A culturally competent community member will adapt their practices to meet the needs of diverse constituents. This includes ongoing evaluation of one’s practices to attend to the dynamic needs of individuals and communities. Growth in this domain results in increased motivation and capacity to engage with perspectives of those we do not understand or with which we disagree, as well as thoroughly consider opportunities to reevaluate our practices, and experiment with new ways of being in the world.
The local college town has a community tradition at nearly all of its outdoor sporting events (including secondary, post-secondary and minor league) of firing rifles during to signal when the home team scores a point or wins a game.
A team of community volunteers has assembled to coordinate their local community’s annual women’s film festival. The women’s film festival recruits and selects short films from women in the community and screens their productions each week throughout the summer. The film festival is a local tradition, spanning three decades, with an explicit mission of highlighting filmmakers from the organizers’ town and surrounding rural region.
A team of staff and graduate students in the College of Science student services coordinates a STEM tutoring program. At the end of the year, they convene to review the reach and impact of their academic coaching and supplemental instruction programs. During the review, they become aware of a racial disparity in student access to the programs and reporting positive outcomes.
Staff and graduate students from the campus events team convene to discuss the results of their annual satisfaction survey. Their preliminary analysis revealed that in large proportion, students of color, in particular international students of color, felt marginalized by the team's series of cultural celebrations. In the comment portions of the survey, many students shared their concerns about events centered on holidays and other cultural significant traditions and asserted that the design and execution of the events was essentializing, misinformed and offensive.
Keith is an assistant dean in the Graduate School and serves as the lead hiring authority for more than a dozen professional faculty. Keith is passionate about recruitment and retention of staff of color and aspires to lead an organization where practitioners with diverse racial identities feel like they belong and thrive.
Ryan is a project team manager in the institutional risk and compliance office. Ryan has been working with his team for more than a year, and in recent weeks he has received indirect feedback on his leadership style. In particular, Ryan is made aware that his heavy reliance on sports analogies and metaphors during staff meetings and during individual supervision is often disengaging, ineffective or even confusing.
Lilly is a clinical faculty member in social psychology. She is currently exploring social phenomena at the intersection of faith identity, race, and gender. Her current study explores the experiences of African American women who identify as Muslim, which is also an experience she shares. Her primary data collection, which included interviews, is now over. As a part of her phenomenological design, Lilly incorporated a member check process in which she will share initial results with her participants to garner their feedback and negotiate her conclusions.
Rachel is an assistant professor in Early Childhood Education, studying parenting and home life practices of Latinx families related to child literacy. Rachel’s research design for her current project includes home visits, interviews and surveys with parents and other live-in adults.
Stina is an associate professor in mathematics who primarily teaches first-year college algebra. Stina attends a workshop hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning on promising practices in student evaluation. Stina finds the workshop interesting and challenging. While she is inspired by the novel formative and summative assessment strategies proposed by her colleagues, she is ambivalent about changing her curriculum and pedagogical approach, which she has slowly and thoughtfully crafted for more than 10 years.
Jamie is a composition and poetry instructor. She recently attended a conference within her discipline at which she met and learned from colleagues who invite their students to submit assignments in multiple languages. The spirit of enabling diverse languages in written submissions is the understanding that writing in one’s first language allows for unique learning opportunities and enables culturally significant expressions not possible through English.
