Culturally Responsive Practitioner

Zaretta Hammond, a former educator, consultant, researcher and author has created a practical process to identify your cultural frame of reference, widen your cultural aperture, and identify key triggers in her book “Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain”. Hammond (2015) teaches how unpacking our implicit bias begins with an intentional self-examination of how we make the familiar strange. Our own culture is so deeply ingrained in our social habits and ways of evaluating that it is often the hardest to examine and we are rarely aware of it (Hammond, 2015). A critical part is understanding the social neuroscience behind how the brain responds and interacts with others.

First, let’s get into some science:

All humans have a part of their brain that is designed to keep us safe ruled by the amygdala and reticular activating system (RAS) often referred to as the “lizard brain”. The lizard brain believes the safest place is deep in the center of your comfort zone of our most unconscious implicit biases. When we venture too close to the edges of your comfort zone it sounds an alarm designed to alert that danger exists outside of that comfort zone. The lizard brain will put you in freeze, fight, or fight mode and flood your brain with stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline causing you to disconnect from your more rational thought processes. Keeping you in check with narratives designed to keep you “safe”. The key strategies are awareness and knowledge about when our brains feel a threat and being able to reduce the fight or flight hormones by practicing mindfulness and relaxation tools.

Now that we have some background knowledge, let's focus on the practical work of a culturally responsive practitioner:

→ Identify Your Cultural Frame of Reference (pgs. 56-58)

Being a culturally responsive practitioner is having the ability to examine and reflect on your own personal beliefs and behavior in order to develop emotional competence about the way you show up in the world and how it affects the diverse people you work with.

The first step is spending time thinking about your surface culture of where you live (urban, suburban, rural community), how you were raised (family traditions and folklore), and what physical attributes (gender, race, ethnicity) shape the way you navigate through life. Then examine some of the shallow cultural beliefs and experiences that are core to what behaviors earned praise, shame, and other primary messaging from your upbringing.

Tips/Tools: Reflect and talk with trusted family, friends, and colleagues about your values about why you believe in them. What shapes your worldview? Ask yourself, how did you come to believe this? What influences your work and lifestyle?

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→ Widen Your Cultural Aperture (pgs. 58-62)

We can broaden our explanations and interpretations of actions and intentions that often misinterprets behavior when we only look at them through our own personal cultural frames. Hammond offers a solution using the metaphor of an aperture which is a hole or an opening through which light travels. Both our natural eyes and a camera opens and closes its aperture to let in more light to see more clearly. Gudykunst and Kim (2003) provided a three-part process to widen our interpretative aperture–description, interpretation and evaluation.

Description–describe what you see without judgment of the action

Interpretation–give it meaning

Evaluation–assign positive or negative significance based on your initial interpretation

Culturally responsive practitioners recognize the need to develop their observation skills to effectively describe what is happening and not jump to conclusions which allows time and space to entertain alternative explanations.

Tips/Tools: Spending time viewing the replay in your mind can help you try on alternative explanations. Make a list of reactions, assumptions, and interpretations of behaviors as the scenario replays and then check your explanations. Build some cross-cultural background knowledge by watching positive television shows and movies that allow you to have a virtual cultural experience.

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→ Identify your Key Triggers (pgs. 62-69)

When we feel threatened–especially against our belief systems–we can become vulnerable to an amygdala hijack. Practicing emotional self-management is the ability to use one’s awareness of their feelings as information to manage and adjust their emotional state (Hammond, 2015). Emotions are contagious and we want to avoid spreading toxic emotions that can become reactive rather than responsive. The brain already has a negative bias (20x more focused on the negative than the positive). There are steps that you can take to calm your amygdala. 

Culturally responsive practitioners know themselves well enough to anticipate situations that might trigger them. There are five elements of social interaction that are universal triggers hardwired into the brain: standing, certainty, connection, control, and equity.

Standing–one’s sense of importance relative to others

Certainty–one’s need for clarity and predictability

Control–one’s sense of control over their life

Connection–one’s sense of connection to and security with another person

Equity–having a sense of just, fair, and unbiased exchange between people

Tips/Tools:  Identify what makes you defensive out of those five areas and take some time in advance to ask yourself “What do I want the outcome in this situation to be and how do I need to show up for that to happen?”Hammond suggests using the SODA strategy: Stop, Observe, Detach, Awaken. Labeling your feelings helps reduce the intensity and return some cognitive control called “affect labeling”. State what’s happening and observe rather than actively participating. This will make it easier to make thoughtful choices about what to do next. Create an “early warning system”!  If you can notice your physical reaction when threatened or angered, it becomes a cue to step back and regroup. Put as little as 10 seconds in-between the time you get triggered and your reaction to preempt an amygdala hijack and avoid responding negatively.

This is not about being perfect but about creating new neural pathways that shift your default cultural programming as you grow in awareness and skill.

→ Going Deeper (pg. 69)

One of the reference materials for further research and application I found most interesting is Pollack’s (2008) Everyday Anti-Racism: Getting Real About Race in School book. It looks at education through anthropological lens and seems to provide some key components for dialogue about oversimplified racial inequalities and discusses methodological tools for educators to address everyday struggles she refers to as “race wrestling”. This concept describes how individuals struggle self-consciously with normalized ideas about “racial” difference and about how racial inequality is produced (Pollack, 2008). 

Although it is geared towards educators, I think this resource would also help any practitioner that engages with a diverse group of individuals, families, and communities on a daily basis. The ongoing daily activities of a racialized world is something I believe needs more attention as we try to dismantle generations of systemic oppression. We must recognize how our behaviors reinforce such beliefs and strive for more anti-racist impulses in deciding everyday behaviors toward individuals.

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References

Hammond, Z. (2015). Chapter 4: Preparing to Be a Culturally Responsive Practitioner . In Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students (pp. 52–69). essay, Corwin, a SAGE company. 

Pollack, M. (Ed.). (2008). Everyday Anti-Racism: Getting Real About Race in School. The New Press.