Cultural Humility

International education, service-learning, and community-based global learning programs are robust with potential. They can positively impact communities, grow civil society networks, and have transformative effects for students who become more globally aware and more engaged in global civil society – at home and abroad. Yet such programs are also packed with peril. Clear evidence indicates that poor forms of such programming have negative impacts on vulnerable persons, including medical patients and children, while cementing stereotypes and reinforcing patterns of privilege and exclusion. These dangers can be mitigated, however, through collaborative planning, design, and evaluation that advances mutually beneficial community partnerships, critically reflective practice, thoughtful facilitation, and creative use of resources.

Drawing on research and insights from several academic disciplines and community partner perspectives, along with the authors’ decades of applied, community-based development and education experience, they present a model of community-based global learning that clearly espouses an equitable balance between learning methodology and a community development philosophy.

Emphasizing the key drivers of community-driven learning and service, cultural humility and exchange, seeking global citizenship, continuous and diverse forms of critically reflective practice, and ongoing attention to power and privilege, this book constitutes a guide to course or program design that takes into account the unpredictable and dynamic character of domestic and international community-based global learning experiences, the varying characteristics of destination communities, and a framework through which to integrate any discipline or collaborative project.

Readers will appreciate the numerous toolboxes and reflective exercises to help them think through the creation of independent programming or courses that support targeted learning and community-driven development. The book ultimately moves beyond course and program design to explore how to integrate these objectives and values in the wider curriculum and throughout formal and informal community-based learning partnerships.

Table of Contents:
Foreword
Introduction

1) The Community-Campus Contribution: Defining Community-Based Global Learning
2) Educating for Global Citizenship
3) Advancing Reflection and Critical Reflection
4) Power, Self as a Cultural Being, Cultural Humility, and Intercultural Communication
5) Community-Driven Partnerships
6) Program Design: What are your team’s goals?
7) Planning for Global Learning
8) Staying Safe, Healthy, and Happy
9) The Journey Continues

References
Index

"In the past decade, notions of “cultural competence” and “cultural sensitivity” have gained rapid ascendance within American medical education in general and within psychiatric residency programs in particular. These innovations in medical education are elements of a multi-pronged, health sector-wide response to vast racial/ethnic disparities in health outcomes recently identified in the United States. The vast scope and magnitude of these disparities came to light at the turn of the millennium with the publication of the Institute of Medicine’s 2002 report, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, and the Surgeon General’s landmark 2001 supplemental report, Mental Health: Culture, Race, Ethnicity, among other studies. These disturbing findings were quickly interpreted as a clarion call to prompt and decisive action, and the field of medical education has been especially responsive to this call. One key consequence of this call has been a comprehensive effort to sensitize clinicians-in-training to the roles they might play – often unwittingly – in producing and reinforcing disparities in treatment and health outcome.
Although a wide variety of educational interventions have been implemented across medical school and residency training programs in recent years, it is striking how little is known about the on-the-ground challenges, problems, and pitfalls that arise when clinician-educators attempt to render issues of racial/ethnic and cultural difference “teachable” and “learnable.” In this commentary, we address this glaring absence from the literature by reporting findings of an innovative qualitative research study conducted at a major teaching hospital in the northeastern United States."

The Institute of Healthcare’s Triple Aim Initiative (TAI) identifies the improvement
of patients’ experience as one of three key components necessary for optimizing the American
health care and cost-delivery systems.1 Widely adopted today, the TAI’s focus on patient-centered
care2 also implicitly embeds the idea of care that is culturally-sensitive. Perhaps nowhere
in the health-care delivery system is this emphasis on patient-centered, culturally sensitive, care
more important than for those addressing life-limiting illness3 or for frail elders who are coping
with the advanced stages of multiple chronic conditions.4

Cultural humility is a critical skill for effective intercultural interactions. While common in other scholarly fields, the concept is seldom found in the literature of global learning and international education. Utilizing grounded theory, this study explores the development of cultural humility through qualitative data analysis of in-class assignments and reflection journals from a university course in the United States (n=18). Throughout the semester students worked in teams to write grant proposals for agricultural development projects in Kenya. Examining student work and reflections sheds light on differing avenues of global learning, which has traditionally prioritized international travel as the core means of learning. This article proposes a pedagogy of cultural humility to promote global learning through a variety of educational interventions. Prioritizing cultural humility can yield enhanced respect for others, providing a focus on lifelong learning, more meaningful global...

As educators, we continuously witness microaggressions contained in ways institutions apprehend differences, and fail become a powerful vehicle for all students to feel safe and included.  Addressing how multiple layers of colonization persists within languages, gender, race,  can inform, and transform practices in International Education. This session takes us into stories of active and self-witnessing, uncovering inherent biases, and our own agency in implementing inclusive IE.

As educators, we wish to address the epistemological forces of colonization are still present in the framing, planning, and practices of internationalization, evident at various levels of administration, faculty, or mobility experience.  This session presents six stories of international/intercultural educators working to develop reciprocal learning spaces for all students to feel safe, included, and recognized. The presenters outline processes and lessons learned through sharing stories of how multiple layers of colonization persists within languages, gender, race, etc., and discuss strategies in addressing microaggressions in educational contexts.

What does it mean to explore active-witnessing and address microaggressions as international educators ? When do we choose to speak out ? Is silence always complicity ? How does our own positionality as international educators convey a larger picture of where inclusion and reconciliation might or might not intersect ?  Through a metissage of institutional, pedagogical and administrative stories, the presenters and participants examine how international educators can become active witnesses and contribute to the intercultural competency within their institutions.