Principles and Practices in Culturally Competent Supervision

Disclosures

Presenter disclosure. Financial disclosures: Dr. Giselle Levin, PsyD, received an honorarium for presenting this course. Dr. Levin has published articles on transgender healthcare, sex therapy, multiple minority stress, and adapting evidence-based interventions for marginalized populations. Non-financial disclosures: Dr. Levin has no relevant non-financial relationships to disclose.

Content disclosure. This learning event does not focus exclusively on any specific product or service.

Sponsor disclosure. There is no external sponsor for this course.

Course overview

This course examines the principles and practices that support effective clinical supervision, with particular attention to the supervisor-trainee relationship, the frameworks that structure multicultural supervision, and practical techniques supervisors can use to strengthen the supervisory alliance. Content is drawn from a continuing education webinar presented by Giselle Levin, PsyD, and is organized to follow the original presentation's structure. The course reviews several established supervision frameworks, including competency-based clinical supervision, the multidimensional ecological comparative approach, the integrated supervision framework, and the SuperVISION model, and introduces concrete techniques such as the worldview genogram and the ADDRESSING framework. The course also reviews how systemic factors within the mental health field, including diagnostic frameworks and institutional norms, can shape both clinical practice and psychology training more broadly, and it closes with a discussion of several frequently asked questions related to this material. Readers should come away with a clearer understanding of how supervisory relationships are built, structured, and evaluated, and how self-awareness and self-disclosure function within that relationship. This version of the course has been adapted to align with Florida's qualified supervisor training requirements, and the discussion of supervision research has accordingly been reframed to center on the supervisor-trainee relationship rather than on diversity, equity, and inclusion training specifically; the rationale for this adaptation, along with a full list of editorial adaptations made to the original presentation materials, is described in the editor's note at the end of the article.

Learning Outcomes

After this course, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the fundamentals of culturally responsive supervision.
2. Compare two different frameworks or models of multicultural supervision with regard to focus and impact on supervisors, supervisees, and clients.
3. Explain the significance of systemic oppression in mental health care systems and how systemic oppression shows up in clinical supervision.

Limitations/Risks

• Information in the presentation is generalized and may not apply to specific patients. Refer or consult as needed.
• Ethical and legal standards may differ from state to state. Ensure that you are familiar with the laws and ethics specific to your state.
• Individual and cultural considerations should be explored prior to pursuing treatment and interventions.

Introduction

Culturally responsive supervision rests on a supervisor's willingness to bring their whole self into supervision, and into clinical work generally, and to model that practice for trainees. Identity, in this framework, is not fixed or determinative; rather, it serves as a reference point for exploring what a given identity means to a particular person and how that meaning manifests in both the supervisory and client-therapist relationships. This framing previews a distinction that recurs across later sections of this article, between having knowledge about a given identity or cultural group and having the awareness and relational skill to work with a specific individual who holds that identity in their own particular way.

My Cultural Self

Levin's own personal and professional identities offer a working example of this practice. These identities are organized below into two categories, reflecting how they were presented in the original course materials.

Some identities, such as sexual orientation and race or ethnicity, tend to be more visible and more commonly disclosed by supervisors and psychology leadership, while others, such as kink community membership, HIV or sexually transmitted infection status, and religious identity, are rarely disclosed. Naming these less commonly disclosed identities is one way to reduce stigma and to model bringing one's full self into supervisory and clinical relationships.

A case example illustrates the potential impact of supervisor self-disclosure. As a trainee, Levin was open about being queer and was working with a bisexual, cisgender woman client who was in a relationship with another woman and who was experiencing a domestic violence dynamic within that relationship. Levin spent a substantial portion of a training year processing feelings related to the client's identity and their own identity as a queer trainee, having assumed the supervisor was heterosexual because the supervisor had never indicated otherwise. On the final day of that supervisory relationship, during termination proceedings, the supervisor disclosed that she was married. Levin later reflected that earlier disclosure of this identity would have provided meaningful support during the year of work with that client.

This experience points to a general principle: self-disclosure of identity is a personal decision, and no supervisor or clinician should feel pressured to disclose any particular identity to a trainee or client. At the same time, supervisors are well served by deliberately considering the reasons for disclosing or withholding an identity, weighing the potential advantages and disadvantages of each choice, and considering the impact that choice may have on the trainee and the supervisory relationship.

Goals for This Presentation

This course is organized around three goals.

• Adopt a critical consciousness and social justice lens (Cadenas & McWhirter, 2022).
• Think about decolonizing both clinical practice and psychology training and supervision.
• Move away from an overemphasis on knowledge and focus instead on awareness, attitudes, and competence or skill.

Critical consciousness refers to the capacity of marginalized individuals to analyze systems of oppression, to act toward social justice, and to develop a sense of agency and hope. Consistent with this framing, this course emphasizes reflective thinking over simple content delivery throughout.

The Need for Culturally Competent Supervision

Reflecting on supervisory training experiences

Approaches to supervisory training vary considerably by training program, region, and trainee generation, and supervisors and trainees frequently differ in how well prepared they feel by that training. A systematic review of training approaches found a wide range of instructional methods in use, including lecture, group discussion, case scenarios, immersion experiences, role-play, structured contact with individuals from diverse backgrounds, self-reflection on clinical interactions, journaling, and service learning, and found that these approaches covered a similarly wide range of topics (Benuto et al., 2018). That review found that these training methods reliably improved trainees' knowledge but produced mixed results regarding trainees' attitudes, self-awareness, and clinical skill (Benuto et al., 2018).

This finding carries a direct implication for supervisors: training that only transmits information is unlikely, by itself, to change how a trainee behaves in the room with a client. Structured, ongoing supervision, rather than one-time didactic training, appears better positioned to help trainees translate knowledge into applied skill.

Experiences within the supervisory relationship

Research on the supervisory relationship indicates that trainees generally want more structured discussion of a client's background and more explicit conversation about power, privilege, and the broader diversity of client and trainee experience, and that this held true across a sample of eighteen interns and forty supervisors surveyed in one study (Adams et al., 2023). The same study found that a large majority of trainees, 77%, reported experiencing harassment based on some aspect of their identity during training, and that a substantial majority of supervisors, 69%, reported the same (Adams et al., 2023). These figures indicate that establishing and protecting relational safety within supervision is not a peripheral concern but a central one, relevant to both members of the supervisory dyad.

Supervisors, for their part, have reported wanting more structured opportunities for self-reflection and self-examination, as well as more conceptual support for addressing dynamics that arise in supervision (Adams et al., 2023). Supervisor responsiveness to trainees has also been found to vary: some research indicates that supervisors do not always engage with a given topic in a consistent way across different trainees, and that this variability can affect how supported a trainee feels within the relationship (Burkard et al., 2006; Hird et al., 2004).

Two case examples illustrate the practical stakes of these dynamics. In the first, a trainee was assigned a teenage client who had been referred to therapy after drawing a swastika on a school wall; the supervisor who assigned the case did not disclose this detail before the assignment, despite knowing that the trainee is Jewish and has family members who survived the Holocaust. The trainee later described feeling blindsided by this omission, noting that, had the information been shared at the time of assignment, there would have been an opportunity to raise concerns about working with that client, including safety concerns related to a distinctly Jewish surname. This example points to a general recommendation: supervisors who assign clients to trainees should consider the trainee's relevant identities and experiences, share information that may bear on the trainee's capacity to work with a given client, and give the trainee the opportunity to participate in that assignment decision.

In a second example, an early-career, non-binary supervisor, who is generally perceived as a woman, observed a trainee move, without hesitation, to sit in the chair typically reserved for the supervisor. This small but notable moment raises questions about how seating position, body language, and other nonverbal behavior can communicate assumptions about power and space within the supervisory relationship, independent of whether any harassment was intended.

Current state of clinical supervision training

A 2019 systematic review of training approaches for multicultural or diversity-related supervision, conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic, found substantial variation in how such training was delivered, spanning the instructional methods described above, and concluded that there was insufficient evidence at that time to recommend any one training strategy over another (Benuto et al., 2018). The review's authors found that training reliably increased trainee knowledge, but evidence for improvements in trainee attitudes, self-awareness, or applied skills was considerably weaker and less consistent (Benuto et al., 2018).

How far does knowledge go?

For a period, cultural competence training was often organized around three components: knowledge, attitude or awareness, and skill or competency. An overemphasis on knowledge carries a specific risk, namely oversimplification and stereotyping. Learning that a cultural group is broadly associated with a particular trait does not mean that the trait will apply, or apply in the same way, to any given individual from that group; how a person understands and expresses that trait can vary widely. For this reason, exploring personal bias and building self-awareness, the attitude component of the framework, may produce the most meaningful gains, and process-oriented techniques, which involve working with material as it arises in the moment rather than only through prepared content, may help build both awareness and skill (Chege et al., 2023).

Role of supervision in trainee development

Supervision occupies a distinct position relative to didactic training because it works directly with the specific scenarios and dilemmas a trainee brings from an actual client relationship, giving the supervisor an opportunity to extrapolate general principles and applied skills from a concrete case. Didactic instruction, such as lectures or workshops, has value, but supervision has been identified as the setting best positioned to teach trainees how to work with a diverse range of clients, in part because it can be tailored to many different training objectives and because supervision quality has been found to relate to trainees' overall satisfaction with their broader training experience (Benuto et al., 2018).

Cultural humility is closely related to this discussion: it describes a stance that balances what a supervisor or clinician knows with genuine curiosity about what they do not know, and recognizes that the trainee is generally the expert on their own experience, just as the client is the expert on theirs.

Systemic Oppression & Decolonization

This section addresses a central question: how does the field of psychology, and by extension the broader mental health field, contribute to systemic oppression, both in clinical practice and within psychology training itself?

Yikes, Psychology Is Problematic!

Several patterns within the mental health field warrant critical examination.

• Pathologization of gender diversity is reflected in the continued inclusion of a gender-related diagnosis in the DSM-5.
• Pathologization of sexual diversity is reflected in how paraphilias and sexual dysfunctions are classified.
• An emphasis on the individual, rather than on the surrounding society, as the locus of a mental health problem.
• An emphasis on the responsibility of marginalized communities to heal from oppression, relative to the responsibility placed on those who oppress.

• A predominance of Western views of healing that de-emphasize the role of community, spirituality, culture, and tradition, and that favor verbal, cognitive approaches such as talk therapy over other healing modalities, including indigenous healing practices.

   

Diagnostic practice with transgender clients illustrates this tension directly. Because insurance-based access to care generally requires a diagnosis, one approach is to use the ICD-11 diagnosis of gender incongruence, which is not classified under mental health conditions in that system, rather than the DSM-5's gender dysphoria diagnosis, while discussing the significance of that diagnostic choice directly with clients. A parallel critique applies to how sexual dysfunction diagnoses are structured: certain diagnoses place a strong emphasis on specific physiological markers, such as erection or orgasm, that are not in fact necessary for sexual satisfaction, and the continued inclusion of transvestic disorder in the DSM-5 offers a further example of the pathologization of a form of sexual expression.

Diagnostic criteria also frequently condition a diagnosis on the presence of clinically significant distress or impairment in social or occupational functioning, and this framing can obscure the role of an unsupportive or non-affirming society in producing that distress or impairment. A transgender person may experience clinically significant distress connected to gender identity, and this distress may, in some cases, be better understood as arising from a non-affirming social environment or from barriers to accessing transition-related care rather than from gender identity itself.

This pattern of pathologization is also applied inconsistently. Consensual kink and consensual non-monogamy are not, in themselves, diagnosable conditions, and most paraphilia diagnoses in the DSM-5 specify that the behavior in question is only considered a mental health concern when it occurs in a non-consensual context. By contrast, behaviors that are inherently non-consensual in a different sense, such as infidelity within a monogamous relationship, lying, or stealing, do not carry a corresponding mental health diagnosis, despite arguably causing comparable relational harm. This comparison illustrates how diagnostic categories have historically concentrated scrutiny on sexual and gender diversity specifically, rather than on non-consensual conduct as a general category.

Research on neurodivergent communication offers a related example: autistic individuals often communicate effectively with one another, suggesting that differences between neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals reflect differences in communication style rather than inherent deficits, even though diagnostic frameworks often characterize such differences as deficits.

Systemic Oppression in Psychology Training

Systemic oppression can manifest within psychology training programs in several specific ways.

• Power dynamics between supervisors and trainees.
• Professional wardrobe policies, which disproportionately affect individuals with larger body sizes and individuals, often Black and Brown women, whose hair or clothing choices are more likely to be subject to scrutiny.
• The blank slate approach to therapy, in which a clinician discloses little about themselves while expecting extensive disclosure from a client, embeds a significant power differential into the therapeutic relationship.
• A mismatch between who holds psychology leadership positions, which tends to be disproportionately White, male, and cisgender, and who is represented among trainees.
• The financial cost of training, which limits who can enter the mental health field; psychologists are generally compensated more than social workers, even though overall compensation across the mental health field remains comparatively low.

Decolonizing Psychology Training

Addressing these dynamics within training programs calls for several concrete steps.

• Remain aware of the power dynamics inherent in the supervisor-trainee relationship.
• Include training material that explores the harmful effects of colonialism (De Angelis, 2023).
• Consider the Euro-Christian-centric influence embedded in prevailing models of change and healing, and make an effort to teach alternative models of healing drawn from other cultural traditions (De Angelis, 2023).

Social Justice Lens

A social justice lens involves attending to how power differentials, economic inequity, and unequal access to education contribute to marginalization, and connecting mental health outcomes to social oppression more broadly. Minority stress theory is a well-researched framework in this area, originally developed to explain disparities in mental health outcomes between queer and heterosexual, cisgender populations. The theory distinguishes between distal stress factors, such as direct experiences of prejudice, violence, or discrimination, and proximal stress factors, such as internalized shame, internalized homophobia, or a sense of isolation that develops as those external stressors become internalized over time. Applied to supervision, this distinction is useful because it separates what a trainee or client experiences from the outside, through discrimination or non-affirmation, from what that experience becomes once it is internalized, and it suggests that a supervisor's response may need to differ depending on which type of stressor is most active for a given client or trainee at a given time.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a framework recognizing that identity is not reducible to any single category and that multiple identities and experiences combine and interact to produce a particular experience of privilege or oppression. The term is often attributed to legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, writing in 1989. The corresponding slide illustrated this concept with six example identity categories that interact to shape a person's position with respect to privilege and oppression. Applied within supervision, an intersectional lens cautions against treating any single identity category, such as race alone or gender alone, as fully explanatory of a trainee's or client's experience; a trainee who is, for example, a Black, queer, disabled woman experiences these identities together, in combination, rather than as separate, additive factors.

Frameworks & Models of Multicultural Supervision

Foundations of Culturally Competent Supervision

Culturally competent supervision rests on three foundational elements.

• The supervisor's own self-exploration of attitudes, biases, strengths, and areas for growth.
• A focus on process, including relational safety, power dynamics, and parallel process, meaning the ways that dynamics present in the client-therapist relationship can recur in the supervisor-trainee relationship, and in the broader systems surrounding both.

• A critical examination of systems of colonization embedded within the psychology field.

   

Taken together, these three foundations describe a supervisor who is willing to examine their own position before examining the trainee's, who treats the supervisory hour as a space to be actively managed rather than a passive container for case discussion, and who is willing to situate individual client and trainee experiences within larger historical and institutional context rather than treating every difficulty as purely personal or idiosyncratic. These three elements function as a starting point for evaluating any specific model or technique a supervisor might adopt, since a model that neglects self-exploration, process, or historical context is likely to fall short regardless of its other strengths.

The focus on process described above extends beyond the two-person supervisory dyad. Dynamics involving power, safety, and relational rupture can appear simultaneously in the client-therapist relationship, in the supervisor-trainee relationship, and within the broader organizational system surrounding both, such as a training clinic, hospital, or larger healthcare system. Supervisors who work within large healthcare systems, in particular, may find that institutional dynamics, such as those between a supervisor and their own director, filter down through the levels of a training hierarchy and ultimately shape what happens between a supervisor and a trainee, or between a trainee and a client. Attending to process, in this sense, means attending to more than one relational layer at once.

Models: Overview

Four models of multicultural supervision are summarized below; two of these, along with a supervision technique, are discussed in more detail in the sections that follow. No single model is presented as superior; rather, each offers a different entry point for structuring supervision, and a supervisor may draw on more than one depending on the trainee, the setting, and the presenting concern.

Competency-Based Clinical Supervision

Competency-based clinical supervision is described as meta-theoretical, meaning it can be layered onto other supervision models rather than functioning as a stand-alone approach. It incorporates a self-assessment of competencies, focuses on areas of strength, and addresses the development of the supervisory relationship, including relationship ruptures and repairs. The model also explicitly addresses supervisee vicarious trauma, recognizing that a trainee's own history, such as a personal history of sexual trauma, can be activated when working with a client processing similar material, and multicultural considerations are described as infused throughout the model rather than treated as a separate topic. Because the model is meta-theoretical, a supervisor already working from another framework, such as the Multidimensional Ecological Comparative Approach or the Integrated Supervision Framework described below, can layer a competency self-assessment and explicit attention to relationship ruptures and repairs on top of that framework rather than adopting an entirely separate model. The model's attention to supervisee vicarious trauma also connects directly to the case example described earlier in this article, involving a trainee who was not informed in advance that an assigned client had drawn a swastika on a school wall. A trainee's own history, whether related to religious or ethnic identity, personal trauma, or another significant experience, can be activated by a client's material in ways that are not always anticipated at the point a case is assigned, which is part of why this model treats vicarious trauma as a standing area of supervisory attention rather than an occasional exception.

MECA

The Multidimensional Ecological Comparative Approach moves away from broad generalizations about cultural groups and instead integrates culture into every training topic as specific scenarios arise, helping the trainee view each client within a comparative sociocultural context (Falicov, 2014). The model is organized around a both-and stance toward generalization, meaning that knowledge about a cultural group may apply to a given individual in some respects but not others, and a knowing-not-knowing stance, meaning that the supervisor gathers relevant information while maintaining ethical curiosity rather than certainty. The model attends to both cultural diversity among clients and broader questions of social justice.

Integrated Supervision Framework

The Integrated Supervision Framework integrates discrimination theory and ecological theory and is organized around three focus areas, intervention, conceptualization, and personalization; three supervisor roles, teacher, counselor, and consultant; and four domains, person, process, context, and time (Peters et al., 2022). Within this framework, intervention concerns the trainee's clinical skill development, including social justice advocacy, such as helping a trainee name culture, microaggressions, or injustice as they arise in a session. Conceptualization concerns helping the trainee build case formulations from a culturally informed framework, and personalization concerns helping the trainee process their own internal reactions and build self-understanding. The three supervisor roles describe different modes of engagement: a teacher role built on instruction, modeling, and feedback; a counselor role built on helping the trainee explore, process, and reflect; and a consultant role built on helping the trainee brainstorm and develop their own solutions. The four domains address the individual trainee's experience, what is occurring in the room in the moment, the various systems within which the trainee is situated, and time considered at multiple scales, from the immediate supervisory session to the trainee's broader training trajectory to the extended historical period within which training occurs (Peters et al., 2022).

SuperVISION Model

The SuperVISION model organizes supervision around the acronym VISION (Garrett et al., 2001). The table below summarizes each component along with an illustrative question a supervisor might use to explore it.

Both supervisor and trainee bring their own goals to supervision. Making those goals explicit and discussing them directly, including the trainee's preference for a more or less directive supervisory style, is a practical starting point for applying this model.

Techniques for Supervisors

Worldview Genogram

The worldview genogram is a three-generation genogram technique designed to de-emphasize psychopathology and instead surface the overarching organizing principles of a family's worldview and culture (Chege et al., 2023). Use of the technique has been associated with improvements in trainees' knowledge, skills, and self-awareness, rather than knowledge alone (Chege et al., 2023).

A worked example illustrates the technique in practice: a three-generation genogram that includes Levin's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who had been held at Auschwitz, extending to Levin's own generation. In the original presentation, this example was drawn as a family-tree diagram, spanning two grandparent couples, their children, and nine grandchildren in Levin's own generation; the same relationships are reproduced below in tabular form, which preserves the generational structure without requiring a visual diagram.

The corresponding slide also included two personal photographs: the presenter's grandmother and the presenter at a Pride event; these are not essential to understanding the technique and are not reproduced here.

ADDRESSING Framework

The ADDRESSING framework was developed to help clinicians and supervisors systematically consider how different identities may carry privilege or oppression for a given individual (Hays, 2008). The framework's nine identity domains are listed below.

Age illustrates the framework's both-and quality well, since both older and younger individuals can experience oppression related to age, through ageism directed at older adults or through dismissiveness directed at younger trainees and clients, depending on context. In practice, a supervisor can use the nine domains as a checklist when helping a trainee build a case conceptualization, working through each domain briefly to consider whether it carries privilege, oppression, or some combination of both for a given client, rather than addressing identity only when a crisis or disclosure makes it unavoidable.

Self-Disclosure?!

Building on the earlier discussion of identity disclosure, three concrete recommendations for supervisors (DeAngelis, 2023) apply.

Appropriate self-disclosure does not mean using supervision time to process a supervisor's own unrelated stressors, but rather sharing oneself intentionally and in ways that model awareness of identity, power, and privilege for the trainee.

Advocacy & Activism

Social work training has historically placed more emphasis on advocacy and activism than psychology training has. Three reflective questions follow from this observation.

• How does a supervisor advocate for their trainee within their own system?
• How does a supervisor help their trainee advocate for their clients within that system?
• How does a supervisor engage in activism within their communities and as a healthcare professional?

A case example illustrates a missed opportunity for advocacy within a supervisory system: in one training group, a Black trainee who was also a military veteran consistently received more negative feedback than peers, without anyone in the group naming or discussing how that trainee's identity and experience as the only Black veteran in the group might be relevant to that pattern. Advocacy operates at multiple levels simultaneously: a supervisor can advocate for an individual trainee within a specific training system, help that trainee build their own capacity to advocate for clients within larger institutional systems, and engage in advocacy or activism as a healthcare professional within their broader community. Supervisors are well served by considering all three levels rather than treating advocacy as a single, undifferentiated task.

Questions and Discussion

This section addresses several questions commonly raised in connection with this material.

Does harassment based on identity, reported by seventy-seven percent of trainees in one study, come specifically from supervisors? The underlying data describe harassment more generally, without specifying the source in every instance, though supervisor-perpetrated harassment is one documented source among others (Adams et al., 2023). Readers seeking a more granular breakdown should consult the original source directly.

Does the DSM adequately account for cultural differences? Many diagnostic categories condition a diagnosis on clinically significant distress or impaired social or occupational functioning, and this framing can obscure whether the underlying difficulty stems from an individual's condition or from a broader society that has not created conditions for diverse individuals to function well. This concern applies broadly across diagnostic categories, not only to those most closely associated with gender and sexual diversity discussed earlier in this article.

How can clinicians in rural areas be more intentional in practice and supervision? Rural practice presents particular difficulties: clinicians in rural areas are often preoccupied with basic access-to-care concerns and may have fewer opportunities to focus on the kind of culturally responsive supervision discussed in this course. Supervisors can nonetheless discuss directly with trainees what it is like to live and work in a rural area, including how contemporaneous political and social events, such as an election, may affect different trainees differently depending on where they live and what legal protections are or are not in place locally. Naming these regional and political considerations openly within supervision, rather than leaving them unaddressed, is a practical starting point regardless of jurisdiction.

What course or certification is required to become a supervisor? Within psychology, supervisory competence is generally developed through training rather than through a separate certification requirement; many psychologists begin supervising more junior trainees while still trainees themselves. A clinician who has not received formal training in supervision is well served by taking a course in clinical supervision and researching whether a relevant certification exists for their discipline and jurisdiction, since requirements outside of psychology, including under Florida's qualified supervisor rules, may differ.

How can clinicians incorporate cultural or spiritual practices relevant to a client's background without engaging in cultural appropriation? Discussing this directly with the client, rather than assuming a practice is relevant based on the client's apparent background, is the central recommendation. A case example involves a Native client grieving a sibling's death by overdose, with whom indigenous healing practices were incorporated at the client's own request, after the clinician asked directly whether the client wished to incorporate such practices, approached the topic with cultural humility, and checked in with the client both during and after incorporating the practice.

Summary and Key Takeaways

This course opened with a personal illustration of how a supervisor's own identity and self-disclosure choices can shape a trainee's experience, and returned to that theme repeatedly across the four major sections that followed. Several points are worth drawing together for practical use.

Regarding the fundamentals of culturally responsive supervision, the course described three foundational elements: a supervisor's ongoing self-exploration of their own attitudes, biases, strengths, and areas for growth; sustained attention to process within the supervisory relationship, including relational safety, power dynamics, and parallel process; and a willingness to examine how the broader psychology field, including its diagnostic frameworks and institutional norms, can embed systemic oppression into everyday practice and training. Supervisors who wish to build culturally responsive supervision into their own work can use these three elements as a working checklist, periodically asking whether their supervision attends to all three, rather than only to case content.

Regarding the comparison of frameworks, this course reviewed four models in varying depth. The Multidimensional Ecological Comparative Approach and the Integrated Supervision Framework were discussed in the greatest detail. The Multidimensional Ecological Comparative Approach is distinguished by its both-and stance toward generalization and its knowing-not-knowing stance toward cultural knowledge, and by its practice of integrating culture into every supervisory topic rather than treating it as a separate unit of training (Falicov, 2014). The Integrated Supervision Framework is distinguished by its explicit three-role structure for the supervisor, teacher, counselor, and consultant, and by its attention to time at multiple scales, from the immediate session to the historical period surrounding training (Peters et al., 2022). Compared with one another, the Multidimensional Ecological Comparative Approach places more weight on how the supervisor and trainee jointly interpret a given client's cultural context session by session, while the Integrated Supervision Framework places more weight on the supervisor's shifting role and on structuring the relationship itself, with implications for supervisors, supervisees, and, ultimately, the clients whose care depends on both.

The remaining two models reviewed in this course, competency-based clinical supervision and the SuperVISION model, serve a somewhat different function than the Multidimensional Ecological Comparative Approach and the Integrated Supervision Framework. Competency-based clinical supervision is meta-theoretical and is designed to be layered onto whichever primary framework a supervisor is already using, contributing a structured self-assessment of competencies and explicit attention to relationship ruptures and repairs. The SuperVISION model, by contrast, offers a discrete six-part structure, organized around the acronym VISION, that a supervisor can use directly to organize an individual supervisory relationship from the outset, making explicit each party's values, goals, and preferred degree of directiveness. A supervisor new to structured multicultural supervision might reasonably begin with the SuperVISION model to establish the relationship, then add competency-based self-assessment once that relationship is underway, before deciding whether the Multidimensional Ecological Comparative Approach or the Integrated Supervision Framework better fits their setting and caseload over time.

Regarding systemic oppression, the course traced several concrete mechanisms by which the mental health field, and psychology training specifically, can reproduce broader patterns of marginalization, including diagnostic frameworks that locate distress within the individual rather than within an unsupportive social environment, professional norms such as wardrobe policies that disproportionately burden certain trainees, and a persistent gap between who holds leadership positions in the field and who is represented among trainees. The course also offered concrete responses to these patterns, including deliberate attention to power dynamics in the supervisor-trainee relationship, incorporation of training material on the history and effects of colonialism, and active advocacy by supervisors on behalf of trainees and by trainees on behalf of clients.

Supervisors seeking to apply this material directly in their own practice may find it useful to begin with the ADDRESSING framework and the worldview genogram as concrete entry points, since both provide a structured way to open conversation about identity and background with a trainee, before moving toward the more comprehensive supervision models discussed above as the supervisory relationship develops. Read together, the course's four major sections suggest a progression that supervisors can revisit over time: understanding the supervisory relationship itself, examining the systemic context surrounding that relationship, selecting a framework or combination of frameworks to structure ongoing work, and applying concrete techniques session by session.

Course Completion

Participants who complete this course may proceed to the corresponding examination through their account, by navigating to pending courses and selecting the option to take the exam.

References

Adams, L. J., MacLean, R. R., Portnoy, G. A., Beauvais, J., & Stacy, M. A. (2023). Psychology trainee and supervisor perspectives of multicultural supervision. Psychological Services, 20(S1), 78. https://doi.org/10.1037/ser0000686

American Psychological Association. (2015). Guidelines for clinical supervision in health service psychology. The American Psychologist, 70(1), 33-46. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038112

Benuto, L. T., Casas, J., & O'Donohue, W. T. (2018). Training culturally competent psychologists: A systematic review of the training outcome literature. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 12(3), 125-134. https://doi.org/10.1037/tep0000193

Burkard, A. W., Johnson, A. J., Madson, M. B., Pruitt, N. T., Contreras-Tadych, D. A., Kozlowski, J. M., & Knox, S. (2006). Supervisor cultural responsiveness and unresponsiveness in cross-cultural supervision. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53(3), 288-301. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.53.3.288

Cadenas, G. A., & McWhirter, E. H. (2022). Critical consciousness in vocational psychology: A vision for the next decade and beyond. Journal of Career Assessment, 30(3), 411-435. https://doi.org/10.1177/10690727211064805

Chege, C. N., Fu, M., Bustrum, J. M., & Jenks, E. H. (2023). The Worldview Genogram: A process model for enhancing diversity responsiveness and competence in education, training, and clinical supervision. Psychological Services, 20(2), 219-226. https://doi.org/10.1037/ser0000674

De Angelis, T. (2023). Increasing supervisor savvy around culture, race, and identity: Culturally responsive supervision includes learning about employees' perspectives, experts say. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/05/news-supervision

Falicov, C. J. (2014). Psychotherapy and supervision as cultural encounters: The multidimensional ecological comparative approach framework. In C. A. Falender, E. P. Shafranske, & C. J. Falicov (Eds.), Multiculturalism and diversity in clinical supervision: A competency-based approach (pp. 3–28). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/14370-001

Garrett, M. T., Borders, L. D., Crutchfield, L. B., Torres‐Rivera, E., Brotherton, D., & Curtis, R. (2001). Multicultural supervision: A paradigm of cultural responsiveness for supervisors. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 29(2), 147-158. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-1912.2001.tb00510.x

Hays, P. A. (2008). Entering another's world: Understanding clients' identities and contexts. In C. A. Falender & E. P. Shafranske (Eds.), Diversity and multiculturalism in supervision (pp. 135–147). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/14370-005

Hird, J. S., Tao, K. W., & Gloria, A. M. (2004). Examining supervisors' multicultural competence in racially similar and different supervision dyads. The Clinical Supervisor, 23(2), 107-122. https://doi.org/10.1300/J001v23n02_07

Peters, H. C., Bruner, S., Luke, M., Dipre, K., & Goodrich, K. (2022). Integrated supervision framework: A multicultural, social justice, and ecological approach. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 63(4), 511-523. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000311

Additional Current References

Please note. The following resources have been included for members to view additional resources associated with this topic area. These resources were not used by the presenter when creating this course.

Childs, A. W., Crusto, C. A., & Miller, R. (2024). Getting Racism Out of Our Work (GROW): Design, deployment, and early outcomes for a program to increase psychology supervisor's multicultural competence. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 18(4), 305–313. https://doi.org/10.1037/tep0000478

Chydenius, H., Ukkonen-Mikkola, T., & Fonsén, E. (2024). Supervisory discussions during the early childhood education and care student teacher practicum period – The cultural scripts, phases, and discourses. Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 44(3-4), 845–859. https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2023.2252997

Hunt, T. T. (2024). The impact of clinical supervision on the authenticity of African American counselors in training. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences, 85(12-A).

Jury, R. T. (2024). Cultural considerations when working with Jewish students and supervisees. The Clinical Supervisor. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/07325223.2024.2413060

Pyland, C. P., Williams, M. G., & Mollen, D. (2024). Ethical and diversity considerations of mandatory reporting: Implications for training. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 18(4), 297–304. https://doi.org/10.1037/tep0000485