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Cultural Sharing Exercises
There are many ways to involve staff in sharing about different aspects of their cultural backgrounds. Identity - Ask participants to introduce themselves by: ethnicity, life cycle phase, sibling position, class background and the label they had in their own family.
- Ask them to talk about any changes in class, religious/spiritual orientation they have made different from that of their own family while growing up.
- Another way of doing this is for each group member to bring in an artifact- a picture, an item, a poem, a piece of music, which conveys something about their cultural heritage to share with the group. Members take turns sharing. This is usually done without cross talk. At the end members are free to offer any concluding thoughts about the experience.
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Getting Started: Introducing Staff to the Process Before getting started, make a statement of your organization’s intentions. A sample introduction follows:
Our agency is deeply committed to engaging issues of cultural, language, and economic diversity, and the accompanying issues of privilege and oppression based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other dimensions of difference and social location. As an organization, we stand for the ideal of incorporating sensitivity to these dimensions of human experience in thinking and talking about therapy, research, community-based programs, and other professional endeavors of our staff. We hope to have these conversations in a way that is mutually respectful, and inclusive of all participants. These issues are not easy for anyone to talk about; no one does it perfectly. Perfect is indeed not a useful goal when it comes to making oneself vulnerable to these concerns, and yet we owe it to the families we work with to engage the issues in a serious, sustained way. In other words, we aspire to open up a conversational space for genuine dialogue. Conversely, we aspire to avoid engaging in interactions that move beyond collegially challenging one another, into hurtful confrontation. |
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The following list of publications were contributed by our faculty. We welcome suggestions for additional readings. You can also view an annotated list of our own publications for interested readers. |
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The following links will be of interest to those committed to cultural competence.
Please note that while we have found these sites helpful in the past, we cannot guarantee their future content nor do we necessarily agree with all their viewpoints.
We encourage you to submit your suggestions for further links. Thank you! |
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We believe that films are an excellent tool for promoting cultural competence. We have listed below some of our favorite films and hope that other will add to our suggestions or offer specific questions and exercises which can be used with the recommended films to help groups explore issues of cultural competence. Most of these films are available for purchase through the internet. We hope readers will add to our list. There are many wonderful films out there. Please contact us and let us know your favorites! |
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