Cultural Competence Check-Ins

How does culture impact your everyday interactions? Do you know that eye contact, directness, and comfort with silence in conversation are all influenced by different cultural norms? Are you aware of your values and how they influence you?

Your perspective influences you and impacts the care you provide. How do you communicate with people whose experiences differ from yours?  It’s important to reflect on yourself and your practice, as well as how your workplace policies reflect larger systems and attitudes. Checking in with yourself is a continuous process. Self-assessments can provide valuable insight.

Consider checking in with the following tools:

Why Check in?

 

Cultural competence is a necessary part of clinical competence. It requires you to develop cultural humility by understanding your own biases and organizational culture, so that your practice can become culturally responsive. Building competence in any area involves continuing education, keeping pace with new evidence-based research, tailoring your approach to suit each client, and, above all, practicing and self-assessing. Cultural competence is an exercise rather than an endpoint.

Beyond Check-ins

Ready to continue learning but don’t know where to start?

Explore That’s Unheard Of

ASHA’s interactive microsite helps you know what you don’t know!

• Translate big concepts into actionable steps
• Connect research to clinical best practices
• Assemble your own toolkit with scenario cards, fact cards, and printouts

Browse ASHA Practice Portal pages on Cultural Responsiveness and Examples of Cultural Dimensions, or consider cultural responsiveness from an ethics standpoint with Issues in Ethics: Cultural and Linguistic Competence.

Return to ASHA’s Multicultural Affairs website for more resources.