COU-730 Social and Cultural Diversity Foundations & Multicultural Counseling

Course Overview

This course is designed for students’ personal and professional development in the area of social and cultural diversity awareness development and multicultural counseling. Effective and meaningful multicultural work with culturally diverse clients/groups/communities requires helping professionals to develop a continuing awareness of self; increased knowledge and practical understanding of others’ world-views; and an ever changing and evolving skill set for effective engagement with diverse individuals/populations. Throughout the course students will begin to develop their own ”cultural portfolios” through the activities and experiences in and outside of the classroom setting that have been designed to draw out personal thought, reflection, evaluation-re-evaluation, and interpersonal dialogue on related issues of cultural relevance and social justice work as a helping professional. This course will facilitate deeper awareness, broader knowledge and understanding, and provide a framework to developing multicultural competence as a counselor all the while addressing the impact of culture and power on an individual, his/her family, community, organizational structures and systems of power that reflect culture. The course takes a meta model approach to identity, and views people as being multifaceted and members of multiple cultural/language groups including but not limited to race, ethnicity, religious diversity, disability, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, age, language, education, and much more. Throughout the course, there is considerable use of experiential learning exercises including individual, pair, small and large group dialogue and activity in and outside of class, regular reading, didactic teaching of theoretical concepts, frameworks, and practices, gust presentation and use of media reflect the teaching approaches.