Field Instructor Training Cultural Competence (Part I)

Lorraine Brave, J’May Rivara, Michelle Bagshaw

November 6, 2008

Cultural Competence and Supervision (Part I)Lorraine, Michelle, J’May

Agenda 11/6/20081:30-4:30

• Welcome and energizer

• Expectations and overview

• Introduction to privilege ,power, and oppression in our communities & workplace

• Integrating social justice course (Soc W 504) and supervision

• Activity - identity wheel

• Large group discussion

• Stretch break

• Exploring diversity in the supervisory relationship:

• Future trainings and additional readings, closing comments and evaluation

• Adjourn

Expectations ?

Objectives

1. To enhance ways to dialogue with students on cultural competence as a developmental process.

2. Make connections between students’ course work and practicum experiences.

3. Address skill development for directly handling issues of diversity in your supervisory relationship with your students.

4. Address skill development for helping students in directly handling issues of diversity with their clients.

Introduction to privilege, power and oppression

• Celebrating differences includes the sometimes painful process of becoming aware of the many ways all of us are affected by unearned privilege and oppression in this society.

• Because we all have multiple social identities, people are both targets of oppression and agents of oppression.

Privilege is defined as unearned entitlements for a certain group and exclusion of others such as limited employment opportunities for older people.

• *Privilege also includes conferred dominance, which gives one group power over another, such as people who are abled in contrast to people with disabilities.

• *Oppression and dominance name social realities that we can participate in without being oppressive or dominating people.

Dealing Directly with Differences

• It is our hope that by giving you tools will help decrease anxiety and raise your confidence in your ability to address issues of social and cultural diversity with students.

• By directly, we mean the ability to be appropriately open and candid about differences.

Integrating Course work (SW504) and Field Supervision

• Focusing on professional and personal development toward social work practice for cultural diversity and social justice.

• The course is designed to develop critical self-reflection, respectful engagement across differences in perspectives, experiences & histories, as well as a preliminary base for multicultural social work practice skill development.

• The purpose of this course is to enable students to articulate a personal-professional stance toward social work practice for cultural diversity & social justice.

• The course will provide a forum for students to:

A) critically, examine their social identities & positionalities embedded in race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, class, ability status, religion & national origin among other intersecting identities and positionalities.

B) Reflect on how socio-cultural beliefs, assumptions and values affect their social work practice.

C) This course aims to help students develop multicultural competencies of critical self-reflection, multicultural values & ethics, knowledge, awareness

and skills.

Identity Wheel Activity

• Please give yourself about 15 minutes to create your own identity wheel.

• You may want to review the example first.

• We encourage you to share with one or two other people in our class.

Sharing Identity Wheel

• What happened to you as you thought about the various groups you belong to?

• What thoughts or feelings came up when you listened to your partner list his or her groups?

• Consider how membership in your groups may contribute to your being privileged in some way. What is it like to think of yourself as privileged? What is it like to think of yourself or others as having unmerited privilege?

Exploring Diversity and the Supervisory Relationship

• Reflecting questions

• Parallel process

• Power

• Boundaries

• Exploring Dilemmas

Reflecting Questions

1. Think of a time in your personal or professional life when you took a risk to share or do something that was important to you even though you had no idea what the result might be. Consider the internal process that you experienced in trying to reach the decision to take the risk. What happened that finally enabled you to do so?

• 2. List several more examples in supervision that you now recognize as times when you avoided discussing an issue that could have been an opportunity to promote or enhance cultural competence? What do you now understand contributed to these blind spots in behavior? How would you act differently now?

• 3. In the past, we (some people) thought the goal of cultural competence was to be colorblind—to emphasize our sameness rather than celebrate diversity. How is it possible to appreciate our common human experience in the context of honoring differences? What are the implications for supervision?

Parallel Process

• Refers to an unconscious process in which the issues and dynamics in one relationship are reenacted in another relationship: two relationships parallel each other.

• Research shows that which occurs, or doesn’t occur in the relationship between filed instructor and student may be mirrored in the way the student works with clients.

Parallel Process Cont.

• Implications for cultural competence:

• If field instructors avoid being direct in discussing physically visible or invisible differences between themselves and students (age, gender, race, etc) students are more likely to avoid noticing differences with clients.

• Field instructors can assess dynamics in the student’s relationship with the client by noting the dynamics that emerge in the supervisory relationship

• Take a few minutes to think of examples you have seen in your practice. (You’ll use these examples a little later.)

Power in the supervisory relationship

• Although the concept of power is core to the supervisory relationship, open discussion about the impact of the Field Instructor’s role power of the power differential tends to be limited (Kaiser 1997; Peterson, 1992; Van Soest, 2004).

Power

• Field instructors are sometimes reluctant to approach issues that create a discomfort in the student.

• Accepting power and using power as a differential teaching tool

• Sometimes Field Instructors are reluctant to approach issues that create discomfort in the student (Marshack et al, 1994; Priddy, 2004). FIs may want to protect students from feeling badly about the mistakes they have made. They worry that discomfort will result in distancing, because the student will not feel safe.

Power differential as a teaching tool

• Within the supervisory relationship, there is an opportunity to explore these dynamics for learning, because the student may experience feelings of injustice if he or she perceives the FIs exercise of power as unfairly controlling of the students’ behavior.

• When the filed instructor initiates a discussion about the perceived injustice and demonstrates how such a topic can be handled productively, it can provide an important learning experience about how to address inequities.

• Engage the student in a dialogue about his/her reaction to the FI, including their experiences of power differential in supervision. This makes it easer to take next step of discussing how power, privilege, oppression influences students work with clients

• Take a minute to think of some examples from your practice experience. How have power differential dynamics between FIs and students been addressed? (or not addressed?) What was the result?

Boundaries and Supervision

1. From the beginning, discuss students’ expectations for educational supervision

2. Clarify differences between therapy and supervision

3. Be willing to form a learning partnership by owning mistakes and struggles with students

4. Present the idea of cultural competence as a continuum of development: Everyone is a work in progress!

5. Help students understand the positives in having a “beginners mind.”

Exploring Dilemmas

• Groups of 3 or 4

• List differences between yourselves and your students or between your students and their clients. Describe the experiences you have had in addressing these differences with students. Describe the dilemmas/challenges and how you handled them.

• What specific assignments, readings or cultural events have you provided in order to increase cultural competence?

• (For example, seeing the film The Laramie Project, which is a true story of the murder of Matthew Shepherd, a young gay man from Laramie, Wyoming, or assigning “Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”

• In the future, what materials could you use to increase this awareness? What untapped resources could be used?

• What ideas for increasing cultural competence did you discuss?

Next Steps

• Future training sessions (review)• Readings and resources• Closing comments • Evaluation