Helping Counselor Trainees Get Along : An Issue for Professional Development / Robbie J. Steward.

This paper presents a programmatic strategy to address unresolved student-student disagreements. The paper examines cultural norms--within training programs in academic settings--that contribute to interpersonal problems among students. It describes the following norms as related to some stated principles for negotiating diversity: (1) program faculty, as a collective, should not manage relationship problems among students; (2) perspectives represented by the majority of a group, whether student or faculty cohorts, are meaningful perspectives; (3) all issues of difference should be addressed and resolved within the confines of multicultural or diversity related counseling courses; (4) increasing the representation of diversity among faculty and student cohorts is the most important end; (5) all faculty share the same level of access to power and resources and professional status within the system and within the profession; (6) all students have the competency to resolve "cross-cultural collisions" that are guaranteed to occur within training programs; (7) interpersonal conflict among peers is abnormal and reflects pathology; (8) being an effective practitioner with diverse client populations and having an interest in multicultural counseling as a specialty automatically translates into being able to develop and maintain effective working relationships with colleagues and vice versa. Some of the students' and faculty members' responses to conflicts that decrease the probability of optimal outcomes are described, and a programmatic model for prevention and intervention of "cross-cultural collisions" among trainees is provided. Potential barriers are outlined and a programmatic proposal for addressing group diversity among trainees is presented. (MKA)

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