Incorporating Multicultural Learning in Clinically-Based Education in the United States

Abstract

This study attempted to explore and clarify the ambiguity surrounding cultural concepts, broaden and deepen the current understanding of cultural competency, and operationalize its core components in multicultural education in the United States. The research findings presented in this study were organized into three overarching themes: Level I: knowledge development; Level II: integrative processes; and Level III: practice evaluation. The findings contributed to the formulation of levels in multicultural learning and to the specification of core cultural components in clinical practice.

Keywords:

• Clinical Competence
• Multicultural Education
• Cultural Competence
• Culturally Competent Practice
• Process-Learning Approach

Notes

^[1] According to the National Association of Social Workers (NASW, 2001), clinical social work is defined as the social workers possessing ‘knowledge of one or more theories of human development within a psychosocial context and practice the professional application of social work theory and methods to treat and prevent psychosocial dysfunction, disability, or impairment, including emotional and mental disorders’.

^[2] The terms emic and etic, from phonemic and phonetic analyses in linguistics, describe the rules of language in separating general from specific aspects: ‘The basic problem facing counselors is how to describe behavior in terms that are true to a particular culture while at the same time comparing those behaviors with a similar pattern in one or more other cultures’ (Pedersen, 1994, p. 16).

^[3] The standardized clients are trained to display certain behaviors or present certain symptoms for a medical resident to respond to, question, and formulate diagnoses. Standardized clients can be trained to a very high level of reliability because they perform similarly for different practitioners.

^[4] Clinical and cultural integration is to incorporate an etic (general/universal) intervention and an emic (cultural-specific) method to generate integrative knowledge and skills to successfully achieve acceptable levels of multicultural counseling.