Chapter 6: CURRENT TRENDS AND ISSUES IN GUIDANCE AND COUNSELLING

We have learnedfrom this chapter that the  three main issues among the issues a school counseling profession is facing are:

 Professional titles- where counselors wanted to be seen as professionals in a large system in professional world. Evaluation- where counselors performance with the different workloads are difficult undertaking. Prevention versus Remediation- just like the saying "prevention is better than cure", so counselors do some interactions to students before crisis occured.

We also learned that the following were some of many difficulties students might be involved:

 1. Gangs- participating in troublesome activities
2. Dropouts- termination in the school
3. Teen Pregnancy- early pregnancy
4. Substance Abuse- engaging on drugs, alcohol and other chemicals
5. School Violence- teasing and bullying in the school
6. Diversity- acceptance of all races, sexes, ages, etc.
7. Child abuse- minors are being abuse by others especially older people.
8. Terrorism

Multiculturalism has been defined as a wide range of multiple groups without grading,
comparing or ranking them as better or worse than one another.

The four dimensions of cultures are:
1. Power distance
2. Uncertainty avoidance
3. Individualism
4. Masculinity/ Femininity

The Multicultural Awareness Continuum- designed to illustrate the areas of awareness

through which a counselor must go in the process of counseling a cultural different people.

There are some multicultural awareness, this are the self-awareness, awareness of one's own culture, awareness of racism, sexism, and poverty, awareness of individual differences, awareness of other cultures,  awareness of diversity and the skills or techniques.

Self awareness is self- understanding about oneself before giving actions to others. Awareness of one's own culture is considering your own behaviors, actions and understanding about yourself. Awareness of racism, sexism, and poverty  are aspects of a culture that must be understood from the perspective of how ane views their effect both upon oneslf and upon others. Awareness of individual differences is being aware of individual differences and come to believe in the uniqueness of the individual before movingnto the level of awreness of othe culture. Awareness of other cultures is being sensitive to words which are unique to a particular culture as well as body language and other non verbal behaviors to which cultural significance is attached. Awareness of diversity is the  old world practices were altered, discarded, or maintained within the context of the new culture and lastly, the skills or  techniques which is implementing what has been learned about working with culturally different groups and add specific techniques to acquire counseling skills.