See Our Strengths: International Counseling Students of Color Leveraging Community Cultural Wealth in Counselor Training

ABSTRACT

Despite growing enrollment of international students in counseling programs, existing research has predominantly emphasized their challenges and adjustment difficulties, with limited attention to their cultural strengths. This critical narrative inquiry study examined how nine international counseling students of color (ICSC) in master's programs leveraged Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) to navigate counselor training experiences. Data were collected through two rounds of semistructured interviews per participant, totaling approximately 27 h, and analyzed using in vivo coding, concept coding guided by the six forms of CCW, and pattern coding. The findings revealed that CCW operated as a dynamic, interconnected system of survival, meaning‐making, resistance, and professional formation. Familial and social capital functioned as collective infrastructures of endurance that sustained persistence under conditions of marginalization. Linguistic capital emerged as a clinical and interpretive strength. Navigational capital reflected not only individual resilience but also the consequence of structural conditions that shift responsibility for navigation onto students themselves. Resistant capital was strategic, relational, and shaped by visa‐related precarity, suggesting that existing frameworks may not fully capture the constrained agency available to ICSC. Aspirational capital revealed a transnational dimension, with participants’ motivations tied to cross‐border commitments to mental health access and community service. These findings challenge deficit‐based approaches in counselor education and call for systemic changes that recognize and support the cultural wealth ICSC bring to training.