Cross Cultural Awareness Training

This highly interactive course is based on recent literature and research underscoring the importance of self-reflection and self understanding on culture in being culturally sensitive and aware. Using a broad array of common ideas and tools to explore personally held beliefs around differences, normal and “crazy”, this course reaches bias, prejudice and ethnocentricity that perpetuates cultural insensitivity. The connection between diagnosis and worldview will be reviewed. Emphasis on commonalities and like “reasons for life” between and among different cultures weaves throughout this course. Local Alaskan concepts of health taken from experience, shared conversation and the literature will be outlined. The goal of this course is to avoid “culture” as a tool of therapy and to engender thoughtful relationships with differences through respect, understanding and equanimity.

Level: Intermediate                              Hours: 8 hours