Cultural Competence

This week’s article summary is  How Schools Can Improve Their Students' Cultural Competence. 

The article resonated for me because it focused on the interrelation of the two most critical aspects of our personality--our sense of self (agency) and our sense of others (communion)—in becoming culturally competence.

Cultural competence is the ability to embrace, understand, and work productively with those who are different from you. 

Cultural competence begins with understanding who we are and then reflecting on how our identity “creates a lens through which we view the world.”

Understanding what shapes us and what we believe and value can help us become better listeners, less judgmental of others, and more open to the pluralism of our country and the world at large.

As we all know, today’s world is much different compared to 10, 20, or 50 years ago, and students today are growing up in a much more multicultural, heterogeneous world, much different from the homogeneity of my childhood in the 1960s. 

This may seem unbelievable in 2016, but I vividly recall as a fifth grader being amazed when a new boy in my class told me he was Jewish and his parents were divorced. This was my first experience with a household that didn’t have a mom and dad and someone who wasn’t at least nominally Christian. That night I’m sure my parents wondered what had gotten into me when I asked them to explain both Judaism and divorce.

My insular, sheltered life was the norm back then as many of us grew up in a neighborhood and attended a school where everyone looked and acted alike. Opportunities to learn about differences, let alone multiculturalism, were quite limited.

Although there is still much neighborhood and school insularity and homogeneity in America (cue to Tuesday’s election), the modern workplace has become much more diverse and multicultural—hence, the importance of becoming culturally competent. (Yes, for many it’s the moral thing to do, but for everyone it’s a essential need for professional success.)

Becoming culturally competent is in some ways very simple yet in others quite daunting. 

It’s more about embracing an inquisitive and non-judgmental mindset than having to follow a set of instructions. 

Yet even with an open attitude, most of us still fret about offending others when exploring difference, are loath to face and work through our explicit and implicit biases, and by nature and habit are more comfortable with and favorable toward those who think, act, and even look like us (cue again to Tuesday’s election results).

Our job as teachers is to help our students not only develop a solid sense of self and others but to embrace and thrive in and to contribute positively to an ever more interconnected, pluralistic, and multicultural world (cue a final time to Tuesday’s election).

Joe

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We live in an increasingly pluralistic society where people run up against the thoughts and beliefs of others more and more frequently.

Helping children learn to navigate the space between what they believe and what others believe is perhaps one of the best ways we can overcome the hate we see in so many facets of our society today.

Cultural competence isn’t tolerance. It’s not that easy. Cultural competence is not simply ensuring that your school has a rich and varied Black History Month or letting students start a Gay-Straight Alliance -- although those can be powerfully important pieces of a culturally competent school.

Cultural competence means first understanding that we all come to school with our sense of who we are, and that unless we are reflective about our own identity and how it creates a lens through which we view the world, we will not be able to honor the identities of others.

But that is only the beginning of cultural competence. As we go through the process of understanding who we are, we also have to listen deeply to those around us to understand who they are and what their experiences are, so that we can relate to them fully as people, without preconceived notions of what it means to have an identity that is different -- or even the same -- as ours.

And it means subjecting the processes of our schools to what we learn when we listen, always working to ensure that our schools are accessible to all, equitable for all.

There’s no shortcut or checklist to building cultural competence, and it isn’t something you ever really get good at -- you just strive to get better at it. Being aware and responsive and listening in ways that ensure all members of the community feel that who they are -- all facets of their identities -- are welcome and safe is something that requires constant work. But there are questions you can ask yourself that can serve to move you toward a more aware, more just school community.

• Do I seek out and listen to a diverse group of voices when making decisions?
• Do I allow myself to be vulnerable in our school community? Do others feel safe letting me know when I make a mistake -- especially when that mistake comes from a lack of cultural competence?
• Do I work to ensure that there is not one standard of excellence, but rather multiple pathways for students to have academic and social success?
• Do I intentionally use anti-racist, anti-heteronormative, and explicitly accepting language?

It has become a cliché to cite Martin Luther King’s famous quote, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” But that quote is at the heart of cultural competence. It is not enough to be tolerant of the diversity of our school communities. It is not enough to be accepting of the wide range of human experience in our schools. We must embrace it. We must truly love all who inhabit our schools, and we can only do that when we seek to understand every individual and the identities we all bring to school every day.

When we do that -- when we aspire to that ideal and model that aspiration to all in our schools, we can teach students to be as loving and as aware as they can be. And if we do that, maybe we can teach our children that the hatred that would cause someone to use an ethnic slur in our hallways or to reject a student’s right to go to the bathroom of their gender identification is the same hatred behind the slaughter of 50 people at a gay dance club in Orlando.

And maybe we can teach our children that they should never choose hate, only love.