Cultural Humility
Cultural Humility
Definition: New students will begin to foster the virtue of cultural humility by reflecting on the unique nature of cultures and identities (racial, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, religious, and ability).
Learning Outcomes—
Students will:
- Identify two distinctive aspects of their own cultural formation.
- Demonstrate knowledge of a cultural/faith/value system previously unfamiliar to them.
- Recognize and respond appropriately to social realities which inhibit another community member’s ability to flourish.
Achieved Through Programs Including:
Study Abroad and Mission Trips, Language and Multicultural Courses, Better Together, The Good Neighbor Project, Residence Hall Programs, Welcome Week, Cultural Competency Initiatives, NSE courses
Encourage Your Students to Attend Leave Your Mark on one of these dates.
Lesson Plans
Each lesson was designed by Baylor Faculty to assist students in learning Cultural Humility.
Implicit Bias - This lesson plan directs students and instructors through several resources and exercises designed to identify and then address unconscious bias in the self and in systems. A directed worksheet helps students to identify areas of bias and potential action in their lives.
Microaggressions - A lesson plan that defines and helps students to define and discuss microaggressions in their daily lives.
Name Story - What’s in a name? This lesson plan, quite a bit, it helps instructors and students consider the importance of names in various cultures and reflect on their own names and their embeddedness in a particular cultural context.
Stereotypes - Based on an excellent Ted Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this lesson challenges students to problematize the idea of a single story and consider whether and how they might listen to others’ stories, not always presume that theirs is central or singular.
Who is my Neighbor? - A theologically-grounded lesson plan that challenges students to understand and answer the question from the New Testament: who is my neighbor? The lesson plan seeks to ask what cultural humility might ask of people with particularly Christian religious commitments.
Unpacking the Knapsack - A broadly challenging lesson plan that asks students to apply the knowledge they are gaining regarding cultural humility. Students are asked to identify aspects of privilege or disadvantage in their lives and respond accordingly.
I'm Still Here - A lesson plan for instructors who plan to ask students to read Austin Channing Brown’s book I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness; this lesson plan contains a nine-week plan for discussion and assessment of this influential work.
Gentrification - Cultural humility entails attention to socio-economic equity. This lesson plan presents well in reviewing the costs of living in Waco, especially as they relate to gentrification's effects in modern American society.
Power and Privilege - Social capital and privilege can be hard to understand since they are such abstract concepts. Using a privilege walk, this exercise encourages students to consider their privilege and/or disadvantage honestly and directly by asking students to step forward or backward based on their lived experience physically.
What is Culture? - Rather than asking students to ask personal questions, this lesson plan asks students to consider the wider, complex questions of culture. Using the symbol of an iceberg, this lesson plan exhorts students not only to observe what is visible about their culture but also to ask students to go deeper in their definitions of what makes them who they are within a particular cultural context.
What is identity? - By asking the deceptively simple question “Who Am I?” this lesson plan encourages students to dig deeper into their own sense of identity. By better understanding themselves and their own self-conception, students become better equipped to understand that others may have their own different identities and that these need not be understood as though they are in conflict with one another.
7E Model for Cultural Humility and Antioppressive Living - A detailed plan for engaging students in cultural humility, this curricular plan/resource packet enables students and professors to discuss their privileges, disadvantages, and assumptions in the world deeply.
Theological Cultural Humility - Using video resources from InterVarsity, this lesson plan seeks to build the case from a Christian perspective that all humanity was created in God’s image and is, therefore, worthy of all that is needed for human flourishing.
Audio/Visual
"RACE - The power of an illusion" is a series of three episodes focusing on race in America.
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Episode One - The Difference Between Us - Examines the contemporary science - including genetics - that challenges our common assumptions that humans can be bundled into three or four fundamentally different groups according to their physical traits.
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Episode Two - The Story We Tell - Uncovers the roots of the race concept in North America, the 19th-century science that legitimated it, and how it came to be held so fiercely in the western imagination.
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Episode Three - The House We Live In - Highly recommended. This is the first film about race to focus not on individual attitudes and behavior but on how our institutions and policies benefit some groups at the expense of others.
Cultural Humility: People, Principles, and Practices
Readings
The Atlantic piece “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, along with The New York Times short response by David Brooks
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
I’m Still Here, Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown, and I'm Still Here Lesson Plan
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
How to be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram Kendi
The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby
White fragility by Robin DeAngelo
The God Who Sees: Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong by Karen Gonzalez
Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, and Identity by Robert Romero
Resources