Listen to thisIn my world as an academic this is the end of the semester. I give my final lectures, grade the final exams, read the final papers, and have conversations with students about how it has all gone. I teach two courses that seem to have a very personal effect on the students that take them. One of them is a course called Cultural Competence. The name is misleading, but I inherited the name when I took over teaching it nearly a decade ago. Of course, it is both extremely problematic and misleading to think that I could teach anyone how to be culturally competent, particularly as it relates to someone else’s culture. That would be an exercise in hubris that I have no interest in engaging.
And so, what I really try to teach is how we might learn to work across our differences in a way that is respectful of the painful legacies of our colonial past and our accountability to shift the effects of that past in our present circumstances. We explore the constructions and structural implications of colonization in the production of race, gender, sexuality, class, mental health, and religious diversity. We explore these issues using lenses such as intersectionality, critical race theory, critical disability studies, feminism, womanism, queer theory, Marxism, and cultural humility. It is a large class with nearly 100 students from different departments including nursing, human services, integrated health sciences, sociology, criminology and psychology. The class is very diverse in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, class, and religious affiliation. Students tend to be passionate about what they are learning and have a good deal to say about their personal experiences with the topics we cover.
Every couple of weeks they write a self-reflection about how the material affects them either personally or as emerging professionals in their fields of choice. The diversity of the class is expressed in these reflections in the ways that students and their families have experienced racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, classism, xenophobia, and marginalization due to disability. In their writing they take up contemporary examples that have occurred or are occurring in their lives or the lives of their loved ones. They also express appreciation for the history of how these pernicious beliefs and practices have emerged over the course of the European colonial project. Repeatedly, they write about how dismayed they are that they were not taught this history earlier in their lives. They express their confusion about why their people and what has been done to them has been erased and is being erased in the way young people are being taught.
Of course, not all my students come from IPOC backgrounds. There are students of European descent who identify as white in my class as well. It is popular in certain current political discourses to assert that if you teach the history of white supremacy and its effects that white students will be paralyzed with guilt and shame. They will be personally traumatized by learning of their legacy of brutality and theft. This has not been my experience over the decade or so that I have taught this class. Instead, I have found that when I teach about the practices of white privilege, my white students wrestle with it with integrity and openness to the possibility that they could be the generation that moves beyond this horrific inheritance. I am not suggesting this is an easy or uncomplicated struggle for them or for me as an old white male professor teaching the class. It can be messy, emotional, and charged at times. Clearly, these issues are not resolved or a new world of egalitarian relations achieved (even in the classroom). But the struggle is engaged, and my White students seem to take it to heart when we watch a video on Decolonization is for Everybody and Nikki Sanchez says that, “This history is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.” In their reflections, they talk about how they need to act both professionally and personally in ways that begin to take responsibility for their inherited privilege.
The complexities of privilege extend beyond whiteness though, into the intersectional coordinates of male privilege and hetero privilege that are entangled with race and class in ways that can make the levels of accountability nuanced and multifaceted. Which is one of the reasons that my students find the concept of cultural humility so evocative. They find the key proposals in cultural competence inspiring. Ideas like learning about how to work across difference is a lifelong task where you never arrive at a place of completion. Or the assertion that the practice of self-reflection is always necessary to see the richness of living relations and the intricate ways that dominant regimes of colonial power infiltrate and pollute our best intentions and drive our worst impulses. And in terms of my student’s emerging professional identities, cultural humility calls on us to hold institutions accountable and to build new structures that offer alternative capacities for just and equitable care.
At the end of the term, as we wind things down, my students begin to wonder about what’s next. In the current political climate here in the U.S. will the class survive? There was a piece of legislation here in Georgia that failed last month by a very slim margin that would have threatened my ability to teach a class with a focus on race, gender, sexuality, class, critical race theory, or intersectionality. It is my understanding that the legislation will be reintroduced in the fall where it could pass. So, my students express concern about how the history, ideas, and proposals for just and equitable practice can continue to be taught. I assure them that I will find a way to teach them, albeit under the radar. But I also remind them that they are the next generation and that it is up to them how we proceed into the future. It will be their world shortly.
All of these issues and concerns are reflected in the other class that seems to have a large impact on my students. Every semester I teach a class on Child and Youth Care. The class is actually called Working with Children and Youth, but it is an introduction into the world of CYC. CYC as a profession or fields of practice is largely absent in the U.S. for reasons I don’t really understand. CYC has always seemed to me to be the cutting-edge field of study and practice when it comes to youth/adult relations. Of course, there are reactionary and professionally conventional edges to the field, but the central thinking about what constitutes the work, I have found durable and continuously challenging. The roots of the work in experiential phenomenology and existentialism combined with the social justice edges that have emerged over the past few decades provide more than enough provocation for teaching students who want to work with integrity and compassion.
And so, we read thinkers such as Garfat, Phelan, Krueger, Charles, and Gharabaghi at the core of the field and Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kouri, Sandrina Carere, Beverly-Jean Daniel, Johanne Jean-Pierre and Kathleen Skott-Myhre at the edges. Of course, I can’t resist having them read a few of my columns from this journal as well. It is eye opening for them to engage in a view of human interactions that centers on the living force of relationships. Most of them are human service majors which is a discipline that also centers relational care at the center of its approach to its work as a practice discipline that works with multiple populations including young people.
The class is taken towards the end of their degree and so I teach it as a seminar. It is usually 12-15 students and so there is ample time for discussion and thinking aloud. Like my other students they write a reflection on what we have read or discussed. We share those reflections as a group and then discuss what has been shared. The discussions are rich, far ranging and evocative. The students have been in the field in their internships and in some cases as workers in settings that work with young people. They have also had quite a lot of coursework that engages more conventional approaches to working with human suffering and resilience. Their encounter with the CYC literature is powerful for many of them. They take quite seriously the call to the relational encounter. They find the possibility that the work could be done with young people without the architecture of diagnosis, agency protocols, behavioral discipline, or adultism, exciting and challenging.
Often, they struggle with the inherent injustices built into the field of practice as bias towards young people generally but also bias built colonially into institutional reproductions of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and class. As newly minted workers, they worry about how they will negotiate their professional identity in contexts that dehumanize young people and their families in agencies that espouse the highest ideals of care. They wrestle with the contradictions inherent in the fact that the work we do is imbedded in a society that refuses any serious attempts at decolonization or even material engagement with socially just practice.
All of that said, they are serious about the work and the possibility implied by what they are reading in the CYC literature. They see the revolutionary capacity of lived encounter. As children of the 21st century they know first-hand the effects of virtual global capitalism. The anxiety, alienation, depression, and despair that is endemic in our contemporary society is palpable to them as lived experience. And they can see an antidote in the promise of the central tenets of CYC practice and the radical extensions of that practice at the edges of the field. At the end of the day I sometimes wish that those of us most identified with the field of CYC could see through their eyes what the entirety of our collective work has to offer. I think we might gain a different sense of who we are as a fully inclusive community.
As I reflect on these two classes, I am struck by a brief conversation that I had with a student at the end of the last class. She came up after we were done and asked me where is the best place to start? Where will I make the most difference? My answer to her was that she should start wherever her heart is most full. However, to make the biggest difference, working on the ecology is most pressing, because our failure to change that will kill us all. To shift the way we live on the planet is the most challenging work we can do. However, to do that, we must take on a whole new way of seeing who we are and what we do. To begin to do that, I suggested she seek out the any work that affirms life and the rest will follow.
