MULTICULTURAL COUNSELING AS AN EFFORT TO PREVENT SOCIAL CONFLICT IN SCHOOLS

Abstract

Schools are representatives of society with diverse cultural, religious, language, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Although this diversity has the potential to add to the richness of social interactions, it sometimes leads to conflict if not managed properly. This is where multicultural counseling becomes one of the useful means of avoiding such conflicts. The current research uses a qualitative research approach, which is a literature study that browses different articles in journals, literature, and proceedings concerning issues of multicultural counseling, as well as avoiding conflicts within a societal setting, specifically a school setting. The results obtained from this research indicate that the service offered by the use of multicultural counseling has a significant impact on enhancing cultural awareness, empathy, and cross-cultural communication skills of students. Multicultural counseling decreases the intensity of conflict, discrimination, and bullying behavior, as well as promotes the establishment of an inclusive and harmonious school climate. Discussion underlined that the success of implementing this service is influenced by a high degree of counselor multicultural competence along with support from inclusive school policy. The results provide novelty in the form of an integrative multicultural counseling formulation, including counselor training, cross-cultural activity development, and strengthening of inclusive character education. Thus, multicultural counseling does not only hold a role as a problem-solving tool but also as a means of social transformation that is able to form a young generation into one which is tolerant, adaptive, and ready to face global challenges.