Cultural Self-Assessment As a human services major, I have learned to explore more about myself. I have learned about my values, and my belief system; in addition, I have become aware of my biases, flaws, and my internalized stereotypes and prejudices. As I go along with each one of my human services classes, I begin to learn more about myself. However, there is one thing that has not changed since before I got into this major, and that is, that there is always hope for people. For me, hope doesn’t come from religion, it could come from those around us, and even from within ourselves. Furthermore, I am highly aware that my upbringing, and culture have both influenced my aspects of life, people, and my belief system. However, I have also learned …show more content…
In a neighborhood like South Central, you see a lot of graffiti, and garbage on the streets; yet in a neighborhood like this, didn’t stop me from meeting people from different ethnic backgrounds. I lived among many people from a Latin American background, and others who were African American. Furthermore, when I went to high school in Boyle Heights, I met people with an Asian, Armenian, and Caucasian background. It was different to see people from different ethnicities because of the unfamiliarity I had with their culture and belief system. However, the differences in our skin color, and language, did not stop me from being close friends with people of different racial backgrounds. Now, when I come across someone with a different skin tone, I do not become alarmed and my reaction does not change. My reaction to different races and ethnicities is not a surprised one, or demeaning one. During my internship, I’ve had the pleasure to work with a variety of ethnicities. Fortunately for me, I have learned to put aside skin color as a component to the treatment I give people. I tend to remind myself that we are all human, and color does not define us, and should not define us, because we are all born the same. Going to a school in a different neighborhood, helped me interact with people from different ethnic backgrounds, and it helped find the many similarities we had that weren’t based on skin
David Brooks makes many good points in his article, and I agree with what he says and can relate many of my personal stories to him. Many of us want to live with people like us, and many of us want to be with people that are like us. At the beginning Brooks mentions how diversity isn’t cared by many, and he’s right. Before moving to California I heard that this was a place where many people came from all over the world to live better lives, so I thought it would be a nice place to meet new people. At first my family wanted to move to Berkeley and we were looking at neighborhoods that were cheap to live in, we liked many neighborhoods, but a few friends of my dad who had lived there told us that those neighborhoods had many blacks and hispanics
Definitions of multicultural Competence Frontline Human Service Providers, was collaboratively written by L. Caldwell, D. Tarver, D. Iwamoto, S. Herzberg, P. Cerda-Lizarraga, and T. Mack. The article was published by the journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. This article explores different definitions provided by ninety nine different human service providers who are on the frontline serving in the helping capacity. All information they have in counseling was gain from firsthand experience. Color blindness, client focused, acknowledgement of cultural differences, textbook consistent, resources driven, skills-based, and self-integrated, are used throughout the article as terms that are frequently used to define multicultural.
There were just few African-Americans and Mexicans and I could barely find Asians. The lack of diversity in my high school could be seen clearly in lunch time. Students grouped themselves in each table such as all blacks in one table, all Mexicans in one table, even whites grouped themselves based on interests or sport teams. Moreover, until now, I am in college, and my classes are full of diverse students, but I still tend to talk and hangout with Asians rather than other races. The viewpoint of diversity is hard to be melted for all
As a woman of color, I believe it is essential that I become aware of my own biases in order to help individuals that have different beliefs, values, and cultural practices. When I was done completing the “Multicultural Counseling Competencies: A Self Examination” assessment, I became aware of my strengths, weaknesses, and areas where I need to grow as a future college counselor. To begin with, I notice that I questioned myself continuously whether I take the time to evaluate the limits of my competency when helping a student from a different cultural heritage from mine.
. Race has always been a big controversial topic around the world. We always hear on the news of situations involving race, and lets face it, if it’s on the news it’s probably something more negative than positive. But, being a young adult causes me to be exposed to many more things on my own without the news or outside influences distorting my own point of view. I can say that I’ve formed my own beliefs solely on what I’ve experienced.
Liberal Arts Self-Assessment There are many benefits to achieving a Liberal Arts education. A Liberal Arts education provides the learner with a broad range of information to help guide them in a direction that create intellectual growth. Liberal Arts cover a wide range of subjects and creates a solid foundation for many other areas of study. A Liberal Arts education teaches you how to think, learn, see things as a whole, makes you a better communicator, and problem solver. A Liberal Arts education is the most important factor in creating critically thinking, well rounded interesting individuals.
I grew up in a two-parent household with my parents being married before they had children. My father has always been the one that provides finically, while my mother was the one who took care of my siblings and I throughout my childhood. Being that both of my parents were born in Mexico, I consider myself Mexican American. I am proud to be Mexican American. Culture plays a huge role in shaping your identity.
Throughout my life, I have perception of the world has changed with the aquiration of new knowledge. Throughout my life I have began to gain consciousness of issues that people of color, people like me, Latina, immigrant-descent, low-income face in everyday life. I always knew since a young age that I wanted to help people, my people. I knew I had to become someone to have the ability to be herd and listened too regardless of the color of my skin, someone worth remembering, someone who created change, someone who my parents could be proud of, but most importantly someone who I can be proud of. When I came to UCLA, a young naïve Latina, who left her bubble community back in Huntington Park, CA, I became aware of how other students were way
There’s an old saying that “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.” In reality, that saying is wrong. Words hurt a person as much as punch or a kick can. It may not hurt someone physically, but it can scar someone mentally and emotionally. Due to the topics they are associated with, certain words or phrases can elicit strong reactions; some are positive, while others are negative but nonetheless, they all leave an impact on people.
The background of my cultural identity I am an African American female but that isn’t all there is to know me for. I am an African American girl who is very interactive with my religion and also my culture. Cultural identity can be hard to explain because some people don’t know what’s really in their culture and they fail to see , and understand it. I know what my cultural identity is because of my ethiopian flag, the baked macaroni, and the movie the lion king.
Diller, J.V. (2015). Cultural Diversity: A Primer for the Human Services (5th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning. Haack, L., & Gerdes, A. (2011).
Hallmarks of cultural competence, including role development and self-discovery, play an instrumental part in the cultural diversity within an organization as a whole. Diversity stems from the top, from CEO’s and executive boards, and trickles down to employees and patients. However, one thing I learned in this course is that people hold biases that they are unaware of and that cultural competence does not happen overnight. With this acquired knowledge, it has been brought to my attention about which implicit biases I hold and how I can work to eliminate them. Secondly, language access services, as an aspiring speech-language pathologist, play a direct role in my future career because I want to give a voice to the often misunderstood.
All my life I have been on the move from one city to another living no more than three years in each. And each brought me unique experiences, that when people ask “well which do you like best?” I could not possibly decide, as you cannot compare a city with one another for each was during a different time in my life and in different circumstances. The one thing they have in common- Quito, Rio de Janeiro, Panama City, Sydney, New York and Buenos Aires- is the presence of the international communities.
Throughout my experiences in this course so far, I have had many opportunities to reflect on my own past and have begun to better understand my own cultural identity. It has been much more difficult to wrap my head around than I would have predicted it to be because so many things play into the construction of an identity that it can be hard to look at all of those separate pieces together. My cultural identity, like all others, is more complicated than it first appears. I identify as a white person, a woman, an American, a gay person, and a feminist, just to name a few. While all of these labels carry with them stereotypes and expectations, they also interplay with the cultural influences I was subject to throughout my childhood.
The way our societies view other cultures and spread the perceptions regarding them is an unfair practice. It causes discrimination and judgment to foster in the mind of the coming generations and they in turn spread these views even more and thus strengthen those perceptions. While I viewed culture as a part of one’s identity or genetics, I feel like I was rather apathetic to reality. Pride is a fault common in all human beings. We simply refuse to admit our mistakes when proven wrong.