Multicultural Competence in Student Affairs

Effectively address the challenges of equity and inclusion on campus

The long-awaited second edition, Multicultural Competence in Student Affairs: Advancing Social Justice and Inclusion, introduces an updated model of student affairs competence that reflects the professional competencies identified by ACPA and NASPA (2015) and offers a valuable approach to dealing effectively with increasingly complex multicultural issues on campus.  To reflect the significance of social justice, the updated model of multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills now includes multicultural action and advocacy and speaks directly to the need for enhanced perspectives, tools, and strategies to create inclusive and equitable campuses.

This book offers a fresh approach and new strategies for student affairs professionals to enhance their practice; useful guidelines and revised core competencies provide a framework for everyday challenges, best practices that advance the ability of student affairs professionals to create multicultural change on their campuses, and case studies that allow readers to consider and apply essential awareness, knowledge, skills, and action applied to common student affairs situations.

Multicultural Competence in Student Affairs: Advancing Social Justice and Inclusion will allow professionals to:

• Examine the updated and revised dynamic model of student affairs competence
• Learn how multicultural competence translates into effective and efficacious practice
• Understand the inextricable connections between multicultural competence and social justice
• Examine the latest research and practical implications
• Explore the impacts of practices on assessment, advising, ethics, teaching, administration, technology, and more
• Learn tools and strategies for creating multicultural change, equity, and inclusion on campus

Understanding the changes taking place on campus today and developing the competencies to make individual and systems change is essential to the role of student affairs professional.  What is needed are new ways of thinking and innovative strategies and approaches to how student affairs professionals interact with students, train campus faculty and staff, and structure their campuses.  Multicultural Competence in Student Affairs: Advancing Social Justice and Inclusion provides guidance for the evolving realities of higher education.

RAECHELE L. POPE is an associate dean and associate professor of higher education and student affairs in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

AMY L. REYNOLDS is an associate professor of counseling psychology in the department of Counseling, School, and Educational Psychology at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

JOHN A. MUELLER is a professor in the Department of Student Affairs in Higher Education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.