PSY 620 Module 7 Cross-Cultural Discourse Example

Who Is in the Room and How They Talk: Cross-Cultural Discourse in a School Consultation

Student Name

Psychology and Addiction Studies Program, Aspen University

PSY 620: Psychological Interactions

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Who Is in the Room and How They Talk: Cross-Cultural Discourse in a School Consultation

The consultation around Mateo at Desert Willow Elementary, the Tucson school imagined for this course, involved three adults of different backgrounds. Leah, the consulting psychologist, is a White woman who grew up in Minnesota and speaks limited Spanish. Gloria, Mateo's teacher, is Mexican American, grew up in Tucson and is bilingual. Ana, Mateo's mother, moved from Sonora, Mexico, ten years ago, speaks Spanish at home and some English at work. All are fictional. This paper analyzes how culture and language shaped their conversations.

A Framework for Multicultural Consultation

Ingraham (2000) proposed a framework for multicultural and cross-cultural consultation in schools with several components. It attends to what the consultant needs to learn and develop, what the consultee needs to learn and develop and the cultural variations within the consultation constellation, the relationships among consultant, consultee and client and how their cultural similarities and differences affect the work. It also addresses contextual and power influences, such as institutional roles and status, and methods for supporting consultee and client success. Ingraham emphasized that a consultant's cultural background is part of the constellation, not a neutral backdrop, and that similarity between parties can bring its own blind spots as well as rapport.

Mapping the Constellation

Broaching and Competence

Day-Vines et al. (2007) described broaching as the counselor's deliberate effort to raise race, ethnicity and culture with a client so that these can be considered in understanding the client's concerns. They proposed a continuum of broaching styles: avoidant, where culture is not acknowledged; isolating, where it is raised once and dropped; continuing or incongruent, where the professional wants to raise it but lacks the skill; integrated or congruent, where it is raised naturally and connected to the work; and infusing, where attention to culture extends to advocacy beyond the session. Sue et al. (1992) earlier set out multicultural competencies in three areas: awareness of one's own cultural assumptions and biases, knowledge of the worldviews of people from other cultures and skills in culturally appropriate intervention.

Conversation One: A Misreading

At the first joint meeting, Ana spoke little and nodded at most suggestions. Leah took this as agreement and moved quickly to a plan. Afterward, Gloria mentioned that Ana might have been deferring to the teacher and psychologist as authorities, as many parents from her background would, and might not have agreed at all. Leah realized she had read silence through her own expectation that a parent who disagreed would say so. In Sue and colleagues' terms, the gap was in awareness: Leah had not noticed her own assumption. At the next meeting, she asked Ana directly, through the interpreter, what parts of the plan would be hard to do at home, and Ana described several.

Conversation Two: The Teacher as Broker

Gloria often explained Ana's views to Leah and Leah's to Ana, sometimes beyond the interpreter's role. This helped, but it carried risks. Ingraham's framework draws attention to the consultee's position in the constellation: Gloria represented the school and had her own views about Mateo, and acting as cultural broker could blur her role and add to her workload. It also risked Leah treating Gloria as the authority on a culture that was not quite hers. Leah discussed this with Gloria privately, thanked her and agreed that Leah would ask Ana directly rather than relying on Gloria's interpretation of what Ana meant.

Power in the Constellation

Language and culture were not the only differences. Leah and Gloria held professional roles in an institution that would decide whether Ana's son received special services, and Ana, an immigrant parent working an hourly job, had less power in that system. Ingraham's attention to contextual and power influences helped Leah see that Ana's deference might reflect not only cultural norms but a reasonable caution about disagreeing with people whose decisions affected her child. Reducing that imbalance meant giving Ana real choices in the plan, not only asking for her agreement.

Conversation Three: Broaching

At the third meeting, Leah broached culture directly. She said that she was not from Mexico or the Southwest, did not share Ana's language and might misunderstand things that mattered, and she asked Ana to tell her if anything in the plan did not fit how her family did things. Ana said that the help signal at home felt strange, because in her family children did not interrupt adults; she proposed instead that Mateo bring his notebook to her when stuck. The plan changed. On Day-Vines and colleagues' continuum, Leah moved from avoidant in the first meeting toward integrated, linking culture directly to the work.

The Interpreter's Role

The school's interpreter attended every meeting with Ana. Leah learned to speak directly to Ana rather than to the interpreter, to pause after short segments and to avoid jargon such as "antecedent" and "function" that had no easy equivalent. After the second meeting, she asked the interpreter whether anything had been hard to convey. The interpreter mentioned that Leah's phrase "escape-maintained behavior" had come across in Spanish as something like "the boy wants to run away," which had alarmed Ana. Leah explained the idea again in plain terms at the next meeting.

Lessons for Practice

Three lessons follow. First, check interpretations with the person rather than through others; silence, nodding and deference may mean many things. Second, notice who is carrying the work of cultural translation and make sure it is not quietly added to a consultee's duties. Third, broach culture early and tie it to the plan, inviting the family to reshape it. Leah also identified a knowledge gap: she resolved to improve her Spanish and to learn more about the communities her school served, while recognizing that knowledge about a group never replaces asking an individual.

Conclusion

Ingraham's framework showed how cultural relationships among consultant, teacher and mother shaped the consultation, including the consultant's own position. Day-Vines and colleagues' broaching continuum and Sue, Arredondo and McDavis's competencies explained what went wrong and right. Leah's early misreading, Gloria's role as broker and a broaching conversation that changed the plan show cross-cultural discourse as a skill practiced in specific moments.

References

Day-Vines, N. L., Wood, S. M., Grothaus, T., Craigen, L., Holman, A., Dotson-Blake, K., & Douglass, M. J. (2007). Broaching the subjects of race, ethnicity, and culture during the counseling process. Journal of Counseling & Development, 85(4), 401-409. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6678.2007.tb00608.x

Ingraham, C. L. (2000). Consultation through a multicultural lens: Multicultural and cross-cultural consultation in schools. School Psychology Review, 29(3), 320-343. https://doi.org/10.1080/02796015.2000.12086018

Sue, D. W., Arredondo, P., & McDavis, R. J. (1992). Multicultural counseling competencies and standards: A call to the profession. Journal of Counseling & Development, 70(4), 477-486. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.1992.tb01642.x