Teaching Note—Diversity and Difference Through a Rural Lens

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis teaching note demonstrates how the PEN-3 cultural model provides an opportunity to address, embrace, and achieve cultural competence among social work programs. By facilitating a more complex and nuanced understanding of diversity and difference, the PEN-3 model allows social work students and practitioners alike to move beyond a historic understanding of diversity and difference to an awareness that truly addresses the intersectionality of the multiple dimensions of diversity, including place diversity. This teaching note particularly focuses on the importance of understanding how place diversity, or the unique social and environmental context where individuals, families, and communities are embedded, influences the interactions and individual experiences among rural individuals and their subsequent health outcomes.