Notes From the Field : Learning Cultural Humility Through Critical Incidents and Central Challenges in Community-Based Participatory Research

Cultural humility is critical in the education of community development and planning graduate students because they often work with communities—geographic and/or identity based—where there is a power differential based on privileges of race, income, and education. Cultural humility requires commitment to ongoing self-reflection and self-critique, particularly identifying and examining one's own patterns of unintentional and intentional racism (Israel, Eng, Schulz, & Parker, 2005 Israel, B., Eng, E., Schulz, A. and Parker, E. 2005. Methods in community-based participatory research for health, San Francisco: Jossey Bass. [Google Scholar]; Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998 Tervalon, M. and Murray-Garcia, J. 1998. Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved, 9(2): 117–125. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). This article describes a 2-course sequence within a community development and planning graduate program that develops students ' cultural humility by integrating community-based participatory research (CBPR) and ongoing reflection. Recommendations for instruction and assessing graduate students ' development of cultural humility emerge from this analysis.