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Cultural Humility And Community Based Participatory Research And Education

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Cultural Humility in Community-based Participatory Research and Education
Cultural humility, while perhaps not easy to grasp at first, is an important concept discussed in the documentary, “Cultural Humility in Community-based Participatory Research and Education.” In the documentary, cultural competence is compared to cultural humility through a series of stories and experiences. There are many beneficial lessons that can be learned and applied to one’s own beliefs and practices from this insightful documentary.
First, in order to understand the lessons covered in the documentary, one must understand the differences between cultural competency and cultural humility. Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia, the researchers behind the development of this documentary, defined cultural competency as a subject that is all knowing, meaning that in order to be culturally competent, one must know everything about all cultures (Chávez, 2012). The speakers defined cultural humility as a multidimensional philosophy, with the ability to understand that one cannot know everything, but instead must have an open mind to learn about other cultures while also being aware of one’s own culture (Chávez, 2012). The concept is further broken down into three stages: lifelong learning and critical self-reflection, recognizing and challenging power imbalances, and institutional accountability (Chávez, 2012). These three concepts provide the framework for the lessons taught in the documentary.

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