Internationalizing the counseling psychology curriculum: toward new values, competencies, and directions

Abstract

The changing world in which we now live requires that counseling psychology alter its training curriculum assumptions, content, and methods to prepare students and faculty for meeting the challenges of life in the global community. Global problems such as poverty, migration, overpopulation, international war and violence, rapid urbanization, and cultural disintegration are posing new challenges for service professions that are no longer suited to ethnocentric values, content, and interventions. Adjustment syndromes such as alienation, culture shock, acculturation, identity conflict and confusion, and migration stress are now emerging as major problems for counselors in schools, colleges, industry, clinics and private practice. New competencies are needed. The present article offers 50 different ways to assist in the internationalization of the counseling curriculum, with specific recommendations for professional psychological associations and department of psychology curriculum content and extra-curricular activities, and universities. The article calls upon counseling psychologists around the world to help create a new professional and global consciousness that can advance our field by addressing the problems we face and restoring dignity to those we serve through the provision of more informed and culturally sensitive services.