Cultural Competence and the Recursive Nature of Conscientization

Abstract

The journey to cultural competence encompasses traveling an ever-expanding path increasing in size with the addition of each of five stages of development: conscientization, self-assessment, self-efficacy, agency, and, finally, critical consciousness as the unifying body within the educational enterprise. The increasing stages create a spiral following the Fibonacci sequence enveloping one another throughout the journey. In this study, one teacher educator conducted a self-study of her cultural competence from which recommendations were revealed (1) cultural competence is an ongoing transformational journey; (2) teacher and leadership educators benefit from insights for infusing the possibilities and parameters associated with cultural competence with their candidates; (3) school leaders become valuable conduits for establishing and reinforcing the responsibility for cultural competence within the profession; (4) professional developers glean guidance for supporting and advancing the levels of cultural competence with classroom teachers; and (5) all educators grow exponentially by reexamining their own cultural competence recursively for modeling and ensuring the presence and power of cultural competence as process and product.