Abstract
Taiwan is a society includes people with multicultural background. There are many ethnic groups from southern Fujian, Guangdong, indigenous groups from Taiwan and recent immigrants. Many foreigners also came to Taiwan for work or school. While the awareness of sexual equality has increased in Taiwan, people are more comfortable with multi-gender identities and culture in the society. Additionally, Taiwan has always showed great tolerance for one’s religion or beliefs. It is not unusual to see temples and churches that practice folk beliefs, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Catholic, or Islam in Taiwan. Therefore, a counseling psychologist trainee must have culturally sensitive attitude and beliefs, cultural knowledge, and culturally relevant counseling skills in order to provide efficient counseling to clients from diverse cultural background. However, counseling psychologist training model in Taiwan did not place multicultural counseling competence as one of the core courses. Aside from that, literatures also encourage training program to incorporate multicultural counseling competency training in every courses. This integration course design is seldom examined in research. Therefore, it is still unclear how integration course design for multicultural counseling competency training looks like, not to mention its effectiveness in improving trainees’ multicultural counseling competence. Therefore, this study aims to integrate multicultural counseling competency training into counseling practicum class, using case analysis as main teaching method. Based on action research method, this study recorded and evaluated the teaching method throughout the course. Using students’ reflection papers, post-test on multicultural counseling competence and counseling self-efficacy was also collected to examine the effectiveness of the course design. The result showed that integration course design did provide a chance for all counseling trainees to be exposed to multicultural counseling training. Trainees were able to examine their own cultural background and values and be more sensitive to client’s culture which was different from theirs. However, competency of multicultural counseling skills needed to take more time to build because these counseling trainees were at their beginning level of counseling training. Future recommendations were also presented in accordance with research results.