Understanding Unearned Privilege: An Experiential Activity for Counseling Students

Abstract

The Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development stresses the importance of counselors to develop multicultural competencies that include attitudes, knowledge, and skills. Counselor educators face the challenge of helping their students develop multicultural counseling competence including an awareness of unearned privilege. This includes a description of an experiential activity used to increase self-awareness of privilege among counseling students and includes student responses and insights gained as a result of participating in this activity.

Keywords:

• unearned privilege
• multicultural counseling competence
• counselor education
• self-awareness
• ADDRESSING framework
• relational-cultural theory
• creativity