A Pedagogical Model for Increasing Race-Related Multicultural Counseling Competency

With the increasing need for multicultural competence, questions have emerged about the appropriate classroom strategies to cultivate growth in this area. These questions have been further complicated by a growing focus on self-awareness, which has increased the affective demands of and student resistance to the material. This article proposes a pedagogical model to enhance what the authors call "race-related multicultural counseling competency", which focuses on race, racism, and racial identity development. The fundamental premise is that two types of safety, psychological safety and identity safety, must be present. The authors further argue that safety requires attention to both course content and teaching processes as well as an incremental learning approach that emphasizes race-related competence as a lifelong developmental process. (Contains 1 figure.)