Assessing and Promoting Cultural Relativism in Students of Counseling
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Assessing and Promoting Cultural Relativism in Students of Counseling Garrett John Mcauliffe & Tim Grothaus & Margaret Jensen & Rebecca Michel
Published online: 16 December 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract Multicultural counseling is often promoted as a core element in counselor development. As such, educational efforts aim to increase counselors’ cultural relativism, or their ability to recognize their own enculturation and to appreciate the value of other cultural norms. This mixed qualitative-quantitative study explored the relationship between counselor and human service professional trainees’ moral development levels and their cultural assumptions after they had experienced a course in cultural diversity. Four themes were noted: (i) reflexivity about culture, (ii) orientation toward activism and advocacy, (iii) differences in attitudes toward sexual orientation and religion, and (iv) increased alertness to culture. Implications for culturally alert practice are discussed. Keywords Multicultural . Moral development . Cultural relativism . Counselor education This is what you shall do: reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul… (From Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855) The [culturally encapsulated] counselor, like the rest of mankind [sic], protects himself against the disturbing reality of change by the maintenance of an encapsulation within a subculture of his own… It is necessary for the counselor to examine his personal patterns of pretended reality. (Gilbert Wrenn, The Culturally Encapsulated Counselor, 1962, p. 444)
Introduction With the above words, two powerful voices of previous centuries promote cultural relativism. Indeed, they consider cultural relativism to be a foundation for a tolerant, democratic society. It is also a prerequisite for becoming a culturally competent counselor G. J. Mcauliffe (*) : T. Grothaus : M. Jensen : R. Michel Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Int J Adv Counselling (2012) 34:118–135
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(Dimmock and Walker 2005; Leach et al. 2010; Lewis 2003; Pedersen et al. 2002; Ponterotto et al. 2006; Sue and Sue 2008). The authors of this present study have attempted to realize Whitman and Wrenn’s words by creating and implementing a cultural de-centering intervention with students of counseling. In particular, we wondered whether some students were more or less mentally ready for de-centering, based on their moral development. We hoped that, with information of this kind, counselor educators could then design educational practices that might increase cultural relativism in future counselors. What is de-centering? It might best be defined in relation to its opposite; that is, ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism represents a tendency to judge all behavior from a particular cultural lens. It has been named as a problem in the field of counseling (Sue 2004). Research has found there to be a lack of cultural awareness, and the related presence of bias (Weber 1994), amon
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