This article in the Baltimore Sun refers to a student complaint of a “lack of cultural competency in our peers and professors.” Can anyone explain what this means?
To the mods: if this turns into a debate, please move it where it belongs.
If you are an African American student, and your teacher or peers know nothing about your culture you could say they lack ‘cultural competency’, or cultural knowledge and understanding. This in turn can impact how you are treated. I think that’s the case they are trying to make. Whether you or anyone else considers this valid or not is another story.
Another question relating to the same article, if I may:
What’s the meaning of “egg shells and racial slurs being thrown out of windows”? Is there a racial connotation to egg shells? And, in the context of being thrown out of windows, ‘racial slurs’ must be a metonymic reference to material objects being thrown out of windows; what would these be?
I’m only familiar with the term from the health care side where it refers to an organization’s or person’s familiarity with and respect for another’s culture and language.
To avoid this sliding into debate, I will note up front that in many ways, it’s a touchy subject. One of the prime arguments against it is the assumption that a person is necessarily a member of one particular culture and should be treated that way, which suggests treating people differently based on their ethnicity, for example.
But it is a widely used concept in the delivery of health and social care. For example, managed care organizations are often required by contract to be “culturally competent.” Which often just means aware of and flexible enough to honor requests for cultural accommodation.
What? No. The metaphor is in “thrown.”
Basically what jsgoddess said: it’s the ability to recognize and adapt to others’ cultural mores and perspectives. As a concept, it seems to have arisen in healthcare first but it’s now a fairly big deal in other areas such as pedagogy.
Cultural bias in pedagogy has been a recognized (or at least debated) thing for a long time. Standardized intelligence tests have long been criticized for having subtle (or not-so-subtle) cultural biases. Googling for the subject, I quickly found at least one article that begins with a cite from 1968.
Sure, but cultural competency is looks at people more than procedures. It’s not so much “is the test culturally biased?” as “is the teacher aware of cultural differences that may affect learning?”
OK, it’s a syllepsis (of egg shells literally, and slurs metaphorically being thrown) then. But still, why egg shells?
Got me. Egg shells are poor projectiles. I can only guess that they meant eggs, with “shells” an error generated by the recollection of broken eggs.
“walking on eggshells” is the expression for being very sensitive to another’s feelings and trying not to disturb/offend them. Other than that, I don’t understand. If it’s literal - why would eggshells, of all the objects at hand, be thrown at minorities?
The only other context I could imagine is that rowdy frat boys (round up the usual suspects) throw eggs at (not eggshells) and yell racial slurs at passing students from the windows… and the reporter messed up the quote.
Cultural sensitivity used to be a complaint is things like IQ tests. For example “Fred wants to plant a hedge around his house, the lot is 50 feet by 100 feet and the driveway is 12 feet wide. How long is Fred’s hedge?” If you posed this question to a Grade 5 child - some inner city children may not know what a hedge is, or to subtract a driveway width. There’s a lot of prior knowledge assumed. Similarly, a sex bias question was a short paragraph about ranks in the military, and a series of questions. Boys are more likely than girls to know the rank order is lieutenant, sergeant, corporal, private and will likely score better than a girl with equivalent reading comprehension.
I’d like to know why the “peers” (fellow students?) are supposed to be “culturally competent”.
Are they supposed to take some kind off special prep classes or something?
Yes, “walking on eggshells” is the phrase being alluded to in the piece. To “throw [something] out the window” means to dispense with it.
So they are throwing the eggshells out the window, in the sense that they are not taking care in the language they use around others who may take offence at such language.
My take at least.
I did. My large-ish public university had a required first-semester course that was basically designed to transition students into a more diverse environment than the one they likely grew up in. We read a lot of memoirs, had opportunities to reflect on our own backgrounds and experiences, and met a lot of great guest speakers with something to say about identity and society. It served as kind of a foundation course in listening to others and understanding that not everyone comes from the same background as you (whatever it is).
Thats more like “cultural tolerance” than “cultural competency”…
Bull malarky like this is why I am glad I got a BS.
And of course, STEM fields are so well known for never having cross-cultural issues.