Multicultural training models within counseling and
psychology aspire to train practitioners to have cultural
competence (e.g., the capacity unconsciously to produce
suitable action strategies in a variety of cultural systems
of action, knowledge, and meaning). This is based on
three beliefs: clients who are culturally different from
practitioners are not inferior, deviant, or have psychological
pathology—those who have ethnic and racial
minority cultural identities are bicultural and have an
advantage because they operate in at least two culturally
distinct environments; bicultural identity allows for
a wider variety of human capability; and clients also
need to be seen in relation to the contexts in which they
operate (Nastasi, Arora, & Varjas, 2017; Sue,
Arrondondo, & McDavis, 1992).
Recently, psychologists have reconceptualized static
models of cultural competence into those which include
a more interdisciplinary perspective. Such models are
reflective of intersectionality—the idea that people are
complicated cultural beings who are impacted by multiple
cultural encounters over their lifetimes (Friedman &
Berthoin Antal, 2005; Nastasi et al., 2017). These models
redefine cultural competence as intercultural competence,
the capacity to actively examine one’s own range
of skills and create suitable strategies. Intercultural
competence includes overcoming barriers already a
part of a practitoner’s culturally formed range of skills, her/his ability to create alternative responses, and
expanding impending analyses and actions in future
intercultural experiences (Friedman & Berthoin Antal,
2005; Nastasi, 2017). This involves the process of
negotiating reality, requiring the practitioner to have
the following skills: (1) awareness of or reflection on
her/his own intercultural experience and the subsequent
culturally formed range of skills, (2) communication
skills that expedite coexamination of expectations, and
(3) a willingness to study and acquire alternative ways
of being in cultural encounters. Communication skills
require a mixture of inquiry (interrogating the reasoning
that both self and others have in order to achieve a
mutual understanding) as well as advocacy (describing
and clarifying one’s viewpoint; Friedman & Berthoin
Antal, 2005; Nastasi, 2017).
Implications and applications of the intercultural
competence model in sport include training sport psychology
researchers and practitioners to improve their
negotiation of reality and communication skills.
Cultural coconstruction is the goal—the practice of
exchanging ideas among equals across cultural, disciplinary,
racial, ethnic, and other margins through a
combination of methods, perspectives, values, and
knowledge from all involved, ending in collaborative
advancement. Cultural coconstruction never ends—it is
a dynamic process reflecting both social construction and participatory intervention (Nastasi, 2017).
