ABSTRACT

People’s life career development involves an on-going, complex, rich, yet sometimes mysterious experience. Some of such experiences are unique only to the person who experiences them, while others can be strikingly similar among individuals who seem to have come from very different tracks and life contexts. Whether it is the former or the latter, the area of life career development always remains one of the most fascinating realms for exploration in social sciences and humanities. This is because the subject is too basic and pivotal to be overlooked. It is certainly a relevant topic for scholars and practitioners in vocational psychology and sociology. Perhaps more importantly, it is an everyday and down-to-earth experience that lay persons in all walks of life have to encounter. To study and comprehend this lay experience, thus, becomes very pertinent and helpful in enhancing our knowledge on human ways of being in general, and on the vocational aspects of life in particular. This book aims to present a descriptive study of life career experience of a very unique group of individuals, that is, people from non-Western cultures (NWC) pursuing the counselling profession in Canada. The term counselling profession here includes occupations of counselling psychologist, psychotherapist, counsellor, and guidance worker in private practice as well as in institutional settings. With a central focus on phenomenology or subjectivity, the book intends to investigate and illustrate the meaning of the transformation involved. What happens to persons with non-Western cultural backgrounds when they pursue and enter counselling training in mainstream Western society? How do they make the decision to pursue such types of professional training? What are their experiences in such endeavours? How do they cope with various new challenges along the way? What are their career paths? Given their special experiences of acculturation, what meaning does the life career transition to the counselling profession have for them? As NWC persons begin their career pusuit in counselling and psychotherapy, the cross-cultural experience poses a unique and pertinent aspect for the present study to investigate. This study attempts to describe and interpret such a unique experience so that it will be better understood by both NWC persons themselves and those involved in higher education. To conform with this purpose and to answer the questions in the previous paragraph, this study addresses the question: “How can the experience of counsellor trainees with non-Western cultural backgrounds (NWC Counsellor trainees) be described and understood?” This inquiry combines a number of issues. According to Super (1990) and others (for example, Amundson & Poehnell, 1996; Erikson, 1982; Gottfredson, 1996;

Schlossberg, Lynch, & Chickering, 1989; Schlossberg, Waters, & Goodman, 1995), student life is an important part of one’s total life career pathway. The pivotal impact of this particular experience on people’s career development, therefore, is worth noting. Reciprocally, the students’ coping experience in higher education is entangled with, and characterized by, many psychological and sociological factors such as self-concept, self-efficacy, socioeconomic changes, and person-environment interaction in people’s career development process (Amundson, 1995a; Betz, 1992; Gottfredson, 1985; Super, 1981). Further, NWC students’ experience in this process is linked with cross-cultural adjustment which reflects and describes the related dynamics and factors within a cross-cultural context. The interplay of variables in these three domains, namely, career development, transition to higher education, and cross-cultural adjustment, displays a meaningful picture of NWC counsellor trainees’ journey of career construction. To understand NWC counsellor trainees’ experience is to look at the interactive and interweaving nature of these various facets in a career-making process which is heuristic to adult students’ career change and transition in general, and relevant to NWC adult students’ coping and transition in particular. Thus, it is the goal of the present study to unveil this coping process.