Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity and Inclusion: Understanding and Working with Diverse Groups

Acknowledgement of Country

• Macquarie University acknowledges the Wallumattagal people of the Dharug nation, the traditional custodians of the land.
• Respect is paid to Elders past, present, and future, especially Indigenous students.

Learning Outcomes

• Explain fundamental concepts of intergroup relations and identify factors influencing interactions between social groups.
• Define equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) and describe their significance in social/cultural contexts.
• Analyse responsibilities and approaches of helping professionals in supporting individuals and groups considering EDI principles.
• Evaluate how language and communication practices affect interactions in diverse settings.

A Chance to Reflect – Who Are You?

• Consider the various aspects of your identity.

Describing Identity

• Examples of characteristics used to describe oneself:
  • Race/ethnicity/skin colour/nationality
  • Gender and/or sexual identity
  • Age
  • Cultural group
  • Occupation
  • Language spoken
  • Religion
  • Political leanings
  • Marital/parental Status
  • Physical/mental/neuro condition

Significance of Groups

• Humans are social beings, and groups express and influence our social nature.
• Groups are unique social organisms with properties beyond the sum of individual members (Dovidio et al., 2005).
• Belonging to a group:
  • Fulfills the need for affiliation, love, and belonging.
  • Influences self-esteem and develops self-concept.
  • Provides social support.
  • Satisfies the need for social comparison, leading to both exciting and challenging intergroup relations.

Intergroup Relations

• Intergroup relations involve individuals perceiving themselves or being perceived by others as members of a social category.
• It encompasses the functional relations between two or more groups and/or their individual members.
• Group identities influence internal cohesion and external competitiveness.
• Social psychology provides the foundation for understanding stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.

The Matildas Example

• The Matildas women's soccer team values teamwork, resilience, respect, dedication, and inspiration, which are central to their identity.
• Shared experiences create camaraderie.
• Strong group identity fosters belonging and loyalty.
• The team’s unique identity sets them apart and creates a competitive edge.

Intergroup Relations & Human Rights

• Kessaris (2006) argues psychology has a duty to uphold a Human Rights-based framework in research, theory development, and interventions.
• It is a human right to be treated equally and fairly, regardless of background.
• Helping professions training should focus on understanding the self within unbalanced power relationships (Walker et al., 2014).

Working with Diverse Backgrounds

• Efficiently working with diverse people fosters an environment free from discrimination and conflicts.
• It enhances relationships, promotes fairness, and enables learning from one another.
• Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) aims to increase participation, accountability, anti-discrimination, equality, empowerment, and legal protection.

Diversity & Inclusion

• Diversity and inclusion fosters acceptance and respect between individuals from different groups.
• Understanding that each person is unique and recognising individual differences is crucial.
• Exploring differences in a safe, positive environment promotes understanding and embraces diversity.

Equality vs. Equity

• Equality: Every individual receives the same resources, potentially overlooking specific needs.
• Equity: Resources are tailored to individual needs, allowing all students an opportunity to succeed and overcome their unique challenges.
• Example Scenario: Providing educational resources

The Role of Culture

Collectivism

• Knowledge is gained from relationships with the sky, land, families, ancestors, and communities.
• Collective societies stress a joint “we” consciousness, emotional dependence, collective identity, and group solidarity.
• The “self” is secondary to the collective good.

Individualism

• Knowledge is generated by introspectively examining (self-analysis) individual’s feelings and thoughts.
• Rights of the individual are important, as is personal autonomy and initiative.
• “I” is the centre of self-consciousness.

Defining Culture

• Culture is a unique meaning and information system shared by a group and transmitted across generations (Matsumoto & Juang, 2016).
  Culture = \text{shared meaning and information system}
• It allows the group to meet basic needs, pursue happiness and wellbeing, and derive meaning from life.
• Culture includes:
  • The way we do things around here.
  • What is considered ‘normal’, ’accepted’, ‘good’.
  • The unwritten rules of the social game.
  • Learned behaviour.
  • Values and beliefs.
  • Dynamic and changing aspects.

Culture is Complex

• Kidd and Teagle (2012) refer to layers of identity:
  1. Individual: Unique sense of personhood.
  2. Social: Collective sense of belonging to a group.
  3. Cultural: Sense of belonging to a distinct ethnic, cultural, or subcultural group.
• These layers can be difficult to differentiate.
• Culture is intrinsic and integral in forming us as individuals and groups.
• Some cultural components are visible only with careful observation.
  • Example: Finnish culture values personal space, and physical contact is minimal.

Australia’s Diversity

• It is important to be informed about the historical antecedents that inform current experiences for those from diverse groups.
• Consider:
  • The colonisation of Australia (assimilation policies) and related global events.
  • Indigenous knowledge systems and values.
  • The history of gender and sexual diversity.
  • The lived experiences of disabled or differently abled people.
  • The strengths and challenges of being culturally and linguistically diverse.
  • The overt and covert forms of discrimination experienced by individuals from specific groups.

Australia’s Diversity – EDI Benefits

• An increased sense of safety and belonging improves national productivity (Pai, 2020).
• Provides economic prosperity and supports cultural heritage (Niebuhr & Peters, 2021).
• Reduces conflict between groups through increased social cohesion (Dirrler, 2020).
• Enhances empathy and connection (Swart et al., 2022).
• Fosters resilience and adaptability (White et al., 2022).
• Contributes to understanding of psychological wellness (Jones, 2019).

First Nations Australians’ Understanding of Health

• Includes body, mind, spirit, land, environment, custom, socioeconomic status, family, and community.
• Differs significantly from mainstream Western perceptions, which typically focus on limiting ill-health.
• Policy and services founded on a restricted understanding of health are likely limited in addressing the holistic Indigenous understanding of health (Gomersall et al., 2017).

Indigenous Healing Frameworks

• Offer an alternative aetiological lens where psychological distress manifests when there are disturbances in the physical, social, spiritual, and/or supernatural realm.
• Expands psychology’s repertoire of intervention to consider Indigenous rituals, herbal remedies, and symbolic healing.

Empathy & EDI

• A dilemma emerges when personal beliefs conflict with empathy principles.
• It's easy to think we accept everyone equally without examining our attitudes.
• Discomfort arises when individuals from different groups don't act as expected.
• Assumptions often arise in the absence of real evidence and are influenced by personal experiences.

EDI & Helping Professionals

• Helping professionals must work with diverse backgrounds and appreciate cultural responsivity, cultural relevance, and cultural reinforcement (CRRR).
• This includes awareness of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, gender identity, race, skin colour, ethnicity, religion, political leanings, sexual orientation, and physical/mental/neuro abilities.

Cultural Responsivity

• Chavez-Haroldson (2018) emphasizes mindfulness in recognising:
  • The history and impact of social structures that marginalize some and privilege others.
  • Honoring diverse ways of communication, gathering, and being.
  • Acknowledging intergenerational pain, grief, trauma, and loss.
• Cultural responsivity is embodied through accountability to disrupt ongoing inequities.

Cultural Relevance

• Being mindful to introduce, discuss, and support dialogue on topics that matter to marginalised populations (Wolbring & Lillywhite, 2021).
• Achieved by consulting with diverse populations about matters that fit and are relatable to them.
• Sharing information in ways that authentically connect with historically excluded populations.
• Cultural relevance is embodied through recognising and deconstructing power through psychoeducation.

Cultural Reinforcement

• Respecting, valuing, honouring, and celebrating diverse cultures (Flint, 2020) by acknowledging diverse group’s heritage, language, lived experiences, ways of knowing, and worldviews.
• Involves joining in the celebration of heritage, ancestry, strengths, and intergenerational stories and histories.
• Cultural reinforcement is embodied through recognising each group’s capacity to lead EDI for social change.

Diversity and You

• Reflection is essential to expand self-awareness and build professional skills.
• The person and the professional are intertwined.
• Helping professionals should stand back from themselves and become aware of their cultural values, beliefs, and perceptions.
• Understanding one's culture helps in understanding others.

Avoiding Judgement

• This awareness helps avoid judging other people’s behaviour and beliefs according to one's own cultural standards.
• Helping professionals must avoid making assumptions about cultural influences and applying generalisations to individuals.
• Know that behaviour and beliefs within each culture vary considerably.
• Understand that not all people identify with their cultural background.

The Helping Professional

• Leaving your ‘self’ out of your work may result in ineffective “helping”.
• Abundant research indicates the centrality of the helping professional and their ability to build and maintain effective relationships as key factors in successful outcomes.
• The contextual factors are the primary determinants of helping outcomes (Wampold, 2001):
  • Alliance
  • Relationship
  • Personal and interpersonal skills of the helping professional
  • Client agency
  • Extra relationship factors

Creating a Safe Environment

• Achieving this requires an environment that is safe, with no assault, challenge, or denial of identity (Herlihy et al., 2014).
• It is about shared respect, shared meaning, shared knowledge and experience, of learning together with dignity, and truly listening.

Personal Characteristics

• Have an identity but be open to change.
• Make choices that are life and present-oriented.
• Be passionate, authentic, sincere, and honest.
• Make mistakes and be willing to admit and learn from them.
• Appreciate the influence of culture on all things.
• Have a sincere interest in the welfare of others, even those not like you.
• Do not impose your values onto others – assist them in finding answers congruent with their own values.
• Become deeply passionate about your work but maintain healthy boundaries.

Professional Characteristics

• Helping professions must consider the impact of culture on a person’s functioning, including their degree of acculturation.
• Effective helping professionals are aware of their own cultural conditioning, biases, values and problems, as well as the cultural values of others.
• Becoming a CRRR helping professional involves challenging the idea that your values are automatically true for others.
• They are comfortable with differences between themselves and others.

Advice to Novice Helping Professionals

• Most new helping professionals have ambivalent feelings when meeting clients from diverse backgrounds.
• Recognise and deal with self-doubt by discussing these anxieties with colleagues.
• If you feel self-conscious and anxious, you may be overly concerned with what the textbooks say.
• Inexperienced helping professionals too often fail to appreciate the values inherent in simply being themselves.
• Genuineness and presence enable connection and effective helping relationships.

Seeking Experiences

• Seek out educational, consultative, and training experiences to enhance the ability to work with people from diverse backgrounds.
• Learn more about how your own cultural background has influenced your basic assumptions.
• Remain open to ongoing learning of how the various dimensions of culture affect the helping process.

Knowing Limitations

• You cannot realistically expect to succeed with every single person you meet.
• It takes honesty to admit that you cannot work successfully with every person.
• It is important to learn when and how to make a referral when your limitations prevent you from working effectively with them.
• Before deciding that you do not have the experience or the personal qualities to work with a given population, try working in a setting with a population you do not intend to specialise in.
  • This can be done through diversified field placements or visits to agencies.

Developing a Sense of Humour

• Helping professions is a responsible endeavour but need not be deadly serious.
• A relationship can be significantly enhanced through humour.
• Laughter/humour does not mean that people are not respected, or that important work is not being accomplished.
• The helping professional needs to distinguish between humour that distracts and humour that enhances the situation, as sometimes laughter can be used to cover up anxiety.

How to be a CRRR Helping Professional

• Be aware that historically, cultural variation has been underrepresented in psychology with the majority of researchers and participants being WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic).
• Inclusive representation can lead to psychology being more relevant for marginalised and disenfranchised groups.
• Where representation is not available, CRRR is essential for more accurate evidence, theories, and frameworks of helping interventions.

Fostering Cultural Resilience

• Be considerate in your creation of environments that foster cultural resilience and identify yourself as a sincere and vested engager with people from diverse communities:
  • Prominent displays of First Nations Australians’ artwork (with credit to the artist).
  • Prominent displays of posters and literature that provides information in different languages.
  • Acknowledgement of Country.
  • Displaying flags (First Nations, LGBTQiA+) in prominent positions.
  • Using Indigenous languages in the naming of services, organisations buildings, and programs (with the endorsement from country Elders).
  • Attending ongoing cultural training for staff.
  • Community participation (where out-group members are welcome).
  • Respecting and using people’s names and pronouns.

CRRR & Resilience

• The CRRR-focussed helping professional acts with a sense of purpose, skill, and respect for the diversity of individuals.
• People come to us for various reasons, including feeling that they are not functioning effectively as a result of stereotyping, prejudice or discrimination:
  • They may feel stressed, stuck, overwhelmed, or hopeless.
  • They may have a negative self-concept, they may be depressed, or they may be full of anger.
• People are empowered when they they feel heard, understood, and respected.

Promoting Empowerment and Resilience

• Reflecting genuineness, congruence, and empathy helps others become intentionally flexible with new ways to make meaning of their experiences.
• Addressing specific, immediate issues helps others feel empowered and facilitates further action.
• Resilience is both a short-term and long-term goal of effective helping professions, particularly when the practitioner upholds a trauma-based approach to their sessions.
• We seek to help others resolve issues and concerns, handle future difficulties, become more competent, and value themselves more.

Facilitating Self-Healing

• Helping others resolve an issue contributes to their resilience.
• Pointing out when others demonstrate resilience helps facilitate longer-term success.
• Helping professions ultimately aim to teach self-healing - the capacity to use what has been learned to address future issues.
• Everyone's story is a sacred truth, believe them!

CRRR in Practice

• CRRR is NOT about doing anything TO or FOR people from diverse groups.
• CRRR includes consulting with, standing alongside, and, building alliances with diverse populations – and believing they know the solutions to the issues brought upon them.
• CRRR seeks out alliance-building opportunities, experiential learning, vulnerability, honest engagement, and a curious exploratory discovery.
• CRRR is an artful co-creative resilient growth mindset for change built on strong, trusting intracultural relationships for the purpose and intent of innovative action for social change.

Communication in Diverse Contexts

• Effective communication skills are vital for building a helping or therapeutic alliance.
• These are magnified in the context of diverse groups where language is often a proxy for culture.
• If the person comes from a cultural background that is different to our own, we may find that we speak and understand different languages.

Language Barriers

• Language barriers can cause several difficulties (Schwei et al., 2018).
• We may have no choice but to rely on translators or interpreters to rephrase what we have said in a way that is understandable to the person.

Third-Party Presence Problems

• Problems may arise because translators may:
  • Interpret from their own frame of reference.
  • Add their own experience, interpretations, prejudices, and comments in the message to the person.
  • Violate confidentiality.
  • Jeopardise the relationship between the helping professional and the client, in favour of the translator-client relationship.

Navigating Language Barriers

• Work with an age-appropriate translator.
• Provide time for translator and client to develop rapport separately from your involvement.
• Communicate directly with client when asking questions to reinforce interest in the client.
• Observe non-verbal responses from client but don’t ignore the interpreter.
• Ask one question at a time.
• Don’t interrupt client and interpreter while they are conversing.
• Don’t make comments to interpreter about the client.
• Avoid medical/psychological/scientific jargon.
• Allow time after session for interpreter to share something that they felt could not be said during session.
• Ask interpreter about their impressions regarding client’s nonverbal messages.
• Arrange (if possible) for client to speak to same interpreter on subsequent visits.

Technology to the Rescue?

• While technologies aid in communicating with people speaking different languages, they are not perfect.
• "Lost in translation" issues regarding nuanced meaning and specific linguistic emphasis can occur.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) has improved translation tools, yet it's essential to understand their current capabilities and limitations.
• Language is deeply tied to culture, and automated tools may struggle with conveying cultural nuances accurately.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) may miss the context of a conversation, leading to potential misinterpretations or loss of specific meanings.
• Expressing emotions through language is intricate, and automated tools may not always capture the emotional tone intended.

Ethical Considerations

• Reliance on technology for translation might impact the depth of understanding and connection between the professional and client.
• Using technology raises ethical questions regarding data handling and storage.
• It's crucial to navigate the balance between efficiency and preserving the authenticity of human connection.

The Future of Technology in Communication

• Technology evolves rapidly – this is the worst AI and other technologies will ever be!
• Developers are continually working on refining translation tools to enhance accuracy and cultural sensitivity.
• While technology aids us, a human-centric approach in cross-cultural communication remains irreplaceable, especially in contexts where empathy and emotional understanding are paramount.
• Acknowledging current developments in translation tools helps us appreciate the richness of diverse communication.

Relevance to your Career

• You do not need to have the same cultural background as someone to be an effective helper.
• You do not need to master all the details of every culture of every person to be successful, but you do need to educate yourself about the cultural history, ideologies, rituals, identities etc. to show respect towards individuals as well as their collective backgrounds.
• Remain authentic – as an outsider to a particular cultural group, you may never fully understand what it means to belong to that group.
• Being reflective and ethical will help keep your focus on what you do/not fully understand.

Being the Change

• As a future helping professional, you will be in a privileged position to “be the change we want to see in the world”.
• You can make an important contribution to improving the lived experiences (and subsequently the health outcomes) of previously and currently disadvantaged groups.