Abstract
With the awakening of cultural awareness, many countries have rapidly developed into a multicultural social structure. Therefore, as a psychologist, it is not only necessary to have psychological knowledge and counseling skills, but also must have multicultural counseling skills to effectively assist clients of various cultural backgrounds in order to solve their psychological problems. According to the literature, scholars suggest that the goal of multicultural counseling training should include the following three dimensions: multicultural knowledge, respectful attitude, and culturally appropriate counseling skills. In addition, more scholars also put emphasis on the development of social justice ability as part of one’s multicultural competency. Such ability means demonstrating the ability of social practice to promote a multicultural friendly society. However, there is still no effective multicultural counseling course in empirical research. According to literature reviews, multicultural counseling courses generally use lecture and experiential learning as main teaching methods. This type of training model often resulted in only reaching the understanding of multiculturalism, without changing one’s prejudice attitude toward minority groups from different culture and developing culture-appropriate counseling skills. Therefore, this research project intended to adopt an action research approach with the aim of developing a curriculum based on problem-based learning and action learning as teaching methods. Incorporating the concept of student learning center and learning by doing, the course helped students to become aware and understand the dilemma of multicultural issues from their life experience through the guidance of the teacher. Learning independently outside of classroom, students came back to class and conducted group discussions to plan a social practice program. The results showed that after eight weeks of action learning, students completed 5 social justice projects that demonstrated the effort to empower minority groups in the face of injustice situations. Three experts evaluated these 5 social justice projects and rated these projects 3 and above out of 5 points. This proved that students were able to demonstrate multicultural counseling competency in awareness, knowledge and skills. On the teaching method satisfaction questionnaire, students rated the class 5 out of 5 points which means students were highly satisfied with the learning experience and results. They also reported high satisfaction about their improvement in awareness and knowledge in multicultural counseling competency. Their confidence in their multicultural counseling skills also raised after a semester of training. Overall, this research showed that students could improve their multicultural competency in counseling through problem-based learning and action learning.