Poster #41 - Training Counseling Psychology Students to Think Developmentally and Culturally: Lessons From Classroom Practice

• In Event: 15.062 - MTCC Poster Session One
  In Poster Session: 15.062-3 - Division E: Counseling Poster Session

Abstract

An important goal of counsellor education is to foster students’ developmental and cultural perspectives. In this paper, we describe the process of designing and delivering a course on adult development for counselling psychology students, to showcase one approach for integrating cultural and developmental perspectives into the training of counsellors. Through analyzing the process of teaching this course and anonymous feedback from students, we demonstrate how autoethnographic research conducted by students during the course can be a powerful tool to help students integrate cultural and developmental perspectives into their understanding of suffering and healing. In the proposed paper, we document the lessons we learned from using this tool in teaching a course, and discuss the implications for counsellor education.

Authors

• Xu Zhao, University of Calgary

• Judy Dang, University of Calgary