Notes From the Field: Learning Cultural Humility Through Critical Incidents and Central Challenges in Community-Based Participatory Research

Abstract

Cultural humility is critical in the education of community development and planning graduate students because they often work with communities—geographic and/or identity based—where there is a power differential based on privileges of race, income, and education. Cultural humility requires commitment to ongoing self-reflection and self-critique, particularly identifying and examining one's own patterns of unintentional and intentional racism (Israel, Eng, Schulz, & Parker, 2005; Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998). This article describes a 2-course sequence within a community development and planning graduate program that develops students ' cultural humility by integrating community-based participatory research (CBPR) and ongoing reflection. Recommendations for instruction and assessing graduate students ' development of cultural humility emerge from this analysis.

Keywords:

• Cultural humility
• experiential education
• community-based participatory research
• reflection
• service-learning