efficient and more effective. We know that tolerance of ambiguity has replaced distance reduction in psychology. It used to be the role of psychology in counseling, used to be to make things simple. The new role of psychology in counseling is to increase people's ability to deal with, with ambiguity. Now, there are a number of ways in which this culture-centered perspective has an upside, has a very positive advantage, for the, ah, society in general. First is accuracy and assessments, as I've mentioned when we started this lecture. Second is common ground conflict management. Where if you can find common ground, you can more easily manage the conflict between people. If you could reframed the conflict between a parent and that child, parent's child into a cultural framework, it'll be easier for the parent and the child to find common ground, to disagree without either one being wrong, just different. Identity, cultured, ah, culture-centered perspective gives us identity, these thousand people that are sitting in your lap. Health and ecosystem, we know that, uhm, ah, diversified ecosystem deals with presolves(ph), ah, results in a healthy society, a healthy ecology. The same is true in psychology. Diversity increases, not decreases, our health. Protection from ourselves, protection from encapsulation, from building walls around ourselves and pretending that those are the, whole world is inside those walls. Survival in the future, so that we know if the future is probably beyond our imagination and how do you get ready to work for the future that's beyond your imagination? You seek out people who are different from yourself. And in the process of seeking out people who will think different, act different, dress different, talk different, you'll develop the facility of dealing with this an unimaginable future that we're looking at. Social justice, every example where one culture has dominated society has resulted in social injustice. Multiculturalism is essential for achieving social justice in society. Life-thinking process. By taking a multicultural, cultural- centered perspective, it becomes possible to not just change the content of your thinking, but change the very way that you're thinking, from a purely linearly, linear, to either a linear or a non-linear perspective. It changes the, the very way that you put ideas together. Learning from life. (crosstalk)

Shelly Savage Can you talk... (crosstalk)

Paul B. Pedersen Yeah? (crosstalk)

Shelly Savage ...a little bit more about the life-thinking process? (crosstalk)

Paul B. Pedersen Okay. We've been trained, anybody that's found their way through graduate school knows the importance of linear thinking, cause, effects, straight-line thinking and the, that, if you can't do that, then you will, you'll, you'll be graded down.

Shelly Savage Uh hmm. (crosstalk)

Paul B. Pedersen You'll, will never get through graduate school. The problem is, that most of the world's population doesn't think like that. The yin yang symbol of light and darkness let, does, that light, does light cause darkness? Does darkness cause light?

Shelly Savage Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Paul B. Pedersen Neither one is true. The majority of the world's population it thinks in non-linear terms and we are not trained to do that. So by... (crosstalk)

Shelly Savage Yeah. (crosstalk)

Paul B. Pedersen taking a culture-centered perspective it changes, not just the content of our thinking, but the very process of thinking itself. Also, it, learning fromlife, is that every learning experience is a culture shock experience, and as you learn to, ah, deal with that culture shock, you will become more, more able to learn from your experiences. Political stability and pluralism, the only three choices we've got politically, are, auto, are, are dictatorship, chaos or pluralism. We've seen dictatorships come and go. We've seen chaos come and go. We've still have not actually achieved a plural society but we're working on it. We're working on trying to achieve a culture-centered plural society. And finally, the upside of taking a culture-centered perspective is good psychology, good counseling. What we're working toward here is not training people to be multicultural counselors. What we're toward, working toward is training people to be good counselors. You'll see on the handout that you have as the, you are watching this video, a "cultural grid" that in a sense, gives you a visual, ah, visual image of what I've been talking about. You start with what somebody did. Then you move to why they did it, why did this person do, why did this kid punch out another kid at two in the afternoon? And finally, where did they learn to do it? And there on the left-hand side you'll see some of those one thousand people, the family relations, the power relationships, the memberships and the non-family relationships. So that in your own mind, you start with what the person did, then you move to why they did it, then thirdly, you move to where did they learn it. And only when you've run that sequence, can you start to do counseling in the cultural context. (coughs) Okay, the second, the second dimension is the knowledge dimension. But. (crosstalk)

Kimberly Wagner Can I ask one? (crosstalk)

Paul B. Pedersen Oh yes, please.

Kimberly Wagner A question of awareness. How can training programs help the trainees, encourage them to engage in more self-awareness activities and reflection, those kinds of things, which aren't necessarily given...

Paul B. Pedersen Okay. (crosstalk)

Kimberly Wagner ...a lot of credit?

Paul B. Pedersen How can you help your trainees, ah, engage in self-awareness activities? Often, my students, well, they'll come into class after about, ah, third of the class is over and they'll say, "Have you noticed the newspaper?" And I said, "No, what?" "The newspaper is suddenly, it's full of multicultural stuff! It never used to be. Suddenly, all the articles are about multiculturalism." The experiences are all there. Where, you can't avoid multicultural experiences. They've been there as long as society has been organized. The trick is, to help them analyze those sit,situations, their daily experiences, from a culture-centered perspective. Not tooverlook, trivialize, or minimalize the culture. So, you, they don't have to do any new experiences. Their all, their regular daily experiences are just fine, as long as they're aware of how culture shapes those experiences.

Kimberly Wagner Uh-huh.

Paul B. Pedersen Okay, the second, ah, section looks at knowledge or perhaps comprehension, not just passive knowledge but knowledge that is understood. And indicators of that are first, specific knowledge about the target pop, population you're working with. Second, understanding what adjustment process, how that occurs differently in each culture group. Third, understanding your own cultural experiences, and what are the facts and information that you need to understand yourself? Fourth, developing an educational background around culture. Five, understanding the importance of socioeconomic pressures. What makes socioeconomic pressures so dangerous is that they're often coincide with other ethnic and cultural differences. So it may appear to be a cultural problem, when in fact, it's a sociopolitical, economic problem. Comprehending the range of cultural values and attitudes. Complexity is your friend. Being able to give multiple interpretations of the same behavior. Appreciating the customs and language of other cultures, valuing other learning, thinking, and communication styles, identifying resources that are available in another cultures, just waiting for you to go and see them, resource people, resource agencies, resource places, just going there to listen and watch. Understanding the relationships between different cultures, being expert in their own field and discipline and mobilizing the training resources, which what I was talking about with you, Kimberly, ah, for continued learning. Everything is learning, life is learning if you're, ah, tuned to learn from it. There are a lot of things about multiculturalism that can be learned that cannot be taught. I cannot teach you how to become multicultural awareness but it's possible for you to learn that. Okay, cultural similarities and differences are a good place to start. No matter how different the person or group is, there will be similarities. No matter how similar the group or person is, there will be differences. I teach my students to become cross-eyed, so they'll see clearly. One eye focused on differences, the other eye, at the very same, time focused on similarities. So that culture is the part of life that people make to become aware of the similarities and differences within a group on those, that part, which people construct. Ideas transmitted from one generation to another, traditions, childhood experiences,socialization, patterns of concepts, of practices, occasional variation in cons, consistent patterns, resistance to permanent change. These are all indicators of, of, ah, factors that you need to look at as you increase your knowledge, your multicultural knowledge. Probably, ah, a shortcut for the understanding how culture affects your life is to look at culturally biased assumptions. I've come up with ten that I think are pretty typical of most counseling textbooks. First, a unimodal dimension of what is normal. What, ah, that, ah, that there is some presumed normal that applies to everybody. Second, individualism is the preferred perspective. People, if we use I and me a lot. Third, narrowly defined professional boundaries so that counselors not, be, not monkey around the stuff, that's not counseling, which is unfortunate because the client comes in unconstrained. The problem is unconstrained by these boundaries. Why should the counselor be constrained by those disciplinary professional boundaries? We'll talk about that in a minute. Low context as, abstractions tend to be more, the more abstract I am, the more sophisticated I am and if you can't understand the thing I say then I must be very sophisticated.

Shelly Savage Uh hmm.

Paul B. Pedersen The problem is, that most of the world's culture is high context. Where if I say, "Is it good? Is it bad?" They say, "Well I don't know." And I say, "Well, his mother, he takes care of his elderly mother." And he said, "Oh, well then he's good." I've now taken it out of the abstract and put it in a con, in a context.Dependency is bad. If someone is dependent, we've been trained to make them be more pen, more independent but in most cultures, dependency is not only good but it's essential. They see independency as a rampant disease, as dangerous as AIDS or any other social, social disease. Support systems are not relevant. We tend to ignore those thousand people. Who are the thousand people that are sitting in your lap?Who are the thousand people sitting in your client's lap? We tend to ignore them and, ah, even though they're speaking much more loudly than we are. Rational thinking is always linear. We always, what you are talking about, Shelly, was, we're always thinking linear terms and we believe the whole rest of the world does too. It's not true. The whole rest of the world does not follow the same guidelines we're thinking that we do. Change the client and change, then protect the system. Even if we know the client is right and the system is wrong, we still are trained as counselors to protect the system against the client. History is not relevant. Some kid comes in. He's punched some other kid out. Sits down, I've got ten minutes before class. He says, "Before we start, I've got to tell you about this, 500 years my people have been in this country." I say, "Hey, I don't have time for that. Let's just go the, this afternoon when you punched this other kid out." We don't acknowledge history. And most cultures believe you cannot be civilized unless you begin with the history and the historical understanding. And finally, we assume that we already know all of our assumptions. That's the most dangerous law. Understanding culture encapsulation, Gilbert Wrenn talked about culture encapsulation law according to, where you define reality according to one and one only set of assumptions. People become insensitive to cultural variations among individuals. People assume their only view, of their own views are the only right views, and assumptions are not dependent on reasonable proof. "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts," kind of thing. It's more alive and healthy than we'd like to believe. And finally, individuals judge everyone else from their own self-reference criteria. We've been brought up to say, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." What if they don't want done unto them like you want done unto you? Should you do it unto them, anyway? Probably, not. In order to deal with some of these standard biases, there's a book by Sue, Ivey, and Pederson on multicultural counseling theory that has six different sections in it. Well, we attempt to develop a multicultural theory. First, Western and non-Western theories are different. Second, counseling must focus complex relationships without simplification. Complexity is your friend, not your enemy. If you can make yourself believe that you'll live longer, you'll be healthier, you'll, ah, drive nicer cars, and you'll live in nicer houses. Good things will happen to you if you can make yourself believe that complexity is your friend, not your enemy. Uhm, thirdly, cultural identities of the counselor and client influence counseling. So you need to be aware not only of the client's cultural identity and those thousand people the client brings in to the room but the thousand people the counselor brings in also. And if you believe that when you entered and sit down with your client, there are only two people in the room, you're already in trouble.

Shelly Savage Even if you share the same racial ethnic identity?

Paul B. Pedersen Oh, yes. That, the, the, the difficulty with subtle differences is you presume. Another Black female might say, "Well, we're the same." And you might say, "I'll say we're not," you know, because some, some socioeconomic difference, some other age difference, some, ah, anyone of, ah, million other thingsmight become more salient for you than it is for them.

Shelly Savage Uh hmm. (crosstalk)

Paul B. Pedersen So, subtle differences, subtle cultural differences tend to be overlooked.

Shelly Savage Uh hmm. (crosstalk)

Paul B. Pedersen That's why all counseling is multicultural. I can't imagine a counseling interview that's not multicultural. 'Coz no matter how similar people are, there are differences. Does that help?

Shelly Savage Uh-huh, yeah.

Paul B. Pedersen Uhm, the ultimate goal of a culture-centered approach is an expanded repertoire. So that you have this, the way of, of reaching people from a variety of different cultures. Conventional models of counseling are de, rejected by many cultures. Talk therapy is after all an exotic form in the world, world scale. Mostcultures, most people say, "You would have to be crazy to go to a stranger and spill your family secrets." That, that would be pathology by itself. And finally, the sixth area in this counseling theory that we developed, is an expanded consciousness of the cultural context and how that is primary to counseling. One of my pet, peevesas another application of the need to become more, more, ah, ah, culturally sensitive and culturally competent is cultural biases in the ethical guidelines. Let me list off some of the guidelines, some of the biases that I think, are existing in the present ethical guidelines. First of all, it takes an individualistic perspective. Secondly, it says dependency is bad. Thirdly, it presumes that freedom of choice is not ever destructive. In some cases, freedom of choice can be very destructive to your client. Fourth, differences should be overlooked in the name of finding common ground. Those differences might be essential to that client and they don't want you to overlook the differences. Counsels pre, ah, fifth, counselors already have a self-awareness. There's a hard data that demonstrate the counselors do not have a multicultural self-awareness. Sixth, dual relationships are bad. Most cultures believe that only if you have a dual relationship, could you ever be sought out withmeaningfully by a client for counseling, that not only are dual relationship is good, in some cultures, they're essential for the counselor. Seventh, cultures are, counselors should withdraw from conflict, not advocate for their clients. And most clients say, "Well, then why are you here? Why am I coming to you if you're not willing to take my side, if you see that I'm being treated wrong and you're not willing to do anything about it, then what use are you?" Services should be paid for with money. We assume of money, money for, ah, society. We assume that privacy is universally valued, when it's not. We assume there are universal guidelines for competence, when there were not. Each cultural context has its own definition of what is competence. We assume that counseling is narrowly defined to a very, ah, to a single profession when it, ah, is much broader than that. We assume that quantitative data is better than qualitative data. We assume in the ethical guidelines that measures, some measures do not always require validation, don't require proof. They're simply true because they're true. We assume that teachers don't learn from students. And then this teacher that thinks they've not learned from students has not been paying attention. We assume there is no allowance for responsible disobedience. It's that, what do you do if you're stuck in a barn(ph), do, you have to either follow the ethical guidelines or do what you think is ethically right. What do you do then? The ethical guidelines don't give us any help. So these are applications of multicultural knowledge. The third section that I wanted to cover is multicultural skill. Multicultural skill presumes the presence of several factors. Appropriate cultural teaching, service techniques, appropriate learning styles, ability to establish empathic rapport or relationships. Empathy becomes kind of like the doorway to couns, to multicultural counseling. That's really all that multicultural counseling and training is trying to do, is it increase levels of empathy. Skills to design and use feedback, ability to evaluate accurately, accuracy in multicultural context, back to that over at accuracy, ability to develop new and original methods as you work with new and original clients, accurate assessment skills, meaningful understanding skills, appropriate intervention skills, self assessment skills. These are all important, essential if you're going to do the right thing. Otherwise, some programs overemphasize knowledge and, ah, overemphasize awareness and students come to me and say, "What do I do with all this awareness? I'm frustrated." Others overemphasize knowledge and they come to me and say, "What do I do with all these facts and information because I lack awareness and skill?" Others, the most dangerous, overemphasize skill. They turn out people able to change lives. But those people, those students, those graduates come to me and say, "Sure, I can change a person's life but I never know if I'm making things better or making things worse."So the, the three levels, awareness, knowledge and skill are essential. And skill is the third. Six basic approaches to multicultural skill training are classroom model, attributional training, laboratory model, cultural awareness training on the street, just walking down the street and paying attention is a form of multicultural training, skill training, cognitive-behavioral modification, going inside yourself, listening to your own internal dialogue, listening to yourself think. Ah, Young and Adler and a variety of our heroes invented teachers that they said were the best teachers they've ever had. Experiential learning and face to face contact, inter, interactional approaches, every interaction becomes a learning experience. One of the things that's characteristic of all these approaches that I think is important is complexity. Complexity in skill training involves several features, ten factors. One is looking at conflicting points of view, being able to see two different points of view at the same time, how this is right and wrong at the same time. Conflicting viewpoints between persons, conflicting viewpoints within the person, being able to take the perspective, accurately take the perspective of other people, listening and storing information for later so that timing is everything, shifting topics appropriately, specific and accurate labeling of feelings, identifying appropriate evaluation criteria, generating unique insights, avoiding simple solutions. These are all examples of how complexity becomes important in the cultural context. Another important word along with complexity is balance. If balance to me indicates a lot about what competency is at the skill level. Balance is, what are the positive aspects of negative? What are the negative aspects of positive? What are the integration of positive and negatives in order to achieve meaning? A life without pain is a life without meaning. So, it's not only a two-directional perspective. It's not just making people feel better and be happy. Two-directional's perspective recognizing the, the importance of both pain and pleasure, ah, sensitivity to influences by collective forces, avoiding side-taking and monological, ah, mon, monological perspectives, sensitivity to changing power levels, sensitivity to changing power levels across cultures who, not only is culture, cul, multicultural counseling complex but it's changing, it's very dynamic. You need to become sensitive to those changing power roles, ability to adjust the power, so that you're not coming too on strong, not coming on too weak. And as the client becomes stronger, you back off. As the client becomes weaker, you move in. Knowing how to that. Knowing what is the right amount of power. And the third word that I like, along with complexity and balance is harmony. Uhm, okay, now, the skills, part of the skill problem in counseling is that we focus on a formal method and a formal context. But most of the world provides counseling in formal-informal methods, and formal-informal context. So if you take a formal, non-formal, informalmethod, a formal-informal method by formal-informal context, you have a table of it, at least a two by two, probably a three by three. So that formal method, a formalcontext is the office interview. We all know about that. Formal method, non-formal context is community service. Formal method, informal context is simply giving advice. Non-formal method, formal context is training, like what we're doing right now. Non-formal method, non-formal context is support groups. Non-formal method, informal context is self-help. Informal method, formal context is presentations. Informal method, non-formal context is the help you get from family and friends. Informal method, informal context is daily encounters. My point is this, is that, is the opportunity to practice culture-centered counseling skills in a many variety of ways besides talk therapy. And, ah, everything from walking down the street with someone, carrying on a conversation, to, ah, simply sitting down ah, with them in silence. It's not, talk therapy, it's far, far exaggerated in terms of its global applicability. We need to find other ways of doing counseling that fit the needs of other clients. In order to do that, I've come up with a figure called the Cultural Grid. Looking at between persons, the interaction between persons, that has four, you have a copy of it on your handout. It has four cells in it. First cell is positive expectation and positive behavior. That's a harmony cell. That's a happy time but nothing really happens there. Both people expect friendliness and both people are smiling. It's a good feeling to, ah, it's a pleasant place to be but very little learning takes place in that cell. The second cell is same behavior, same positive expectation but different behavior, same expectation but different behavior. This is the most important cell of the whole figure. This is where learning occurs. Two people whobelieve and trust the same with one another but their behaviors are different. The temptation is to force the other person, the stronger, to force the other person to behave like you do. To, we have very little tolerance for people who behavedifferently than we do. We say, "Well, you obviously don't want to be my friend 'coz you act like my enemy." So that if one's, person's style is direct and the other indirect, the likelihood of them being friends is very difficult. But perhaps, if you think of your best friend, best friend you've ever had in the world and ask yourself of that best friend looks like you, thinks like you, talks like you, acts like you. You'll probably say no but because they're your best friend you are willing not only to overlook those differences but those differences actually enliven and make that relationship more powerful. So, cell two is where the learning occurs. That's the most important. Cell three is where we often end up. If we, don't tolerate the different behavior and we force the other person to behave like we want them to behave. And they do but forget friendliness at that point. They'll pretend to be our friend but they've, we've lost the positive expectation because we forced them to behave in the way that we want them to behave. And the, the temptation, especially in counseling, is to simply focus on the behavior out of context and think that if we change behaviors, we've done something. Even hold a gun to somebody'shead and they'll change their behavior, there's no trick to changing behavior. It's very easy but it has no meaning if you've lost the shared common ground, positive expectations. And the last is where everybody has given up on pretending. The last cell is war, where you, the two people are now in, over at conflict, they don't I even want to like one another. All they wanna do is hurt one another and that's where most conflict ends up. The trick of multicultural competence, the importance of skill in multicultural competency is to capture all conflict in cell two, where people, where we're confident they have some, to some extent, the shared positive expectations for respect, for trust, for, for friendliness, even though their behaviors might be different than what we expect the, from our other friends. That's where learning occurs. That's your positive, you, you build common ground by focusing on the shared positive expectations like building a platform with different planks and when that platform get strong enough that both you and the client can stand on it, thenyou can talk about the differences. Then you could deal with the differences. You do deal with them but not until you've established the common ground of shared positive expectations and in the, in the meantime that you've tolerated those cultural differences in behavior. So these are the three levels. Awareness, knowledge and skill of multicultural competence as I see them and some applications of that three-level model, the multicultural three-step to, ah, awareness and knowledge and skill in the practice of counseling. I hope this has been useful. Thank you very much.

Participants Hispanic male: Gerardo Torres Caucasian female: Kimberly Wagner Asian American male: Jarrett M. Horibata African American female: Shelly Savage Videographer Josh Johnson Editing Bruce Oldershaw Edward Murch Copyright 2004 Paul B. Pedersen, Ph.D.