One of the central ethical mandates of SOE’s department of Specialized Programs in Professional Psychology is to prepare school psychologists and counselors who will provide culturally relevant and culturally competent interventions and services to students, families and other clients. Earlier this summer, 24 graduate-level students enrolled in the department’s Multicultural Counseling course (EDSP 6998), which is taught abroad. They had an international experience that went a long way toward fulfilling that goal.
For 11 days in late June, the LMU students participated in an immersive summer study abroad experience in Mexico City as part of a new partnership with Universidad Iberoamericana (IBERO), learning about multicultural counseling alongside graduate students from IBERO’s psychology department. While the summer study abroad experience has been available to students enrolled in the course for a number of years, this was the first time it was offered in partnership with another university, thanks to a multi-year memorandum of understanding between the LMU School of Education and IBERO, the premier Jesuit institution in Mexico. The study abroad course was co-taught by SOE associate professor Fernando Estrada and professor Emily Fisher.
“Our students were fully integrated into university life at IBERO, which made it a more meaningful experience,” Estrada says. As part of the program, the SOE students also engaged in service-learning activities with community agencies and toured historic city sites as they learned about topics such as systemic oppression, social justice counseling, and professional cultural competence.
Estrada says the feedback from the program’s participants was overwhelmingly positive, with some of the students calling the experience “transformative” and “one of the best courses at LMU.” Others reported that their perspective was “positively impacted” and that they gained a “new critical outlook” on their chosen profession.
“The Multicultural Counseling course centers on issues like institutionalized oppression, personal and professional prejudices and biases, social justice interventions and ways of creating systemic change,” Estrada says. “With the summer study abroad program, we can equip our students with this knowledge and then pair it with the real-world experience of not only being immersed in a new country, but also providing direct services to agencies there. That integration of knowledge and practice reflects exactly what LMU stands for.”
