As American labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez expressed, “Preservation of one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.” Respecting everyone’s culture is a necessity, no matter their ethnic background, or if they stand out in society. Language, customs, food, and religion are all parts of a culture everyone possesses. All individuals have a viewpoint, a perspective of what cultures the world around them is compromised of. The culture in every human influences how they view the world around them by hiding one’s own culture, giving people biased views of others’ ethnicities, and weighing down the minority groups.
First and foremost, I would like to point out that I underestimated this course prior to its launch. It has surely challenged and steered many of my views and beliefs in such a short period of time. This course, overall, has truly been the most challenging, but I have taken plenty of knowledge and insight from it. There is so much that an individual can do in order to improve cultural competence within families as well as what a professional can do in order to encourage cultural competence within themselves. Ultimately, I now believe that it is absolutely fair to say that both professionals and society in general have a considerable amount of information to learn before gaining cultural competence;knowledge may be gained through personal experiences
The article ‘’What Every American Should Know’’ by Eric Liu acknowledges the struggles, the rapidly changing, and all of the multicultural issues that continually expands through every day of the culture wars. So within this article Liu is confronting a very substantial topic, which he asserts the problem of cultural diversity or the culture wars inside of the United States. In the article Liu provides the reader with many different examples all the way from cultural literacy, multiculturalism, and many examples from history over the years. Liu also expresses these examples in a way that the reader can absorb the details in a different style were the reader has to look at each example in a different aspect to fully understand what he is trying to stay. Liu evaluates E.D Hirsch and talks about the list. The list that every American should know, containing ten words that every citizen in America should know. Liu discourages people use Hirsch’s list because of the time differences between the past and the future, and how the culture war has progressed through time. Liu has evolved Hirsch’s idea and created something more modern that people can create their own list to show the people of America different opinions to have and no one is wrong or right that is what makes this list so influential. (Liu)
My block was a melting pot of people but my high school was not. After entering high school is when I realized that I was white or Caucasian. During this time, I was also given the
It is high time that people learn about different cultures to have a thorough understanding of the same and thus achieve cultural competency. This is necessary for educators, healthcare givers, attorneys, organizations and all to live in a cross-cultural world without any emotional or physical conflict. Most organizations have their presence in multiple countries and have business relations with people of different cultural groups. So, for a successful business also, cultural competency is the demand.
I have learned that it is important that educators and health providers be trained on cultural competency to understand the population they are serving. Marks, Sims, and Osher (King, Sims, & Osher, n.d.) define cultural competency as a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals and enables that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross–cultural situations" ( as cited in Cross et al., 1989; Isaacs & Benjamin, 1991). Health providers and educators should investigate demographic patterns or trends in the place where they live and work. This brings awareness of the types of cultures that they might come across when they are working with people. Organizations should integrate and implement policies that promote the value of diversity, self-assessment, manage the dynamics of difference, acquire and institutionalize cultural knowledge, and adapt to diversity and the cultural contexts of communities they serve (Georgetown University, 2004). Georgetown University (2004) also stresses that culture competency grows gradually and is always open for improvement.
Department of Health and Human Service (2003), stating that cultural competency is “the ability to provide services to clients that honor different cultural beliefs, interpersonal styles, attitudes and behaviors and the use of multi-cultural staff in the policy development, administration and provision of those services.” According to the National Associations of Social Workers’ (2008) code of ethics, competency is important for understanding clients and their needs. Cultural competence differs from cultural humility in that it solely provides educational information regarding diverse populations in attempts to provide quality services. Culturally humility is a philosophy that includes components of cultural competence, but also involves analyzing ones self-awareness and biases. It includes life long learning surrounding issues of cultural diversity. Cultural humility is what is strived for but for the purpose of this analysis it will focus on cultural competence as a means of educating individuals on LGBT issues in later
It have been proven effective in providing services to individuals from a wide spread of diverse backgrounds. Cultural competence is understanding a set of congruent behaviors, knowledge, attitudes and policies that enable effective work in cross-cultural situations (Bazron, Cross, Dennis, & Isaacs, 1989). This means that an individual trains to understand different cultural groups. Cultural competency training is beneficial to all human service organizations because it aims to increase the knowledge and skills to improve one’s ability to efficiently serve different cultural groups therefore eliminating biases and
In the field of human services, “cultural competency” has become a common buzz meant to address in part the . The intention being, that workers are able to achieve some level of knowledge and training that prepares them to work with
My life experiences with different cultures began in my hometown, when Prairie Island Tribal Council members educated students about their culture through lectures, dance, and band performances. This allowed me to appreciate my Mdewakanton classmates’ culture. My exposure to different cultures expanded during an internship at a medical examiner’s office, because death is universal. I learned being culturally respectful and sensitive begins by listening to their stories and experiences before answering their questions honestly and reassuring them the deceased would be treated with respect. As I traveled to rural Honduras on a medical brigade and as a student studying abroad in Italy and Germany, I realized by listening and observing without judgement, I began to understand the cultures. In addition, I discovered generalizations of a culture give an incomplete view and I cannot assume I understand a culture. Instead, individuals are unique based on experiences as well as their culture.
The core claims of Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia include the existence of power imbalances between patients and health professionals, the high impact of the relationship between non-financial barriers and a patient’s view of care, and the false sense of preparedness that traditional teaching of cultural competence provides. The core claims made are credible based upon the growing numbers of health disparities outside of the scope of economic differences, as well as the rise in attitudes towards cultural humility versus cultural competence training in academia. The challenges involved in increasing attitudes towards cultural humility lie within curriculum construction and evaluation. Those involved in academia regarded stereotypic
The first step to achieving complete cultural competency is valuing diversity. It is a process that requires cultural humility. Unlike competency, cultural humility goes beyond simply being knowledgeable of differences, but having a humble desire to ensure a lifelong commitment to intercultural exchange (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998). I have witnessed some Americans oppose the idea of immigration and strongly believe that American services should not cater to immigrants. They believe that all foreigners should learn English and the United States should not accommodate their linguistic needs. These same people are aware of the cultural differences that exist in America, but lack cultural humility and appreciation for diversity, making it difficult for them to attain complete cultural competency. A public health professional cannot go into a community, assuming that everyone thinks and behaves like them. They must be open-minded, flexible, empathetic, and aware of the differences and similarities that exist. Therefore, cultural humility is a prerequisite in achieving cultural competence.
After watching the Cultural Competence in Health care video, I learned that there are many different people I will deal with in my career as an advocate for health. One quote I really liked from the video stated, “My diversity is my strength, not my weakness”. I believe this is true because having so many different people of different cultural backgrounds opens up the opportunity for different points of view to develop new ideas. This reminds me of the activity we did in class on our first day. We were asked to simply write down what our thoughts were. What we realized upon getting our sheets back is that when you work with others, they may have an idea you had not thought about. Overall, I think this video is a good representation of the
This article elaborately explains the process of becoming culturally competent. It states the stages of development as Denial, Defense, Minimization, Acceptance, Adaptation, and Integration, respectfully. The article goes in depth on each stage of development, the first three being stages in what is termed “ethnocentrism” and the last three being stages of “ethnorelativism”. While the different stages are being discussed, the author presents examples of each and emphasizes the fact that American’s are not the only people who go through these stages when becoming more culturally competent.
Cultural self-awareness is strongly linked to development of a cultural intelligence for a number of reasons. Thus, this essay will critically reflect on what cultural self-awareness is and its importance on how it develops ones cultural intelligence. Before we discuss about cultural self-awareness and cultural intelligence, it is important to understand what culture is and how it impacts on our society. Culture is a complex subject that can be defined in various ways.