Developing Cultural Competence through Children’s Literature in Training Educational and Psycho-Social Professionals

Abstract

Present day educational and psycho-social services deal with broad cultural diversity. Educators and psycho-social professionals need to become culturally competent to be able to work with people from different cultural backgrounds including race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, etc. To be able to do so, it is important to cultivate cultural competence among these workers, the perquisites to which are the awareness and acceptance of differences between people as well as reflection upon their own attitudes and feelings. To create a profound and long-lasting effect of the training, creative and experiential teaching methods are often applied. This paper describes the use of children’s books in academic training for cultural and context awareness and presents two training modules. The application of this methodology is demonstrated with university students in social work and with students in an Arabic-speaking teachers’ college in Israel.