Save the Date-Multicultural Orientation Gathering: Integrating Cultural Humility into Research, Practice, and Leadership

Greetings,

We are planning a mini-conference at Georgia State University to gather some of the Multicultural Orientation (MCO) network to share ideas about integrating MCO into research, practice, and consultation/training (see additional materials). We will have an in-person meeting (GSU Law School) from 9am to 4:30pm on Saturday May 13th. We also invite people to contribute to the virtual poster session on Friday May 12th.

• Friday 5/12, 1pm (zoom call)

  • Virtual Poster Session

    • Faculty, students, or clinicians interested in MCO are invited to submit a 5-10 minute asynchronous minute presentations using the “new poster” format (see additional instructions).

• Saturday 5/13 from 9am to 4:30pm (6 hours with one hour for lunch break)

  • We will offer free CEs for people who attend in-person talks by:

    • Cirleen DeBlaere, “Multicultural Orientation in the Classroom and Beyond”

    • Kimber Shelton (and book signing opportunity), “Developing Culturally Competent Case Conceptualization”

    • Evelyn Hunter, “Cultural Humility in the Assessment of Professional Competence: Ethical Considerations for Psychologists”

    • Jesse Owen, “When is Ineffective Therapy with Minoritized Clients Enough? Would We Know?”

Register early for Saturday-Register early for space limited to 100 people (Cost of registration for the conference is free***)

Additional Information

The Ken Matheny Center for the Study of Stress, Trauma, and Resilience (M-STAR) is hosting our first in a series of annual mini-conferences. The purpose of the series is to continue to build relationships with research scholars at GSU and other universities, increase the national reputations of GSU and M-STAR, and build professional networks that will address important science-practice gaps. We especially want to prioritize the needs of early career researchers and clinicians.

Our first meeting (May 12-13) will focus on several center partners who have used the Multicultural Orientation (MCO) framework to guide some of their work in research, practice, and consultation/training in higher education or other settings such as business or healthcare. The MCO framework gives a language for helping clinicians adapt their approach and way of being to prioritize the client's cultural worldview and background. As expressions of cultural humility, the clinician orients to the client's values and way of understanding the stressors in their lives. When clinicians adopt this orientation, it helps to set the stage for trust to grow within the relationship, which improves therapy outcomes and makes the relationship more resilient to cultural barriers or setbacks.

We chose this theme for our first meeting, because it is an example of a research program in positive psychology (i.e., the study of human strengths, flourishing, and resilience) that has already had broad implications for practice. Many of the scholars doing research on MCO are early career psychologists or counselor educators, and we want to provide a context for relationship to form and grow. Our hope for the meeting is that people will develop professional friendships that may last for many years, and that many fruitful collaborations and conversations will occur in the years that follow the meeting.

The virtual poster session (May 12) is a way for us to broadcast a wide range of projects led by people connected to M-STAR. Posters are especially encouraged from graduate students or those early in their career paths. Posters can be linked to this year’s MCO theme or to ongoing interests of the center that touch on stress, trauma, and resilience.

We have some initial ideas for future CE sessions:

• Moral injury in the military

• Perfectionism

• Working with cultural countertransference or reactions to clients

• Integrating positive psychology into the mainstream of psychotherapy

• Approaches to integrating deliberate practice into the training of psychologists and counselors

• Methodology workshop on measurement of stress

• Methodology workshop on making causal inference with longitudinal data

If you have reactions to these ideas or want to recommend topics for CE sessions, or you have ideas for a theme for future meetings, please email Dr. Don Davis (ddavis88@gsu.edu).

When you register for the conference, you can also provide us additional requests for trainings that would be helpful for you and your colleagues.