‘I was seeing more of her’: international counselling trainees' perceived benefits of intercultural clinical practice

Abstract

Counsellor education in Britain is steadily turning into a multicultural environment. The limited relevant literature focuses on the challenges that ‘culturally different’ and international trainees may encounter. The aim of this paper is to elucidate a rarely exposed aspect of international counselling trainees' training experience, namely, the benefits they identify in practising across languages and cultures during placement. The illustration of this positive perspective is pertinent to the profession, as it expands existing knowledge on international trainees' experience of clinical practice and it challenges the prevailing conceptualisation of this situation as potentially problematic. It is argued that a shift towards a more holistic understanding of this population's counselling experiences is likely to have particularly useful implications for counsellor education and the profession more broadly.

Keywords:

• intercultural counselling
• counsellor training
• international trainees
• interpretative phenomenological analysis

Acknowledgement

This study has been supervised by Siobhan Canavan and Dr Marion Smith, whose input has been invaluable for the development of this paper. I would also like to thank Dagmar Alexander and Marlies Kustatscher for their feedback on earlier drafts. Finally, my sincere appreciation to my participants for making this study possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lorena Georgiadou received her Ph.D. in Counselling and Psychotherapy from the University of Edinburgh. She is an Honorary Fellow at the School of Health in Social Science, University of Edinburgh and a Lecturer at Edge Hill University. Her research interests include: counsellor training, international student experience, (second) language use, issues of difference and diversity and qualitative research methods.

Notes

1. In this paper, the term multicultural is used to denote the plurality of cultures (e.g. in a training programme), whereas the term ‘intercultural’, to describe a relationship, process or encounter between people from different cultures.

2. The site of the research remains confidential to protect participants’ identities. The decision to recruit from one institution aimed to maximise consistency of theoretical orientation through training, an element potentially influencing attitudes towards clients and counselling practice, as well as towards difference and intercultural experience.

3. Different language use was not strictly explored from a native/non-native English speaker perspective, but from a broader cultural/contextual point of view.

4. This design was guided by the researcher’s interest in investigating ‘different’ language use in the therapeutic environment from the perspective not only of ‘non-native English speakers’, but also of ‘native’ speakers who used English in an unfamiliar cultural context. This discussion falls beyond the scope of the present paper and is not elaborated here.

5. All participants’ names are pseudonyms.