The importance of cultural humility

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Cultural Humility                                                                                                            

While there is a lot of talk about cultural humility and intercultural competence, to me cultural humility is an essential component of truly getting to know someone from a different culture and getting to know yourself. 

What exactly is cultural humility and how can we make sure we are practicing cultural humility when talking to people! Well, a few tips are: 

• Take  the time to self-evaluate and critically reflect on yourself. 

• We must be able to truly accept that we do not know everything and critique our own self and constantly check our biases and assumptions. 

• We need to be able to recognize power-imbalances and work towards minimizing these power imbalances 

• We need to be completely selfless.  It is not all about you! Take the time to listen to others, your culture or perspective is not the best and enter with an open mind with the attitude of "what can I learn from you." 

I believe that to really maximize your time with someone and develop a relationship with someone from a different cultural perspective you need to be able to enter the conversation with an attitude of, "my culture is not better than yours, what can I learn from you? 

Accepting that you are not better than others:

Coming from a country where we are often considered in a better position than other countries such as 2nd and 3rd world countries it is important to always be aware of how you may come across when speaking to someone who may not consider themselves as "powerful." 

I have interviewed students, program administrators and teachers from different countries and constantly had to remind myself to check my assumptions and biases. When I arrived, I had some of my participants looking to me for the answer and some that did not look too comfortable with their responses. They often asked me what I thought and what the answer was I turned it yo them: 

Incorporating cultural humility into your workshops:

1. Give workshop participants a chance to share their perspectives without judging them 

2. Open up the space for dialogue; I like to allow time for breakout rooms and whole group discussions so participants can talk to one another and get to know one another 

3. Don't spend all the time lecturing; Allow participants to speak

4. Incorporate activities which allow 

A culturally humble approach seeks to understand others “in relation to aspects of cultural identity that are most important to the [person]” (Hook, 2013, p. 2).