Multicultural Counseling and Social Justice Competencies
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Councelor Values and Beliefs: Exercises

Upon completion of any of the activities aimed at increasing your cultural competence, be sure to complete a Progress Note reflecting on your experience.

The following are some suggested learning activities.

 
Cultural Genogram:

This exercise helps you develop a more thorough understanding of your own cultural background as a product, in part, of your family heritage. This, in turn, helps you to identify the origin of many of your beliefs, conscious or subconscious, and values that influence your work and life.

To begin completing a cultural genogram, click here.

 
Explore your Hidden Biases:

The Implicit Associations Test (IAT) is designed to help you identify areas in which you may have underlying preferences regarding different groups of individuals or certain characteristics. The IAT website was designed to provide the opportunity for individuals to assess conscious and unconscious preferences by measuring your reaction time in various tasks.

For further information about the IAT, click here.

 
Cultural Immersion:
The cultural immersion exercise is designed with two objectives in mind. The primary objective is for you to have an affective experience of being the only one in a cultural group that is unfamiliar to you. For people of color, this is often not a new experience. However, given our multiple identities, everyone has at least one area in which they would benefit from exposure or immersion. The following are some examples:

Heterosexual individual immersed or participating in gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered organization or activity.

Christian involved in an activity or organization of a different religious group.

A person with no identifiable physical or sensory disability participating in an activist organization made up of people who identify as persons with disabilities.

These are just some examples.

For further information regarding the specifics of this activity, click here.

 
Self Assessment Using the ADDRESSING Framework
(adapted from Hays, 2001, and expanded by Rebecca Toporek)

This activity is an individual assessment of different aspects of your identity, background, experiences of privilege and oppression and how these influence your work as a human service provider. This is a somewhat solitary activity but you may gain more from it by consulting those who may be able to provide insight or observations of you.

To view the exercise, click here.

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©Rebecca L. Toporek (2008)