In the profession of social work, there is an expectation that all service providers and professionals provide culturally responsive interventions and considerations to diverse individuals, groups, and communities. At the same time, the topic of diversity has the potential to create discomfort. How do social workers continue to not only engage in difficult conversations, but to also acknowledge and confront the layers of discomfort?
Learning about local diversity and attending cultural events is one way to challenge one’s perspective and engage with diverse others. For this Assignment, participate in an immersive experience in your community. As a guest at this experience, remember to take a stance of cultural humility and respectfully participate. You then create a PowerPoint (PPT) presentation about this experience in which you analyze related concepts in the course. You are expected to demonstrate professional demeanor in behavior, dress, and setting for the presentation.
To Prepare: Attend an open event in your community related to a diverse social identity (gender identity/expression, race/ethnicity, class, religion, ability, sexual orientation, national origin, or age). Then, create a PPT presentation and record the presentation using the Personal Capture function of Kaltura Media (see Kaltura Media Uploader linked in the classroom for instructions on using this technology). Use the Presentation feature to record both your PPT and a video of yourself presenting.
By Day 7
Submit, a 7-10 minute recorded PowerPoint presentation and transcript of presentation. In the PPT presentation, address the following prompts:
- Describe the cultural event in which you participated.
- Explain how this experience influenced your perceptions of diversity and difference.
- Analyze at least 3 key concepts from this course in relation to this experience.
- Define what it means to you to engage with diversity and difference in practice.
- Describe two challenges associated with discussing and reflecting on diversity related content.
- Describe one strategy to address these challenges.
- Identify one positive emotion and one negative emotion that surfaced during the past 10 weeks of the course.
- Describe one strategy to address the negative emotion in order to continue developing cultural awareness.
- Explain specific steps that you will take to advance human rights and social, economic, and environmental justice based on what you have learned in this course.
It is highly recommended that you write a script before recording your presentation. A good guide for translating the length of your written script into presentation time is about 135 words per minute. This rate may differ based on your speaking style and other variables, so consider it a general guideline.
