VISTAS Online is an innovative publication produced for the American Counseling Association by Dr. Garry R. Walz and Dr. Jeanne C. Bleuer of Counseling Outfitters, LLC. Its purpose is to provide a means of capturing the ideas, information and experiences generated by the annual ACA Conference and selected ACA Division Conferences. Papers on a program or practice that has been validated through research or experience may also be submitted. This digital collection of peer-reviewed articles is authored by counselors, for counselors. VISTAS Online contains the full text of over 500 proprietary counseling articles published from 2004 to present. VISTAS articles and ACA Digests are located in the ACA Online Library. To access the ACA Online Library, go to http://www.counseling.org/ and scroll down to the LIBRARY tab on the left of the homepage. n Under the Start Your Search Now box, you may search by author, title and key words. n The ACA Online Library is a member’s only benefit. You can join today via the web: counseling.org and via the phone: 800-347-6647 x222. Vistas™ is commissioned by and is property of the American Counseling Association, 5999 Stevenson Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304. No part of Vistas™ may be reproduced without express permission of the American Counseling Association. All rights reserved. Join ACA at: http://www.counseling.org/ VISTAS Online
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Immersion Into Faith and Culture: A Means of … APA style reference: Rehfuss, M. C., Parks-Savage, A., & Malone, A. (2011). Immersion into faith and culture: A means of developing
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VISTAS Online is an innovative publication produced for the American Counseling Association by Dr. Garry R. Walz and Dr. Jeanne C. Bleuer of Counseling Outfitters, LLC. Its purpose is to provide a means of capturing the ideas, information and experiences generated by the annual ACA Conference and selected ACA Division Conferences. Papers on a program or practice that has been validated through research or experience may also be submitted. This digital collection of peer-reviewed articles is authored by counselors, for counselors. VISTAS Online contains the full text of over 500 proprietary counseling articles published from 2004 to present.
VISTAS articles and ACA Digests are located in the ACA Online Library. To access the ACA Online Library, go to http://www.counseling.org/ and scroll down to the LIBRARY tab on the left of the homepage.
n Under the Start Your Search Now box, you may search by author, title and key words.
n The ACA Online Library is a member’s only benefit. You can join today via the web: counseling.org and via the phone: 800-347-6647 x222.
Vistas™ is commissioned by and is property of the American Counseling Association, 5999 Stevenson Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304. No part of Vistas™ may be reproduced without express permission of the American Counseling Association. All rights reserved.
Join ACA at: http://www.counseling.org/
VISTAS Online
Suggested APA style reference: Rehfuss, M. C., Parks-Savage, A., & Malone, A. (2011). Immersion into faith
and culture: A means of developing multicultural counseling. Retrieved from http://counselingoutfitters.com
/vistas/vistas11/Article_71.pdf
Article 71
Immersion Into Faith and Culture: A Means of Developing
Multicultural Counseling
Mark C. Rehfuss, Agatha Parks-Savage, and Arlene Malone
Paper based on a program presented at the 2007 ACES Conference, October 13, 2007, Columbus, OH.
Rehfuss, Mark C., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Counseling and Human
Services at Old Dominion University. He is interested in teaching effectiveness, career
counseling, mental health counseling and counselor training and education. He is
licensed as a professional counselor (LPC) and is nationally credentialed as an Approved
Clinical Supervisor (ACS).
Parks-Savage, Agatha, is an Associate Professor with the Department of Family &
Community Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk, Virginia. She has
been teaching in undergraduate, masters, and doctoral level psychology and counseling
programs since 1991. She is licensed as a professional counselor (LPC) and is nationally
credentialed as an Approved Clinical Supervisor (ACS) and a forensic mental health
evaluator.
Malone, Arlene, is a graduate student in the School of Psychology & Counseling at
Regent University. She is pursuing her Master’s degree in Community Counseling, and
is actively engaged in research regarding the unique culture of the military and their
families. Her areas of interest include teaching and mental health counseling with a focus
on trauma-induced stressors and family and marital counseling.
Competencies
The rapid diversification of American society over the past two decades has
encouraged the counseling profession to recognize and address diversity in both its
practice and its training of counselors (D’Andrea, Daniels, & Heck, 1991; Heppner &
O’Brien, 1994). Yet, this demographic transformation appears to continue to pose a
challenge for counselor educators and their trainees (D’Andrea et al., 1991). A study by
Holcomb-McCoy and Myers (1999) indicated that counselors tend to view their training
in multicultural competence as inadequate. Moreover, counselor educators, though
receptive and eager to meet these challenges, are having a difficult time figuring out how
to develop comprehensive multicultural counseling competence (MCC) in their trainees
(Alexander, Krucek, & Ponterotto, 2005).
The importance of this issue to the counseling profession has been affirmed by the
Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Education Programs (CACREP)
and the American Counseling Association (ACA), as both organizations have
implemented multicultural standards that counseling training programs and counselors
are required to adhere to (Dinsmore & England, 1996; Estrada, Durlak, & Juarez, 2002).
Ideas and Research You Can Use: VISTAS 2011
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Moreover, in response to the inclusion of spiritual and religious beliefs in counseling, the
Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling (ASERVIC), a
division of ACA, developed Competencies for Integrating Spirituality into Counseling as
a guide for the counseling profession (ASERVIC, n.d.). The Spiritual Competencies
inform counselors of the prerequisites to effectively and ethically include spirituality and
religion in counseling and how to meet the ethical mandates for competency in this area
(Robertson, 2008). Consequently, course content should consist of culturally-responsive
materials that develop and foster multicultural competencies across the domains of
awareness, knowledge, and skills (Collins & Pieterse, 2007). Although these standards
have been enacted, the literature has suggested that educators are still having a difficult
time coming up with techniques that can provide trainees with the competencies needed
in multiculturalism (Alexander et al., 2005; Dinsmore & England, 1996). Although 90%
of counselor education programs address multiculturalism in their course work, the level
of training received is not significant enough to address the rapidly growing needs of
diversity (Das, 1995). For instance, although the multicultural counseling competencies
have been expanded to include other areas of diversity such as sexual orientation and
spiritual and religious beliefs, it appears the primary focus of these guidelines continues
to center around racial and ethnic issues (Constantine & Ladany, 2000). Subsequently,
the influence of a client’s faith or spirituality is typically left unaddressed or, at best,
receives only superficial attention during the intake process through a perfunctory inquiry
into the client’s religious denominational preferences (Robertson, 2008). Neglecting this
sphere of influence can pose a problem, as faith and spiritual beliefs are pervasive; “they
influence one’s worldview and are imbedded in most of life’s experiences” (Robertson,
2008, p. 27). According to Everts & Agee (1994), people typically use spiritual strategies
to manage all of life’s events. This further illuminates the necessity for counselor
education programs to provide trainees with a viable strategy for developing multicultural
competence to address the growing needs of a diverse society.
A possible explanation for this gap between training and need may have to do
with the way students retain information. The literature suggests that students in general
tend to learn more through experiential learning as opposed to simple didactic and
information-based learning (Arthur & Achenbach, 2002). This suggests that counseling
programs seeking to infuse multicultural competence in students may need to combine
instructive learning with practical experiential learning experiences (Alexander et al.,
2005).
The purpose of this article is to provide counselor educators with a multicultural
course technique that integrates an experiential activity designed to infuse issues related
to faith, spirituality and religion into counselor education; thus, facilitating the
development of professional counseling students’ multicultural competencies. The
experiential activity engages students through direct immersion, interaction, observation
and reflection. Such practical activities seem to be missing from some reports on different
approaches to multicultural counseling training and professional development (D’ Andrea
et al., 1991; Hill, 2003) although descriptions of differing types of immersions have