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INFORMATION
National Tour for Multicultural Competence and Social Justice
[Click
here for the Application for the NIMC's National Tour to Promote
Multicultural Competence and Social Justice]
The national tour that
is designed to promote multicultural competence and social justice. This
national
tour is being offered
by the National Institute for Multicultural Competence (NIMC). The NIMC is
comprised of a group of internationally-respected multicultural and social
justice advocates who recognize that the fields of education and mental
health professions are entering a new era. Among the factors that are
contributing the emergence of this new era in the educational and mental
health-care systems in the United States include:
-
the new challenges
that educators and mental health practitioners face as they deal with
the rapid cultural-racial transformation of our citizenry and
-
recent reports that
describe the overall failure of our existing school and mental
health-care systems to effectively and ethically meet the psychological
needs of millions of persons from culturally and racially-different
groups in our society.
Dr. Michael D'Andrea,
a professor at the University of Hawaii and Executive Director of NIMC, is
coordinating this national event. In commenting on the purpose of the
tour, Dr. D'Andrea stated that "the
tour provides a broad
range of professional development training opportunities that are
intentionally designed to promote administrators', faculty members', and
students' level of multicultural
competence and support
their commitment for social justice." In detailing these goals in more
specific terms, D'Andrea pointed out that the discussions and training
workshops offered in the tour are aimed at
assisting interested
persons to:
-
acquire a broad
array of new professional competencies that will enable them to work
more effectively, respectfully, and ethically in promoting the
educational and psychological well-being of large numbers of persons
from cultural-racial groups that historically have been marginalized in
the past and
-
develop new teaching
and helping roles as social justice advocates.
D'Andrea stressed that
"the fields of education, counseling, and psychology are presently
confronted with a number of unprecedented challenges that need to be
addressed if our nation's educational and
mental health-care
systems are to remain viable and relevant in the coming years.
Recognizing
that these challenges demand revolutionary changes in the way educators,
counselors, and psychologists are trained and conduct their work;
universities have slowly begun to provide the kinds of professional
development services that are necessary to assist administrators,
educators, counselors and psychologists in becoming culturally-competent.
While this progress is encouraging, multicultural and social justice
counseling advocates agree that much more needs to be done to help
educational and mental health professionals become better prepared to meet
the unprecedented challenges they face in our contemporary society. The
NIMC's national tour is specifically designed to serve these ends."
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