Refugee-Serving Multicultural Therapy Practicum: An Example of a Culture-Infused, Service-Based Training Program

Abstract

Concrete examples or models of multicultural counselling training (MCT) that incorporate direct counselling and psychotherapy with diverse clients and infuse concepts of culture and social justice in the interventions of counsellor and therapist trainees are rare. Against this backdrop, this chapter presents and details a unique model of MCT based on a refugee-serving multicultural counselling and therapy practicum for clinical psychology Ph.D. students. Grounded in experiential and service-learning principles and approaches and a university-community collaboration, student trainees in this practicum provided direct counselling, therapy, and emotional support to community-based refugee survivors of trauma and torture. In this chapter, I will first introduce this refugee-serving multicultural practicum by describing the contextual, conceptual, and structural characteristics of this practicum, including the target clients, the conceptual/philosophical bases, and the structure and the learning conditions of this MCT. I will then present an illustrative case example to help elucidate the inner working processes, the therapy interactions, and the learning impacts of this practicum. The case of Luah, a female Karen-speaking Burmese refugee client, and her therapist trainee, Crystal, an English-speaking, Canadian-born graduate student of European descent will be described in detail. Hence, this chapter hopes to present a promising, alternative MCT model – a multicultural therapy practicum – to help prepare and facilitate multicultural counselling and social advocacy competencies for future counsellors and therapists.