Claiborne County Schools CULTURAL COMPETENCY, CULTURAL RESPONSIVENESS & POVERTY TRAINING

DEFINITION Cultural Competence is the ability to work effectively with people from different cultures. It is a way of ensuring that all people are understood and treated equally. Cultural competence promotes a celebration and appreciation of diversity.

What happens when cultural competence is not achieved? Specific groups of people remain underserved. This may be because services are inaccessible. For example, the organization is in a working class community, but only has office hours from 9-5pm making it unlikely that people will be able to attend as there are no after work hours.

Minority groups are over-represented in punitive systems. Due to a lack of understanding and cultural bias, minority groups are more likely to be viewed as deficient and are overrepresented in the child welfare, juvenile justice and some special education systems.

Minority groups are under-represented in mental health systems. As a result of cultural bias, ethnic minority groups are often referred to punitive systems like Juvenile Justice, as opposed to those that help by focusing on treatment and recovery.

Organizational Cultural Responsiveness On the organizational level, cultural competence requires that organizations have the capacity to value diversity, conduct self assessments, manage the dynamics of difference, acquire and institutionalize cultural knowledge, and adapt to the diversity and cultural contexts of the individuals and communities they serve.

Questions to Assess Cultural Competence/Responsiveness • Are there policies in place to ensure equitable hiring practices? • Does our staff represent the community we serve? • Have we considered whether our location, office hours, etc. make it possible for all to utilize our services? • Are brochures produced in the languages of the families we serve? • Are our waiting areas inviting, with pictures of children and families of all ethnicities? • Do we have representatives from the community on our boards or advisory groups? • Do we have institutionalized cultural knowledge in our framework? • Are our diagnostic tools culturally and linguistically competent? • Have we modified our interventions to the cultural groups we serve?

Practicing Cultural Competence On the practitioner level, cultural competence means that we have specific knowledge of the cultural groups we serve, and an understanding of the role that culture and ethnicity play in personality formation, problem presentation and help seeking behaviors. It also means that we have specific skills, intervention techniques and strategies to use in our work with families.

Practicing Cultural Competence The process of becoming culturally competent is one in which we come to see our own cultural lens and explore ways in which it may differ from other points of view. We make gains as our ability to see the value in many perspectives is enhanced. We stereotype less, become more culturally sensitive to the families we serve.

POVERTY It’s clear that children from poverty are often at a disadvantage in school, and educators can find it challenging to help such students become positively engaged in their own learning. 

Guidance For Teachers Even though parents are children's first teachers, it is also the responsibility of teachers to help bring about positive changes in students' developing brains to improve their learning ability.  Included in the following slides are some suggestions to improve brainpower for learners from poverty.

Build Relationships   At-risk learners are often lacking long-lasting, stable relationships in their lives.  They may also require more assistance in developing the full emotional range to respond well to various kinds of stimulation. Discipline issues sometimes emerge when teachers expect more than what students are currently capable of, on an emotional level. Eric Jensen, Author “Teaching with Poverty in Mind”, suggests that classroom teachers help students develop a healthy range of emotional responses in order to build healthy, stable, trusting relationships as a foundation for learning.

Understand and Control Stress. Jensen defines stress as "a physiological response to a perception of a lack of control over an aversive situation or person", and notes that at-risk students are likely to have more stress in their lives than other students. Teachers can help increase students’ perception of control by encouraging activities like peer mentoring and student jobs in the classroom, as well as offering more opportunities for students to make their own choices throughout the school day.

Develop a Growth Mindset. Children who are raised in a poverty-stricken environment often need help developing a " growth mindset," which places more importance on attitude, effort, and strategy than on luck, genetics, and socioeconomic status. Since developing a growth mindset is teachable and free, educators should rise to the responsibility of this important part of teaching.

Build Executive Function. Working memory, the ability to retain fresh information long enough to do something with it, is a component of executive function—a term which generally refers to a collection of cognitive processes of the brain. Working memory at age 5 is a far greater predictor of student success at age 11 than IQ. It is also a more reliable predictor than reading scores, motivation level, math scores, or attitude. If educators focus on building their students’ working memory, they will get significant improvements across the board.

Boost Engagement. Students from poverty often need more help engaging in the classroom. To help students become truly engaged, teachers can use physical activity, music, drama, social work  (cooperative groups, teams, partners, etc…) and positive affirmations in their classroom instruction.

DON’T GIVE UP. Above all, educators should avoid giving up on “difficult” students by deciding that certain kids “can’t be taught,” . At-risk children can be successful in supportive environments. "If you don't teach it, don't punish kids for not being good at it.”  ~Eric Jensen

Never Forget—You Make a Difference!