Blog 8

Brown chapter 4, 5, and metacognition article:

Before I began to write the blog for this week, my dad walks in and interestingly enough starts talking to me about how he is confused about what path to take with my brother.  My brother is in his third year of college at West Virginia University.  He still has three more years to complete credit wise due to certain circumstances.  My dad’s concern is how much debt my brother will be in, without a sufficient enough payout in the end.  He could easily get the same degree from Millersville for less money.  I can relate this to step 3 of Brown’s Values-based multicultural career counseling.  The idea of occupational prestige or choosing a career path is difficult to handle.  My dad wants my brother to choose his own path, but doesn’t see any benefit to him finding it down at West Virginia right now.   

We definitely pre-judge and stereotype people even if we don’t want to or do it at an unconscious level.  I have served at restaurants for a majority of my life, and I realize that the first thing I look at when a table gets sat is their race or ethnicity.  It is wrong to do, but based off of what I see, I can usually judge what kind of tip I am going to get off them, no matter what the bill is.  If counselors were to do the same thing every time a new culturally different client comes in to their office, that client could be mislead due to prior beliefs that the counselor holds about a certain ethnicity.  “The counselor’s ability to generate insights for the client is dependent on the counselor’s understanding of the prominent cultural contexts in the client’s life.  That understanding is filtered through the counselor’s own cultural lens” (Byars-Winston, Fouad 2006). 

Through career counseling, counselors may be able to learn more about themselves as well as their clients.  Everyone holds some kind of culture-specific assumptions about others because it is built into us through human nature.  In connecting this to chapter 4 of Brown, Principle 2 states that being competent involves sensitivity to multicultural issues (Brown 2010).  In Brown’s chapter 5, a great example of why multicultural competence is of great importance is discussed.  The example given describes a lesbian counselor faced with a Christian white male who believes that homosexuality is a sin and freely expresses it.  This could create major issues between the counselor and the client, but if a counselor were able to set aside his or her own cultural biases and belief’s, a great relationship could be formed.  Brown puts it perfect saying how because our culture is so diverse, multicultural counseling becomes extremely crucial above almost every other theory out there (Brown 2010).   

Brown, D. (2012). Career information, career counseling, and career development (10^th ed.).  New York, NY: Pearson Education, Inc.

Byars-Winston, A. M. & Fouad, N.A. (2006).  Metacognition and multicultural competence:  Expanding the culturally appropriate career counseling model.  The Career Development Quarterly, 54(3), 187-201.