Cultural humility in youth work: a duoethnography on anti-racist, anti-ableist practice

Abstract

Cultural humility is a framework for engaging in self-reflection, self-critique, and reflective practice to cultivate respectful relationships and understand power and privilege. Using duoethnography, we applied cultural humility to our youth work at summer camp and in a social skills group for Autistic youth. Our integrative analysis shows how cultural humility allowed us to enact a transformative social justice agenda, understand inherent power imbalances in youth-practitioner partnerships, and better engage around race and disability in our daily practice. Given the power imbalances inherent to working with youth, we posit cultural humility as an important framework for creating anti-oppressive youth development spaces and relationships.

Keywords:

• Cultural humility
• youth work
• youth-practitioner partnerships
• camp
• autism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah L. Curtiss

Dr. Sarah Curtiss is an assistant professor specializing in special education in the School of Education. She completed her Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Curtiss explores how to develop programs for autistic youth that foster resilience, facilitate positive development, and are grounded in lived experience and informed by stakeholders. Throughout her research, Dr. Curtiss situates autistic youth in context—in families, communities, schools, service systems, and cultures.

S. Cole Perry

Dr. Cole Perry is a high school Spanish teacher in Cincinnati, Ohio, and pursues their research as an independent scholar. They completed their Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Perry’s research explores youth culture, youth development programs, and anti-racism. They are particularly interested in developmental processes at residential summer camps.