“Cultural Competence and Cultural Humility”
Leyland said universities need to proactively consider how they care for transgender and non-binary students.
“Cultural competency for providing care to transgender and non-binary students is critical in universities and requires ongoing training and reflection, particularly by staff advising mental health care staff. ,” Leyland said. “So this other idea of cultural competency, or cultural humility, is really important for working with groups that may have experiences that providers, administrators, and staff themselves don't have.”
He says cultural humility centers around an individual's willingness to learn and engage with people from marginalized groups and communities to which they may not belong. This includes the ability to interact sensitively with individuals, including gay students and students of diverse racial backgrounds.
Another University of Delaware expert, Roderick L. Carey, a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, emphasizes the important role cultural competency plays for marginalized groups, especially in matters of race. .
“Race is a very important variable in life, and it's not necessarily just skin color, but how skin color presents opportunities as well as challenges.”
They can successfully navigate the K-12 education system and even go on to college,” Carey said. “We're seeing even black boys in preschool being suspended and expelled from school.”
Students who are suspended from school may be labeled as “problematic.” Carey said experiences based on skin color can be traumatic for students and greatly impact their cognitive development from kindergarten through high school.
“It's kind of the same thing. When kids experience that kind of trauma in school, they start to question whether other institutions, like higher education, are right for them,” he said. To tell.
To better support underrepresented groups, experts suggest colleges collect sexual orientation and gender identity data at admissions to better understand enrollment patterns. They argue that schools should allocate more resources to helping educators develop cultural competency.
