Lang, S. K. W. and Gardiner, B. D. (2014). As they like it – culture-centred counsellor education in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand: A play on bicultural pluralism. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 42 (1), 73–85. doi.org./10.1080/03069885.2013.824949

ABSTRACT

In their article, Lang and Gardiner draw support from the Treaty of Waitangi to deconstruct cultural dominance and reconstruct a framework, which promotes bicultural pluralism in the new counsellor education programme at the Massey University. However, they omit significant details of the Treaty and therefore mislead the audience to think that the Treaty has always served its purpose to protect Māori and the colonisers all the time. They develop a new counselling framework ‘ARC = Attend Reflect Collaborate’ which merely describes what has happened or what should have happened in counselling. It fails to address the need to raise a counsellor's awareness of his or her own cultural identity and understanding of the worldview of a culturally different client before counselling starts.

KEYWORDS:

• Treaty of Waitangi
• culture-centred counselling
• cultural sensitivity
• counsellor's cultural identity
• understandings of client's culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Helen Au Yeung is a Research Administrator in the Faculty of Social and Health Sciences at the Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand. She studied Philosophy in New Zealand, Teaching English as a Second Language in Canada, Social Work as well as Public and Social Administration in Hong Kong.

Notes

1. According to Orange (2014), the first colonial parliament established in 1853 started to exercise authority in the whole country for the first time but it excluded Māori from political participation at a national level. The parliament, as a political arena which allows direct participation in decision-making at the highest national level, did not have any Māori members until 1868.