Cultural Competence and Cultural Humility as Foundations for Meaningful Engagement Among an Educational System of Care for School Stakeholders

Abstract

Cultural competence refers to behaviors, attitudes, awareness, and policies that promote effective intervention, relationships, and work in cross-cultural situations. Cultural humility refers to a lifelong commitment to working on understanding cross-cultural interactions, with the understanding that working across cultures is an ongoing process of acknowledging power differentials and building client relationships across diverse cultural contexts. The literature has presented a distinction between these two concepts, with cultural competence tending to have an endpoint with a mastery level of skills in contrast to cultural humility that involves a lifelong self-reflective process. The purpose of this chapter is to present a term that combines the two concepts, as both complementary to one another and effective in promoting school engagement. Hence, the concepts of cultural competence and humility (CCH) are presented as a foundation for the effective engagement of what is introduced as a new concept—an educational system of care (ESOC)—for diverse school community stakeholders. This chapter presents an overview of terms and a rationale regarding their centrality for meaningful engagement among school mental health (SMH) stakeholders. Current demographic data highlight the diverse classroom experience that makes up the public school system in the United States. From this diverse classroom context, a CCH ESOC framework for multiple stakeholder engagement is presented where culturally adaptive interventions are operationalized by multiple stakeholders that include: students, parents/guardians/family members, community stakeholders, teachers, SMH professionals, and administrators. A case study is presented that demonstrates how each stakeholder group can provide student support in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.