Practising cultural sensitivity in virtual spaces
Katherine Wimpenny, Coventry University
I wish to centre this thought piece on the concept of cultural humility and partnership work for mutual understanding and promotion of mutual learning when practising cultural sensitivity in virtual spaces. I share these reflections in the context of practising global experiential learning as a critical form of knowledge production that values mutually reciprocal interactions with practitioners, community members, and diverse actors within institutions of higher education (Oberhauser, 2019).
Writing from a healthcare perspective (nursing), Foranda’s (2008, p208-9) concept analysis of cultural sensitivity identifies with five key dimensions, namely 1) knowledge of cultural difference and values; 2) careful thought, deliberation, having concern for others; 3) a willingness for understanding the effects and importance of one another’s values or experiences; 4) respect, and a willingness to show regard; and 5) tailoring, as in a willingness to alter one’s perspective, taking into account the perspective of others. Foranda suggests the consequences of cultural sensitivity should enable effective communication, effective interventions, and satisfaction among those in dialogue (p.10). While Foranda’s key dimensions are not without value, arguably the question remains how issues of power, privilege, and marginalisation are recognised in participants' sense of agency and voice in online collaboration. Drawing on Oberhauser’s (2019, p.754) feminist scholarship focused on ‘transformation from within’, the need for our more nuanced analyses of power, place, and social identities in our virtual global learning practices is acknowledged.
Cultural sensitivity has been related to models of cultural competence. For example, Deardoff’s (2006; 2017) intercultural competence model provides focus on consideration of one’s attitudes and values such as respect, openness, curiosity, and discovery, and how awareness of our attitude links to our willingness for self-critique about biases we often hold about people and communities and contexts, and our need to be open to learn and discover rather than working with assumptions. While the importance of being self-aware and reflexivity therein is acknowledged, Allwright et al. (2019) highlight how issues of intersectionality are often neglected in cultural competency models, with the focus more on learning about particular cultural group values, beliefs, traditions, and customs, resulting in the silencing of marginalised voices. Even more recent conceptualisations of cultural competence, incorporating components such as increased awareness of privilege and socio-political factors, are argued as being oriented towards developing the practitioners' attitudes, knowledge, and skills rather than focusing on power imbalances within the participants' relationship (Kirmayer 2012). Cultural humility, on the other hand, places emphasis on what social identities and intersections mean to the person, rather than what previously acquired ‘cultural’ knowledge can contribute, and with focus on partnership and mutual empowerment in working practices (Allwright et al., 2019).
As acknowledged by Rawal and Deardoff (2021), our capabilities in intercultural communication are being harnessed more so as a consequence of the global pandemic, as we readily come into contact with colleagues across geographies, but from our own (home) environments. Over the past 18 months+, practising cultural sensitivity has placed emphasis (again) on our ontology and epistemology, our ethical and moral orientation, and the influence of self, our experiences, our values, and our ability to be attuned towards others in the virtual space. Such respect – both verbally and non-verbally – in our Teams and Zoom conversations (accelerating a digital transformation that has been underway for decades [OECD, 2020]), and especially when we have not physically met our partners in context, has been part of my becoming and in developing my cultural humility in striving for reciprocal interactions as an English- speaking, female, white-privileged researcher from a developed country. (And indeed, in recognising the more tangible assets regarding connectivity and hard/software as technological requirements necessary for the complexity of networked learning [Jacobs et al., 2021]).
Critiques of cultural competence – learning about a certain culture is not in itself adequate, cultural groups are not static and uniform. Users of cultural competence also commonly reduce diversity and culture to ethnicity and race, and thus fail to consider other social identities such as sexual orientation and gender identity. Beagan (2015) and Oberhauser (2019) write of approaches for building effective cross-disciplinary and critical perspectives grounded in diverse theoretical and methodological approaches decentring and decolonising Western perspectives. Our willingness to be culturally humble in what could be viewed as a digitalisation/virtualisation turn is, in our praxis, in the process of combining theoretical understandings of issues and concepts of power, privilege, and hegemony, with activism and relational pedagogy, and ethics. With colleagues from South Africa and Brazil, we have examined the interconnected nature of a range of personal, linguistic, social, cultural, digital, and structural ‘capitals’, which, in the context of practising values for global experiential learning as a critical form of knowledge production, give rise to how ways of knowing, being, relating and expressing might be questioned, contested, and transformed when collaborating in virtual spaces (Wimpenny et al. 2021). While rich cultural, and potentially challenging, dialogue is inevitable and desirable in such learning, what seems key in practising cultural sensitivity is to create a critically humble learning culture in bridging the gap between past, present, and future, where participants’ identities are welcomed in a respectful space, unleashing a culture of listening, building trust and joint partnership alongside recognition of context. Use of the virtual space for storytelling, and modes of expression embracing metaphor, images, alongside tea drinking (during ‘Friday Cuppas’), are part of this mutual learning, and in our reflection on the multidimensional nature of culture and identity.