Cultural Immersion Experience
Cultural immersion is regarded as the direct, lasting, and actual interaction with a culture that is different from that of an individual, usually a counselor trainee. Cultural immersion implies leaving one’s culture and comfort zone instead of bringing alien cultural aspects into an individual’s space of familiarity (Canfield et al., 2009). Participating in a cultural immersion experiment is a vital experience for trainee counselors. Individuals plunge themselves in a universe wholly different from what they are familiar with, which magnifies their cognizance as far as diverse cultures, ideals, and lifestyles are concerned. Trainee counselors need to experience cultural immersion to interact with individuals with diverse upbringings, distinctive challenges, and different cultural identities. This is vital as counselors encounter clients from all walks of life, and cultural immersion helps the trainees to understand all kinds of people in society. Understanding different cultures, ideas, struggles, and hopes of different people allow counselors to serve their clients wholly. Cultural immersion allows us to understand others. I will be a volunteer mentor at a high school in a low-income neighborhood as part of my cultural immersion experience.
Martin Luther King, Jr. high school is located within one of the low-income neighborhoods in New York City. The schools is predominantly composed of poor African-Americans students and a few other minority groups such as Hispanics. Various voluntary organizations have worked with the school over the years to improve the lives and prospects of the young students. Volunteers from “Young Lives Matter,” an international nonprofit group dedicated to assisting young black men and women, are running a program to mentor the students to increase their chances of achieving a meaningful and fulfilling life in the future. It is this organization that I am joining as a volunteer mentor to help improve the lives of the students in the best way I can. The organization supports young people by financing youth initiatives such as student exchange programs; they recently sponsored a tour that saw many students visit colleges in different states. They also link students to potential employers and even buy them proper attire to attend interviews. The organization also liaises with different governmental and non-governmental agencies to connect the students with various opportunities. Through “Young Lives Matter,” I want to immerse myself in the lives of these youth to understand all aspects of their lives and help them in any way I can.
There are several reasons why I chose this particular experience. More than seventy-five percent of annual homicide victims in New York City is below the age of twenty. Most of these victims are African-Americans. I think it is our responsibility to come together and help this category of youth make better choices and deal with the various struggles every day within their demographic so that they can enjoy wholesome lives now and in the future. To be able to provide the best help possible as a future counselor, I must understand what the lives of these youth entail. I chose this experience to understand the culture, traditions, challenges, and opportunities of the young African-American individual so that I can effectively use my expertise as a counselor to help them in the best and most effective way possible. I also feel personally responsible for the young and vulnerable youth in the urban low-income neighborhoods as I spent a part of my childhood in similar circumstances before my family moved to the suburbs. Therefore, I have childhood friends who are still stuck in the vicious cycle of poverty and crime. Even if I cannot help them, at least I can improve the conditions so that their children have a better chance at life. To accomplish this, I felt it was necessary to spend time in one of such neighborhoods to understand the people and the dynamic.
The cultural immersion experience changed my worldview in various ways. The experience has imparted a new sense of consciousness in me so that I can perceive the world with a clearer mind (Collins & Pieterse, 2007). The interaction between the theories I learned in the classroom and the practice I encountered in the real world will undoubtedly have a long-lasting learning outcome. The experiential training I received during the cultural immersion has helped me effectively connect multicultural theory to practice, giving me a path to challenge subjective prejudices and patterns of behavior, in emotional and rational spheres moving from ethnocentric to ethnorelative viewpoints (Chung & Bemack, 2002). Also, I have recognized that the experiential training was invaluable in diversity training to increase mindfulness, investigate personal schemas, and give opportunities to reach deeply entrenched prejudices. To develop new knowledge, people have to meet circumstances that challenge their current models, or meet ‘confusing dilemmas’ so that they have to reconsider their present viewpoints. I have questioned my existing outlook and stereotypes and established cultural understanding by participating in the cultural immersion experiment.
The cultural immersion experience has influenced my capacity to encompass cultural competence in a significant way. The interaction and exposure with individuals from a different cultural disposition increased the levels of my cultural compassion, cognizance, self-efficacy, and competence. The experience allowed me to gain direct engagement with others from different backgrounds, participating in multicultural learning that enhanced my skills and thinking analytically and conceptualizing the cultural circumstances of other people. By engaging in cultural immersion, I questioned my prevailing worldviews and assumptions, continuing along with the range of multiethnic competence as I interacted with individuals from various upbringings (Pope-Davis & Coleman, 1997).
There are various ways in which I can infuse social justice advocacy in my work as a counselor. Since I would like to be a high school counselor, I would design my social justice efforts around a school-based club. The club would be open to students who would be trained to be ambassadors of goodwill both inside and outside the school. The club would engage in multiple activities geared towards helping the less fortunate individual in low-income neighborhoods. Some of the club’s activities include mentoring young people such as students as well as youth who can access the school, collecting donations from willing students and staff, and using the funds to help the less fortunate. We would also organize cleaning exercises and other community improvement initiatives and collecting and donating books to the youth in low-income neighborhoods, among other efforts.
References
Canfield, B. S., Low, L., & Hovestadt, A. (2009). Cultural immersion as a learning method for expanding intercultural competencies. The Family Journal, 17(4), 318-322.
Collins, N. M., & Pieterse, A. L. (2007). Critical incident analysis based training: An approach for developing active racial/cultural awareness. Journal of Counseling & Development, 85(1), 14-23.
Chung, R. C. Y., & Bemak, F. (2002). The relationship between culture and empathy in cross‐cultural counseling. Journal of Counseling & Development, 80(2), 154-159.
Pope-Davis, D. B., & Coleman, H. L. (1996). Multicultural counseling competencies: Assessment, education and training, and supervision (Vol. 7). Sage Publications.