56 INVITED CHAPTERS
promote and provoke rich discussion and reflection. Please note that each question focuses on
our practice:
- How much do I know about my own culture(s)?
- How much do I know about the cultures in our service area?
- How is our EDAD program viewed by the various cultures in our service area?
- How do members of the various cultures in our service area view our program and
me? - How do the students/candidates in our program know I value diversity? How does it
show in my/our approaches to serving the varied educational needs in our service
area? - How are the voices of women faculty and faculty of color known in our program(s)?
- How do I distinguish between tolerance and valuing?
- How does our program/department deal with differences rooted in culture? Do we
avoid, ignore, sublimate, or discuss? - How do we support service and research that is non-traditional and that depart from past
practices? - Who teaches the diversity courses?
- What does our silence about issues of diversity say about us? Too often silence
equates to permission, agreement. - How do we insure that our curriculum and instructional delivery system and research
agendas reflect changes in the community? - As we consider the changes sought by ELCC, to what extent do we insure that these
changes permeate through our curriculum, our research, our service, and our
scholarship in ways that are authentic? OR, do we make our syllabus and program
descriptions align in print, but continue to do the same thing as we have been doing for
years?
The good news is that anyone can do it; all it takes is the willingness to try on a lens that
recognizes disparity and is committed to finding out how to be of service to others. Two
valuable sources and their websites for ideas and instruments are:
- Georgetown University Medical School – gumc.edu
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources, Health Resources and Services
Administration – hrsa.gov/cultural competence.
Barriers to Cultural Proficiency
The 4th tool describes what it takes to overcome the barriers to Cultural Proficiency. One
might ask, and appropriately I might add, well, this seems pretty straightforward, are there
any pitfalls? The answer is a decided YES! This takes us back to my earlier questions when
we, in this room, believed that systems of oppression have existed and continue to persist to
today. As I recall, the preponderance of responses were that these systems existed and
continue to exist. Table 4 provides a description of barriers to Cultural Proficiency: