Oregon course gives students cultural sense

Psychology students are learning about multiculturalism by volunteering to help migrant farm workers.

By Lisa Rabasca
Monitor staff

As psychology urges practitioners to become more cultur-ally competent, a graduate program in Portland, Ore., has taken a novel first step. At Lewis and Clark College, students in counseling psychology are working with Mexican and Latino migrant farm workers--a population that historically doesn't seek help from mental health professionals--and learning first-hand how to become more effective in serving a different culture.

The course was developed out of concern that multicultural curricula for psychology tend to be more philosophical than practical.

"We can sit in a classroom and discuss diversity with people raised the same way we were and feel like we're cross-culturally sensitive, but how functional is that?" says Mary Henning-Stout, PhD, a professor of counseling psychology at Lewis and Clark College who developed the course.

The course is de-signed to put students into situ ations where they become "the other"--the one who speaks another language and who comes from a different culture. Many of them do this by teaching the migrants English or assisting at a preschool program for migrant children.

The program, which was offered last academic year and will be offered again in 2000, is one of the first graduate courses to expose students to migrant workers and their families. During the year-long course, students provide 18 hours of volunteer service, tour a migrant labor camp and participate in monthly classroom discussions about the linguistic, cultural and economic barriers to providing services to a different culture.

Psychologists need to increase their cultural competence, says Henning-Stout, because demographic forecasts predict their practice and research in the future will involve other cultures. But psychologists and students have been particularly concerned that graduate programs don't always offer a multicultural curriculum and, when it is offered, it's usually taught in a single graduate course.

The course takes the topic out of the conceptual realm and gives it a practical footing, says Henning-Stout.

Traditionally, graduate programs in psychology tend to focus on stereotypical representations of ethnic groups, forgetting to emphasize that each individual is unique. But this course allows students to see a culture "through honest human experience," she says.

For example, many students start the class thinking they know a lot more about migrant farm life than they actually do, says Henning-Stout. They rate how much they know about Latino and migrant cultures, and how prepared they feel to work with a group whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds are different from their own. Most students give themselves a fairly high rating at the beginning of the class. But at the end of the class, most give themselves a lower rating, understanding how much more they need to learn.

Privilege as a barrier

Students are responsible for finding their own volunteer position because the experience helps them gain an awareness for what it's like to be the minority within a community, says Henning-Stout. Most of the students are European-American, she says.

"One of the things the students experience is being well-intentioned white people trying to volunteer in an area where they don't fit in," she says

Cross-cultural service delivery is hard, she adds, because privilege can be as much a barrier to providing services as lack of economic independence can be a barrier to receiving services. This is a particularly important lesson for mental health providers because migrant workers are often reluctant to seek services out of fear of being deported or mistreated, Henning-Stout says.

Other barriers students learn about include language and transportation. Many migrants don't speak formal Spanish, but a dialect particular to their region. Thus, even bilingual providers can't always easily communicate with them. And, most migrants rely on public transportation. They often have to take two or three buses to access health services because their labor camps are away from the center of the city's business district.

Some of the cultural barriers, though, prove to be more subtle, as in the cases of students Lark Huang and Sue Collins-Larson. They volunteered at a federally funded preschool program for children of migrant workers, held at a Portland public school. While children, ages three to five, could attend the program three days a week with their parents, class attendance was sporadic.

Subtle barriers

Collins-Larson realized that the parents who participated in the preschool program didn't always share the same goals for their children as the American teacher. The teacher wanted the children to learn as much English as possible and expected the parents to work with their children on the days they didn't attend class. But for many parents this was difficult because they were working in the fields.

"The teacher's goal for the children and the pressure she was inadvertently putting on the families, were seen as coming from an outside culture," says Collins-Larson. "Our best intentions, if not met with the same intensity from the people we're working with, can be misunderstood," she says.

Huang's revelation came from a woman who had come to the United States as a child with her migrant farm-worker parents. She did well in school, but at 12 felt pressure from her family to work in the fields. Her school counselors told her that she could "be someone" if she stayed in school and worked hard. But the woman already felt she had worked hard all those years and she had achieved success. She began to resent the counselors.

"They had a clear expectation of how she would be successful but she had already felt she was a success," Huang says. "You can go in with such good intentions but if you're blinded to the actual needs of the people, you're not going to help."

Best intentions gone astray is a common problem facing psychologists and other service providers working with diverse cultures, says Henning-Stout.

"We enter into situations and we wish to make things better, which too often means to make things look more like we want them to be," she says. "But it could be that the people we are trying to help perceive their needs quite differently than what we may be trained to see. It's important to avoid assigning pathology to people who are psychologically just fine."

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