Listen Please

After a week immersed in this course, and a few days back home, I’ve had time to reflect on what it means to be culturally sensitive. I’ve thought long and hard about how a community, who practices cultural humility, behaves?  I learned a big lesson from being thrust into an international community of strangers where we were expected to have serious conversations about difficult global issues. Communication is at the heart of everything. We can’t possibly know everything about every nation’s culture. But we can learn how to listen well, ask good questions, and respond with empathy when we face a difficult conversation with someone we don’t know well.

Communication built on misinformation, assumptions or stereotypes can create distance between schools, families and students. If handled with respect and cultural sensitivity, however, school-family communication provides an opportunity to live out the values of inclusiveness and equity, which are at the heart of cultural humility. I believe we can educate ourselves and our professional community so that we can avoid communication pitfalls and support teacher-family relationships built on respect.

This kind of professional development, commonly referred to as Anti-Bias education, addresses culturally sensitive communication. It can also teach us how to demonstrate respect for families with a diverse range of backgrounds and structures. As our school communities become more and more diverse over the coming decades we will need to be prepared with culturally relevant family engagement strategies that communicate to students that their family identities are understood and valued. And this work needs to begin today at my school because until we can demonstrate respect for families with a diverse range of backgrounds and structures we are not carrying out Dr. Montessori’s vision for cosmic education –  teaching children about the interconnectednes, interdpendence, and the unity of the world.