Abstract:

This paper provides a status report of an ongoing international collaboration between psychology faculty from Trinity Western University (TWU) in Langley, Canada, and from the Universitas Katolik Soegijapranata (UNIKA) in Semarang, Indonesia. As an outgrowth of post-tsunami relief efforts, a small team of collaborators is emerging in an effort to cultivate indigenous training systems in an Indonesian university setting. Many efforts at internationalizing psychology draw upon research frameworks that draw upon indigenous frameworks and European intellectual traditions. In this project, we support hybridization efforts for adapting and contextualizing international dissemination through research and intellectual engagement. However, professional education in psychotherapy also draws profoundly upon healing traditions shared by communities and cultural traditions. Health and healing practices are also being addressed with great energy through institutional activities of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Professions education in psychotherapy embodies the full scope of considerations across the domains of science, health, ethnicity, education, spirituality, and identity. In this presentation, we outline a cultural ecology of psychotherapy practices with the intent to nurturing postcolonial forms of collaboration. By framing salient contexts that sustain practices of professional psychotherapy, opportunities for adaptation and hybridization become more accessible. To illustrate, in Canada curricular models for psychotherapy training and supervision are being transformed through the formulation of systems of competency development and evaluation. Competency-based curricula are employed to coordinate university-based training systems, government-based systems of professional credentialing, and profession- and discipline-based strategies for accreditation, research and evaluation. Political, economic, and intellectual ecologies converge in emerging systems of quality assurance. At the level of universities as institutions, the Association of Universities and Colleges in Canada (AUCC) provides a national forum for collaborations that emphasize international implications of the emergence of the European Higher Education Area, for instance. At the level of international professional collaborations, the World Council for Psychotherapy has developed the World Certificate for Psychotherapy to facilitate credentialing, quality control, and protection of the public. In contrast to international institutional and intergovernmental activities, the UNIKA-TWU collaboration is grounded at the level of interpersonal activities in counseling, psychotherapy, and supervision. By shifting the focus of collaboration to interpersonal, alternative sources of creative adaptation can emerge. In this paper we outline hybridization strategies for embodying postcolonial values systems in professional practices of supervision, counseling, professional education, and dissemination of healing practices. The impact of institution-level resources can be mobilized in flexible or in hegemonic manners, and strategies for addressing this core ambiguity are summarized.

Keywords:

Psychotherapy, indigenous psychology, supervision model, competency evaluation, quality assurance, higher education.