Posted: November 8th, 2016

What aspects of your cultural heritage have resulted in privileges or discrimination and oppression for you and your family?

Assignment 5

Cultural Autobiography

In the last unit, you began to consider the characteristics of counselors and clients with respect to culture, class, and language, and how important it is to be mindful of how you attend to these factors in your counseling practice. In this exercise, you will be asked to take your personal exploration further by investigating your own cultural heritage and its impact on your worldviews.

Sue and Sue (2016) explain that our worldviews are related to our values, cultural upbringing, and experiences.

For this assignment, you will need to interview at least one family member, and you may wish to include more as you investigate your own cultural background. Based upon the data you gather from the interview process, your own reflections, and peer-reviewed articles that address counselor characteristics and cultural heritage, address the following points:

Awareness of Your Cultural Heritage

• Briefly describe your and your family’s (either birth or adopted) cultural heritage (for example, your paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Italy, and your maternal grandparents emigrated from Ireland).
• Does your family have one or more religious or spiritual traditions?
• What aspects of your cultural heritage have resulted in privileges or discrimination and oppression for you and your family?
• Analyze how your cultural heritage may potentially impact effective counseling practices. How might it contribute to your ideas about the purpose of counseling, role of the counselor, and approaches to therapy that you will be using in your work with clients from diverse backgrounds?
• Consider potential barriers or opportunities your worldview could present in counseling a client of a different:
  • Ethnicity or race.
  • Socioeconomic status.

Strategies to Overcome Your Cultural Competence Limitations

• Identify and describe at least one strategy to address each of the aspects of multicultural competence (awareness, knowledge, skill) that would be important to apply in ensuring that you eliminate barriers to competent counseling practices that may come from your own cultural characteristics, attitudes, and beliefs.

• Your paper should be 3 pages long and should include 5 references from current peer-reviewed journals (one source may be the course text). Use current APA format for all citations and references.

Cultural Autobiography Scoring Guide

1. Analyze how a counselor’s personal cultural heritage may potentially impact effective counseling practices.

33%.

2. Develop strategies to

address the influence a counselor’s characteristics, attitudes, and beliefs have on culturally competent counseling practices.

33%.

3. Communicate in written documents applying APA formatting, scholarly research, and professional tone.

20%.

4. Exhibit proficiency in academic writing (correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling).

14%.