by Stefani Gomez, Jasmine Woodson, and Jess Denke
Last year’s ACRL DVC fall program was focused on incorporating cultural humility into professional development in academic libraries. Cultural humility is a cousin to the cultural competency often discussed in diversity training, but while cultural competency means learning about other cultures, cultural humility means continuously uncovering and making ourselves accountable for the ways that our institutions are complicit in under-serving some and over-serving others. We wanted to explore this issue because we felt that much of the meaning is lost in the typical ways that many of our institutions talk about equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). In these conversations, equity often gets sidelined and diversity planning becomes a kind of tokenism rather than the cultural shift it needs to be to create real change.
The Fall program turned out to be a great success. In the morning we got advice on developing allies, heard about personal experiences developing and participating in cultural humility programming, and learned about the unique problems and potential of library and archival collections. In the afternoon we had a workshop with Theatre of the Oppressed NYC designed to break us out of our solidified ways of thinking. It gave everyone the opportunity to share their own experiences with others in a way that is not typical of a professional conference. The conversation left many of us moved and thinking about the concept of cultural humility for long after. Jasmine Woodson, Jess Denke, and I decided to dialogue together to process what we had learned and think about what types of changes we believe are needed. What you read below is our conversation. We are sharing it with you because it was helpful to us and we thought it might be to you as well..
Being a Librarian Practitioner
Stefani:
I think it is helpful that the cultural humility terminology makes us reexamine the diversity terminology we have been using and acknowledge its limitations. When certain words are used for a long time we all begin to think we understand what they mean and therefore they lose their power to make us reevaluate and reflect.
The nice thing about cultural humility is its emphasis on self-reflection, making it not only about others, but about our own growth. This makes the project more relevant to each individual and integrates the notion that it is each of our responsibility to promote equity and that if we don’t, we are part of the problem. It uses everyone’s self-centered tendency to its own advantage to provide the impetus for the ongoing social justice project.
Jess:
I really like your emphasis on self-reflection. I believe that being intentional about reflection following classes, meetings, appointments with students, etc. has helped me evaluate my assumptions and actions on a day-to-day basis. To me, part of being a practitioner of cultural humility means that I value reflection as a crucial part of the work, enough that I schedule it into my week. I also find that writing my reflections helps me grow over time.
I also think that practicing vulnerability increases cultural humility. During the Fall program, Muhlenberg College archivist Susan Falciani Maldonado mentioned that she acknowledges gaps in the college archive and speaks with students about why these gaps persist – I also seek to be transparent about gaps in my own knowledge and recognize that others may know or have ways of knowing with which I am not familiar. I think that this works to the benefit of my community in (at least) two ways: knowledge is demonstrated to be constructed and contextual in a practical, not theoretical, way and I am able to enter into real relationships with others, not ones that are predicated on my ability to answer questions as an “authority.”
Stefani:
I liked what Susan said about cultural humility being a practice and I can really see that in the ways you have incorporated reflection into your work, Jess. What you say about vulnerability seems crucial to this because maybe more important than any kind of knowledge we bring into a situation is being open to learning from it. The popularity of “cultural competency training” gave people the idea that they could learn a few facts or skills and they would be set. In this scenario people learned general facts about different “cultures” that they could then use in their work. However, we know that this won’t work because people are not general. Each person is a specific person with a very unique combination of experiences.
In my own work I look at culture in Latinx families. The important thing being that the individual culture of each family is a much more dominant force in peoples’ lives than is some abstract notion of Latinx culture. Depending on cultural competence training is just one step up from navigating from stereotypes. While you have probably learned more sensitive depictions you are still mapping individuals to generalized ideas about what it means to be a part of certain cultures. Latinx are this way or that way for example, ignoring the fact that the Latinx terminology encompases a huge range of racial, ethnic, religious, national origin, documentation status, socio-economic standing, native languages, and education differences, among many others. A big part of what joins us together, is the tendency in the United States to imagine us as all belonging to one group and our struggle for equality in the face of that perspective.
Jasmine:
I first came across the term cultural humility when taking a Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) course. I was searching youtube for videos that demonstrated examples of CBPR and came across this one featuring interviews with the originators of the term, Doctors Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia. It was the proverbial lightbulb moment. Like, OH. Yes. Yes! Like you’ve both emphasized, Stefani and Jess, continual self-reflection is not typically centered in ‘diversity speak’ or diversity “training” (whatever that means…) for that matter.
So to come back round to the question, I think what we’re all articulating is that there is no BEST way, really: what cultural humility means to me and my particular context is likely a different process from what it may mean to another. Implicit to me in the concept of cultural humility is the acknowledgement of intersectionality. To your point, Stefani, about individual families having their own culture and not adhering to ideas about what constitutes Latinx culture, is that we all, individually, are an intersection of identities and that we should be thinking of that not just in terms of the individuals we work with, but within ourselves, and how our identities (and any attendant privilege) and experiences shape our ideologies, values, and interactions. Our understanding of our relationships to others don’t occur in a one-way vacuum. We all operate under a particular lens and a culturally humble PRACTICE (what a necessary word for this: practice. It implies both non-expertise and continual exercise. Even the greatest athletes, musicians, artists, etc practice and they practice often.) incorporate this dually reflective understanding into their day-to-day ACTIONS.
Getting People to Care
Jess:
Getting people to care is an issue when their privilege is heavy (a phrase that Stefani used in an earlier conversation that I love). Most times, it isn’t challenging to get people to care because they have been the victims of marginalization and marginality, which results in what Sandra Harding refers to as a “feeling of enrage(d).” My initial suggestion when Jasmine asked this question was to make that individual a minority – I guess it’s a cheeky suggestion, but I haven’t come up with a better one yet…
Stefani:
The idea of making majority culture people feel like a minority is an interesting one. It seems like it could be helpful to those that don’t operate from that place during their everyday life.
At the same time, while we can’t avoid conflict and we need to challenge people to see things differently, it helps if we are not too threatening. This is somewhere where it’s possible that the language that has been adopted to talk about all these issues becomes problematic. Having a specific vocabulary easily separates people into those that are in the know and those that aren’t. I think people are naturally suspicious when they are approached by others that are seeming to take a superior stance. We need to consider our own motivations for doing diversity work and reflect on whether we are in it to spread freedom or to build up our own egos and sense of belonging to what has become a culture with its own ways of being and language.
Jess, getting past our own egos is another place where your idea to bring in vulnerability is very helpful. It is very hard to be truly vulnerable without breaking down our own walls. We must come into these situations being as open to learning and being wrong as we think those that are not in the know should be. Jasmine, this relates to what you said above about being aware of our own many intersected identities and how they influence our worldview. This should make us more sensitive to the difficulty of taking on new epistemological frames. Though hooks warns against being afraid of conflict In her book Teaching to Transgress, she also emphasizes the need to be sensitive to the pain that change causes others.
I think this aligns with what we know about learning. It needs to be challenging enough to keep someone’s interest and create a sense of accomplishment, but not so hard that it becomes more frustrating than rewarding or people will simply give up.
Jasmine:
Your reference to bell hooks made me super excited, Stefani, and made me think of an essay I read by her, titled “The Heartbeat of Cultural Revolution” in her book Outlaw Culture. hooks talks about sitting on her couch with two little girls from the neighborhood, talking to them about a painting, and how she and these girls have a wonderful dialogue about how they analyze the painting’s colors and composition and what the painting’s visual elements make them feel. Hooks writes that experience was an example of practicing “cultural criticism” and feeling the “excitement of learning in relation to living regular life”. Later she goes on to say how this type of work, once thought illegitimate and unscholarly, when taken up by white male academics, became “all the rage”.
Both those points — the need for our critical frameworks to be grounded in the language and experience of the everyday, and how that everyday-ness can evaporate once academia gets hold of an idea — come to mind when thinking about this question.
I frequently use jargon to talk about these concepts. I’m doing it now. But that is in part because these concepts have become jargonized — they’ve been subsumed into a very particular academic and professional discourse and with that often comes inaccessibility and ingroup/outgroup dynamics. That emphasis on the everyday is really important, and a way to mitigate those divisions. In their presentation on the work done in UDel’s libraries, Maesha Carey and Adam Foley explicitly talked about forgoing one-off staff development programming models for ones that embed this kind of dialog and reflection across regularly occurring professional development programs. I’m interested in how we can take the language we use to describe our values, already largely centered on access and equity, and use it as the building blocks by which a bridge can be built across the widening insider/outsider division. How do we imbue cultural humility into collection development, into instruction, into relationships with other staff and faculty within and across institutions, into our interactions with students? How do we incorporate these principles into cataloging and metadata work, or library systems? How are we already doing that work?
This isn’t to discount what Jess said about marginalization, or the lack thereof, playing a significant role in some individuals’ apathy toward D&I efforts — I agree entirely. I suppose my strategy is more about reframing our work such that these principles are understood to be everyday and not optional — how can we be a service profession if we only provide service on our own narrow terms? How can we grow as professionals if we don’t reflect, or change? This is a part of our jobs, PERIOD.
Jess:
Yes! And, so, we need to think about how we demonstrate value in a way that holds individuals accountable – how to align evaluation and promotion efforts with D&I, how do we communicate our values in library assessment to the institution? These questions are important for library leadership, but it is also important that we can articulate the reasons we make particular decisions about our time, energy, and choices on an individual level.
Stefani:
Jasmine, I love what you are saying here. I like hooks’ commitment to practicing what she calls an engaged pedagogy that is focused on the self-actualization of her students rather than simply their intellectual understanding. This gets at the difference between intellectual and experiential knowledge. It occurs to me that cultural humility and vulnerability practice are both almost spiritual ideas. Not to scare anyone away, but they remind me of what I’ve read about mindfulness practice. When individuals begin to become aware of how they show up to the momentary occurrences of everyday life, the intricate and beautiful fullness of life becomes more apparent and creates more space for change. The idea being, I guess, that if someone is paying better attention they will see people beyond the roles they are playing and the scripts we have assigned them and will be more likely to interact outside of their own habits and therefore create change.
Valuing Different Types of Expertise
Stefani:
Jasmine and Jess, you both mention the need to connect learning to regular life and our professional lives. Moving on to our next question, a reevaluation within librarianship of what we value as expertise may be at the heart of how to approach making EDI relevant to the library communities as they exist now. Many individuals at our Fall program mentioned how their own situated expertise were not respected in their libraries. They discussed how academic credentials were routinely valued over community-based knowledge and labor and how this made them feel unappreciated. The phenomenon they mention has a number of damaging implications for diversity work as well as for morale. The fetishization of credentials and expertise as defined by majority culture librarians serves to effectively keep much of the diversity that is espoused to be valued out of the academy. Building diversity is seen as charity as opposed to something that is necessary for the provision of adequate and improved service. If we actively value more nuanced definitions of expertise and knowledge as a community we can use them to tackle recruitment and retention of “diversity hires” (a thoroughly annoying term), but also to appreciate the types of knowledge that are already contained in our libraries that go unrecognized. Feeling appreciated for their own situated knowledge might make the entire library community more likely to value the need for people with bodies of knowledge that are different from their own and could help to improve their ability to effectively serve their populations and avoid blindspots.
Jasmine :
Stefani, you’ve stated this so well I don’t have much to add! Just thinking of my own experience, I’ve grown so much as a librarian (and reader and writer and creator and PERSON) through learning from people and groups that we typically do not imbue with authority in our field: students, “support”/”non-professional” staff (that label feels so diminishing I cringe to use it), individuals outside of academia without traditional college credentials, who’ve taught me so much about outreach, marketing, teaching, presenting, project management, etc. And my own growth in these areas has translated into bettered service to the communities that I serve. Ultimately we do ourselves and the populations we work with a disservice when we think so insularly and myopically about ‘who knows what’ and also, crucially, what’s worth knowing. Shoutout to the DVC program planning committees: one of the many things I’ve admired in a number of our events is how much I’ve been able to learn from people whose expertise is not within the tidy confines of the academic library, but very much related to the work that we do (case in point: the Theater of the Oppressed facilitators!), and I hope to maintain that thread in future programs.
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The DVC community is tasked with professional development and provides a valuable network for our local librarian community. Our Fall 2019 program explored the role of cultural humility in our library work. It was so valuable to have peers with whom to share our practice, concerns, and questions, that we decided to continue the dialogue here. We encourage you to continue these conversations with others as well and share your uncertainties and wishes in an attempt to practice vulnerability at work. The upcoming Spring 2020 ACRL DVC program will continue this focus on practice. It is entitled: Working out loud: Reflections, revisions, & recipes and will be held at the Temple University’s new Charles Library on April 3rd. Please join us to explore how to grow and even flourish from our most challenging academic library experiences. We look forward to seeing you there.
Respectfully Yours,
Stefani Gomez, Jasmine Woodson, and Jess Denke
*If you would like to explore this topic further, check out the following amazing public bibliography, “LIS Diversity Readings” posted anonymously online.