Multicultural competency building: Practical solutions for training and evaluating student progress.

TLDR

Fostering cultural competence among psychology trainees is required by national accrediting bodies, yet guidelines lack specifics on how to develop or evaluate such competence. This review offers information to fill that gap in clinical, counseling, and school psychology training literature. The authors build on Sue, Arredondo, and McDavis’s model to summarize multicultural training across four competence domains—beliefs and attitudes, knowledge, skills, and advocacy—while providing teaching tools and experiential exercises. The review supplies a quick reference of teaching tools, a menu of experiential exercises, and discusses limitations and future directions for student training.

Abstract

Fostering the development of cultural competence and responsiveness among psychology trainees is expected according to the professional standards of national accrediting bodies (Arredondo, Toporek, Brown, & Jones, 1996). However, the guidelines do not provide specifics on how to develop or evaluate such competence in trainees. This review offers information to help address that gap in clinical, counseling, and school psychology training literature. Building on the model of Sue, Arredondo, and McDavis (1992), we summarize multicultural training in the context of four domains of competence: development of multicultural beliefs and attitudes, knowledge, skills, and advocacy. We address these dimensions and provide a quick reference of teaching tools, offer a menu of experiential exercises, and discuss limitations and future directions in terms of student.