Cultural Competency Webinar

For my professional development, I watched an ASCA seminar on cultural competency, by Paul Harris. I was able to do this from the comfort of my own home, as the ASCA 2016 webinar series archives most of its presentations for repeated use. This is really convenient because in just one hour, I was able to retrieve a PowerPoint slide, a presentation and discussion questions. I was curious about this webinar, because I wanted to pick up new ideologies, skills and strategies in a field that I am passionate about. I would recommend this to other school counselors, and Harris contends this would make a great training for all staff at every school.

The webinar started off with an activity that can be used in all settings, classrooms and age groups.  Harris drew a picture of everything that represented him. Then he shared for two minutes about everything he drew in his “My World” diagram. Harris explained that the exercise only had two rules.

1.             You cannot laugh at others drawings
2.        You should take cues as to what the author is trying to convey as an emotion at the time. (I drew one as well!)

The point of this exercise was to allow students to share about their lives and individual and unique experiences. From a counseling perspective, this was to show how little you could know about someone in two minutes. He also noted that even when you think you know a lot about a student, that could be a fraction of “their world”, so to stay awake, curious, and present.

            What were beautiful about Harris’ presentation were the snippets off deep meaning hidden in his presentation that although could be used in any counseling session, were really universal. For example, he had a diagram that said:

Empathy, Congruence, unconditional positive regard = core conditions for healthy relationships. He also stated that to him, there was humility in knowing we can never fully be culturally competent.

            Harris then went into the four areas of becoming more culturally competent:

Cultural Knowledge – ethnicity, gender, social class, general idea

Cultural Awareness – capacity to recognize and issues

Cultural Sensitivity – being able to predict an outcome based on it

Cultural action – what are you doing

Lastly, Harris notes that one of the ways to continue being culturally competent, is to set aside time for individual and collective reflection and accountability by checking in with someone you can allow yourself to be vulnerable with.

            I think cultural competency is important in every aspect of life, and can be explored and employed at any level of education. There are multiple self-assessing tools and tests that measure cultural competency in a variety of settings. I think doing needs assessments can help determine if this is a problem at a certain school, but I think the biggest issue with this topic is an unwillingness to step out of a comfort zone, or area of complacency for the familiar. I really appreciated this Webinar, and hope that all school personal strive to keep these lessons in mind when teaching, as well as passing them along to their children for universal learning purposes.