Cultural+Competence

= = = Introduction = While it may be easy to define what makes a person “competent” in many areas, what qualifies an individual or institution as being “culturally competent” is a more difficult question to answer. This question has never been more important, however, for museums to address; to ensure the sustainability of their institutions and the relevancy of their work, museum professionals must turn more of their attention and their resources toward becoming culturally competent. Faced with high rates of immigration, exponential advances in technology, and an increasingly globalized world, museums have more need than ever before for the creation of effective programs and partnerships with people from all cultures.

Rather than reaching out to the underserved audiences from our ivory tower, however, museums should strive to build a strong, permanent, and relevant relationship for both the cultural community and the museum, striving to create a larger community of which the museum itself is an integral but not all important piece. Museums should also strive to make their own institutional community more culturally competent, by hiring a diverse staff that better reflects the plethora of cultural communities from which they can draw.

Here, we hope to outline effective strategies and references for becoming more culturally competent, and to highlight some effective and admirable programs already in existence.

Before turning to specific examples, however, we should begin by defining two key terms. Using these definitions as our starting ground, it is obvious that many different groups can be considered a "cultural community." The heart of cultural competency, then, consists of strategies that are universally applicable for developing effective partnerships, no matter the specific community in question. Before creating a partnership, however, a museum must acknowledge what cultural community it wishes to focus on. What are some potential cultural communities? What does this amorphous audience look like? = Audience Profile = If asked to describe their “typical museum visitor,” most museums would be able to rattle off statistics based off the growing amount of research into this question. In striving to be more culturally competent, however, museums should not point to percentages already represented but look for the gaps in their numbers. What communities are missing from the reports that the museum could seek out as potential partners?
 * **Culture:** the sum of attitudes, customs, behavior, or beliefs that is characteristic of a particular social group distinguished from another, transmitted from one generation to the next through a variety means, including language, material objects, ritual, institutions, and art
 * **Community:** a group of people who share a common heritage, characteristics, interests, or desired outcomes

Depending on your institution’s location or desired objectives, there are a variety of groups with which new partnerships could be created. Add to this the fact that people typically identify themselves with multiple cultural communities at the same time, and you can see the difficulty in trying to pin down specific cultural boundaries.

Communities can be defined by: There are as many different cultural communities as the reasons for creating a community, so museums have the potential to work with an almost infinite number of new communities. A museum can choose to build programs with communities of African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, the deaf community, the blind community, military members or their families, church groups, school groups, low-income immigrants, or even international visitors, to name a only few possibilities.
 * Race/ethnicity
 * Age
 * Gender
 * Sexual orientation
 * Occupation
 * Religion or spiritual identification
 * Physical ability or disability
 * Social and economic class
 * Geographical or residential location
 * Interest in particular problems or outcomes
 * Other common bonds

= Summary of Relevant Research = Unlike other audience profiles, statistics are not so readily accessible for defining underserved cultural groups. Depending on your location, you may have different cultures comprising your community. However, one thing is certain: Museum-going is not spread evenly across different cultures. According to John Falk’s research described in “Visitors: Who Does, Who Doesn’t, and Why” ( // Museum News, March/April 1998), // “the museum-going habit is far from evenly distributed throughout the population. Less than half of all Americans visit museums even once a year, and fewer than one in five visit with any regularity.” Reasons for visiting or not visiting museums depend on multiple variables, including demographic (education, income, occupation, age, race), psychographic (psychological and motivational characteristics), personal and cultural history (early childhood and parental modeling), and environmental (cues and experiences in environment) variables. To better understand the profile of your museum’s underserved audiences, it helps to first know who // is // visiting your institution and why. Only then can you begin to see which communities are absent from your visitors and who might potentially respond to community engagement efforts.

= Effective Strategies = Developing cultural competency is an on-going and multi-dimensional process, concerning attitudes on both the professional and the personal level. It must begin with a process of becoming more aware of the influences of one's own culture; next, becoming more knowledgeable about other cultures; and finally, taking concrete steps to implement lessons learned.

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Below we have divided effective strategies on becoming more culturally competent into three main categories. Each page lists suggestions as well as examples of effective programs and additional resources. ======

=THE PROCESS OF BECOMING CULTURALLY COMPETENT= =COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT= =LANGUAGE ACCESS=

= References, Resources, and Links = //(Please see each page in the "Effective Strategies" section for Works Cited and Additional Resources)//

= Games and Activities =
 * Wilderdom, a project focused on natural living and living in conjunction with nature, has some useful games and activities for building multicultural, cross-cultural, and intercultural skills. ([])