Race and Culture

Tools, Techniques and Trainings: A Manual for Professionals

Sumita Dutta, Reenee Singh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429918377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

"Race" and Culture: Tools, Techniques and Trainings is a practical resource for trainers who wish to work with the issues raised by racial and cultural diversity in their own agency settings. It is intended as an easy guide and a "hands-on" tool for practitioners (family therapists, clinical psychologists, social workers, GPs, nurses, health visitors, counsellors, teachers, etc), academics, educators and students. It brings together contributions from professional trainers working in multiple and diverse settings. It is aimed both at those who would like to initiate training on diversity in their agency contexts or those who wish to include the important dimensions of "race" and culture into their existing trainings. This book emerged directly from training developed by the authorsfor professionals working with refugees in their own communities, at the Centre for Cross Cultural Studies at the Institute of Family Therapy.

Part One
Overview and generic exercises

Reenee Singh and Sumita Dutta
(with contributions from Claire Dempster and Rory Worthington)

Introduction

Who is this book for?

“Race” and Culture: Tools, Techniques, and Trainings is a practical resource for trainers who wish to work with the issues raised by racial and cultural diversity in their own agency settings. It is intended as an easy guide and a “hands-on” tool for practitioners (family therapists, clinical psychologists, social workers, GPs, nurses, health visitors, counsellors, teachers, etc.), academics, educators, and students.

The book brings together contributions from professional trainers working in multiple and diverse settings. It is aimed both at those who would like to initiate training on diversity in their agency contexts or those who wish to include the important dimensions of “race” and culture into their existing trainings.

Context and history

This book emerged directly from training developed by Reenee Singh and Sumita Dutta for professionals working with refugees in their own communities, at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies at the Institute of Family Therapy (2006–2009). Expanding on the training in family work skills that we developed for professionals working with refugees, we (RS and SD) were invited to talk about issues of “race” and culture for students at the Institute of Family Therapy and on other family therapy, mental health, and psychology courses. We were approached by Social Services, Health Services, Education Services and agencies in the voluntary sector, all of whom were keen to introduce training in diversity and cultural competence in their settings. The trainings that we developed were carried out at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies between 2003 and 2008, and are listed in Appendix I.

The ethos of our training at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies was to include professional trainers, especially those from refugee, minority ethnic, and migrant communities, to contribute to our training. In keeping with this, we have included the voices of our trainer colleagues in each part of this book.

We were fortunate to receive funding for the Centre from Lloyds TSB Foundation, and could, hence, afford to offer our courses for professionals working with refugees free of charge. This was consistent with one of the aims of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies: to improve access of minority ethnic professionals to culturally appropriate training. Our book is, thus, offered as a resource to professionals who would like to design and deliver culturally appropriate and sensitive training.

How to approach this book

The book is divided into five parts. Each part will include its own theoretical perspective, followed by a number of exercises.

In this first part, following the introduction, we will outline the main theoretical and systemic principles underlining the book. We then proceed to link the theoretical ideas with a collection of generic exercises on diversity, “race”, culture, and spirituality.

In Parts Two, Three, and Four, we address specific applications for professionals working with particular client groups.

Part Two is entitled “Working with refugee and asylum seeking families”. Working with refugees, asylum seekers, and migrant communities often throws up dilemmas for professionals about how to meaningfully incorporate understandings of loss, transition, adaptation, and acculturation, as well as providing practical support and assistance in the here and now. This section will provide a range of thinking and exercises looking at the multiple support systems around refugees, asylum seekers, and migrant communities, and it will consider some of the assumptions and dilemmas around “race” and culture that often emerge in the work. A section is also dedicated to looking at issues of language and interpretation, which can so often be central to this work.

Part Three is designed for those working with mixed heritage clients and intercultural couples. Until recently, there was very little thinking or research on working with mixed heritage clients and families. Intercultural/interfaith couples often present to practitioners with dilemmas regarding their cultural and faith differences, with particular reference to the impact of such differences on their parenting. There is a range of original exercises in this section, developed for couple counsellors and for all professionals who work with clients from mixed heritage backgrounds.

Part Four is entitled “Kinship care: working with children and carers”. In the context of looked after children, a child’s racial and cultural identity is viewed as being actively shaped with every new environment and placement the child finds himself in. In this section, we explore some of the themes of cultural transition, bereavement, and coherence when working with looked after children. In doing so, and more broadly, we consider the ways in which professionals can assist people to maintain coherent cultural identities.

In the concluding section, Part Five, we explore how managers and supervisors can use some of the ideas in the book to take thinking about “race” and culture forward in their agency contexts. We discuss the advantages and dilemmas of a number of different practices to incorporating “race” and culture in agency contexts. We draw on interviews with managers about their approaches to “race” and culture in their organizations, and we offer a few exercises to help managers and supervisors work with their teams.

Needless to say, the areas that we have addressed in this book are not exhaustive, or even indicative of all the training that we have done over the years. For example, we would have liked to include a section on working with cultural conflict in schools. Similarly, we think this book would have benefited from a chapter on working with issues of cultural diversity in child protection. However, because of constraints of space and time, we have included only those areas that we feel that we have been able to develop most fully.

How to use this book

It is important to state at the outset that, in our training, we tend to rely far more on experiential and skills-based exercises, or the use of films and group discussions, than on didactic teaching. In fact, we seldom spend more than 30% of the total allocated time in presenting theoretical ideas, in comparison to 70% on exercises. We do believe, however, that a brief presentation of theory at the beginning of a training seminar can help to contextualize the material. Thus, in each section of the book, we will begin with a theoretical overview and then go on to offer between five and ten exercises.

The number of theoretical ideas and exercises that you choose to use in your training will obviously depend on the length and scope of the training that you are asked to provide. For example, you may be asked to provide a short training (half a day) on working with interpreters, in which case you could refer directly to the theoretical material and exercises on working with interpreters found in Part Two of this book. Similarly, somebody might invite you to do a day-long training on “Diversity and spirituality”, in which case you would look for relevant exercises in Part One.

Alternatively, you may be asked to provide a more generic, modular, or short course (approximately six days) on working with “race” and culture. In that case, you could base your training on this first section, perhaps dipping into some of the other sections, depending on the kind of professionals or students you are being requested to train. With reference to specific applications, you may be seeking to design a longer course on “race” and culture for those working in a fostering agency. You may then wish to include some of the theoretical overview on “race” and culture found in Part One of the book, a few of the generic exercises found in 1(C), followed by some of the theoretical ideas and exercises found in Part Four.

What we are recommending, then, is a creative “mix and match” approach to the book, depending on the nature and length of the training that you would like to design and deliver. Appendix II comprises a list of resources, films, and websites that you may want to draw on in your training. The theoretical overview, presented in the next section, includes summary sections that may be a useful tool when presenting your theoretical ideas.

Theoretical overview

In this section, we will outline a few theoretical perspectives that we find most useful when we teach professionals about “race” and culture. Within the vast area of theory and research in intercultural practice, for the sake of brevity, we have chosen to focus on a few key areas.

1. A systemic perspective.
2. Diversity.
3. Defining “race”, culture, and ethnicity.
4. Theorizing “the other”
5. MECA (see Figure 1).
6. Dominant discourses about the self and “the family”.
7. Cultural ideas about illness and healing.

In subsequent sections of the book, these theoretical themes may be taken up, or expanded on, or, alternatively, new theoretical ideas may be introduced.

A systemic perspective

We (Reenee and Sumita) are both systemic psychotherapists (family therapists), trained to focus on interactions and relationships between people in systems, rather than on the “inner world” of an individual. We find that systemic thinking, with its emphasis on the multiple contexts framing people’s behaviour, lends itself to theorizing about issues of “race” and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• PART ONE: OVERVIEW AND GENERIC EXERCISES
• PART TWO: WORKING WITH REFUGEE AND ASYLUM SEEKING FAMILIES
• PART THREE: WORKING WITH MIXED HERITAGE CLIENTS AND INTERCULTURAL COUPLES
• PART FOUR: KINSHIP CARE: WORKING WITH CHILDREN
• PART FIVE: POSITIVE PRACTICES AROUND “RACE” AND CULTURE
• POSTSCRIPT: DILEMMAS IN TRAINING AND POINTERS FOR PRACTICE
• Appendix I: Training courses taught by Reenee Singh and Sumita Dutta at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies at IFT
• Appendix II: Television, film and book resources
• Appendix III: Guide to drawing a basic family genogram
• Appendix IV: The Social GRRAACCEESS
• INDEX