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Our Values: Community Service Learning
* They are positive, meaningful and real to the participants.
* They involve cooperative rather than competitive experiences and thus promote skills associated with teamwork and community involvement and citizenship.
* They address complex problems in complex settings rather than simplified problems in isolation.
* They offer opportunities to engage in problem-solving by requiring participants to gain knowledge of the specific context of their service-learning activity and community challenges, rather than only to draw upon generalized or abstract knowledge such as might come from a textbook. As a result, service-learning offers powerful opportunities to acquire the habits of critical thinking; i.e. the ability to identify the most important questions or issues within a real-world situation.
* They promote deeper learning because the results are immediate and uncontrived. There are no "right answers" in the back of the book.
* As a consequence of this immediacy of experience, service-learning is more likely to be personally meaningful to participants and to generate emotional consequences, to challenge values as well as ideas, and hence to support social, emotional and cognitive learning and development.
Paraphrased from Eyler & Giles, Where's the Learning in Service-Learning?, 1999
Cultural Competency Building
To understand cultural competence, it is important to grasp the full meaning of the word culture first. According to Chamberlain (2005), culture represents “the values, norms, and traditions that affect how individuals of a particular group perceive, think, interact, behave, and make judgments about their world” (p. 197). While a few individuals seem to be born with cultural competence, the rest of us have had to put considerable effort into developing it. This means examining our biases and prejudices, developing cross-cultural skills, searching for role models, and spending as much time as possible with other people who share a passion for cultural competence.
The term multicultural competence surfaced in a mental health publication by psychologist Paul Pedersen (1988) at least a decade before the term cultural competence became popular. Most of the definitions of cultural competence shared among diversity professionals come from the health-care industry. Their perspective is useful in the broader context of diversity work.
Consider the following definitions:
* A set of congruent behaviors, attitudes and policies that come together as a system, agency or among professionals and enable that system, agency or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations.
* Cultural competence requires that organizations have a defined set of values and principles, and demonstrate behaviors, attitudes, policies, and structures that enable them to work effectively cross-culturally.
* Cultural competence is defined simply as the level of knowledge-based skills required to provide effective clinical care to patients from a particular ethnic or racial group.
* Cultural competence is a developmental process that evolves over an extended period. Both individuals and organizations are at various levels of awareness, knowledge and skills along the cultural competence continuum. It is not surprising that the healthcare profession was the first to promote cultural competence. A poor diagnosis due to lack of cultural understanding, for example, can have fatal consequences, especially in medical service delivery.
Cultural incompetence in the business or non profit community can damage an individual’s self esteem and career, but the unobservable psychological impact on the victims can go largely unnoticed until the threat of a class action suit brings them to light. Notice that some definitions emphasize the knowledge and skills needed to interact with people of different cultures, while others focus on attitudes. A few definitions attribute cultural competence or a lack thereof to policies and organizations. It’s easy to see how working with terms that vary in definition can be tricky. Can you even measure something like cultural competence? In an attempt to offer solutions for developing cultural competence, Diversity Training University International (DTUI) isolated four cognitive components: (a) Awareness, (b) Attitude, (c) Knowledge, and (d) Skills.
Awareness
Awareness is consciousness of one's personal reactions to people who are different. A police officer who recognizes that he profiles people who look like they are from Mexico as “illegal aliens” has cultural awareness of his reactions to this group of people.
Attitude
Paul Pedersen’s multicultural competence model emphasized three components: awareness, knowledge and skills. DTUI added the attitude component in order to emphasize the difference between training that increases awareness of cultural bias and beliefs in general and training that has participants carefully examine their own beliefs and values about cultural differences.
Knowledge
Social science research indicates that our values and beliefs about equality may be inconsistent with our behaviors, and we ironically may be unaware of it. Social psychologist Patricia Devine and her colleagues, for example, showed in their research that many people who score low on a prejudice test tend to do things in cross cultural encounters that exemplify prejudice (e.g., using out-dated labels such as “illegal aliens”, “colored”, and “homosexual”.). This makes the Knowledge component an important part of cultural competence development.
Regardless of whether our attitude towards cultural differences matches our behaviors, we can all benefit by improving our cross-cultural effectiveness. One common goal of diversity professionals is to create inclusive systems that allow members to work at maximum productivity levels.
Skills
The Skills component focuses on practicing cultural competence to perfection. Communication is the fundamental tool by which people interact in organizations. This includes gestures and other non-verbal communication that tend to vary from culture to culture. Notice that the set of four components of our cultural competence definition—awareness, attitude, knowledge, and skills— represents the key features of each of the popular definitions. The utility of the definition goes beyond the simple integration of previous definitions, however. It is the diagnostic and intervention development benefits that make the approach most appealing. Cultural competence is becoming increasingly necessary for work, home, community social lives.
Reprint by permission. Reference: Mercedes Martin & Billy Vaughn (2007). Strategic Diversity & Inclusion Management magazine, pp. 31-36. DTUI Publications Division: San Francisco, CA.
How Do We Choose?
There is need for support in all corners of the globe. It is a challenge to choose what place or group to focus energy and resources, knowing reaching all people who struggle is likely not possible. It is important to build relationships based on reciprocity and trust with local communities where there is a level of safety and infrastructure for integrating foreign volunteers.
The work of the volunteer should be guided by the wisdom and expertise of the local affected community and its leaders. Careful planning and shared expectation setting is paramount. Good volunteers work in partnership with local cultures by respecting limits, and not imposing solutions.
The volunteer is not the domain of the solution just as the host culture is not the domain of the problem. Culturally imposed strategies rarely work and are often unsustainable.
Our first location for Volunteer Positive is Chiang Mai, Thailand. We will be working on launching other locations in Latin America and Africa as we grow.
