Engaging Colleagues: Developing a Faculty Seminar on Multicultural Practice

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Engaging ColleaguesDeveloping a Faculty
Seminar on Multicultural Practice

• Kimberlyn Leary, Ph.D., ABPP

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Roadmap

• Present the methodology on developing a faculty
  seminar
• Describe goal
• Assisting colleagues with differing levels of
  expertise to learn with and from one another
• Developing specific seminars

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Cambridge Health Alliance

• 3 hospitals and 23 neighborhood sites
• CHA mission To deliver excellence in public
  sector health care
• Serve, in particular, the medically indigent,
  refugee, immigrant and low income population
• Severe and persistent forms of mental illness
• Harvard teaching hospital but funded through a
  mix of payers

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• Psychiatry is the largest department
• Training programs in adult child psychiatry,
  nursing, social work and psychology
• Division of Psychology
• APA-approved internship program (8), postdoctoral
  fellowship (14) practicum trainees (18)

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• Approximately 35 core faculty 200 affiliated
  supervisors
• Large, distributed system
• Working under pressured conditions
• High productivity expectations
• Dearth of resources (especially time)

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• Faculty and institution understand themselves to
  stand for the value of inclusive practice
• Diverse community with cultural-linguistic
  specialty clinics, a large interpreter service
  and many community-based links

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• Ironically, in such a situation can be difficult
  for concerns about multicultural sensitivity and
  practice to be be raised
• Problems, in fact, can sometimes prove a
  defensive reaction because the institutions
  identity is challenged

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Challenges

• How to engage faculty in a busy public sector
  facility working with limited resources?
• How to create a learning venue in the context of
  considerable variation in expertise?
• e.g. younger faculty, recently graduated, with
  state of the art knowledge about
  culturally-sensitive practice, multi-cultural
  issues and cross-cultural psychotherapy
• Senior faculty whose training did not include
  this focus
• How to make it possible for faculty to examine
  extant practices and minimize identity threat?

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• Faculty seminar was scheduled into the regular
  staff meeting time
• One time in the hospital schedule where the core
  faculty of Psychology come together
• Pre-planning for this meeting over email

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Developing a mission statement

• To develop our ability to teach and supervise
  psychologists-in-training
• To enhance our ability to collaborate as
  colleagues
• To examine how race, culture, class and other
  identity parameters affect our professional
  practice at Cambridge Health Alliance

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• To update our knowledge of the relevant
  literature and coordinate our efforts with work
  trainees are doing in their seminars
• Desire for this seminar to have experiential
  component to minimize intellectualism and
  maximize awareness of our feelings and their
  impact on the work we do

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• Recruited faculty to chair individual sessions on
  topics of their own choosing
• Each facilitator was asked to choose exercises,
  readings, etc. and to lead the session
• All facilitators subsequently wrote a teaching
  note
• Collated these notes into an internal curriculum

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Seminar Topics

• Engaging with Identity-Bases Experience Three
  Things Exercise
• Personal Reactions to Awareness of Difference
  Early Memories of Race
• Acculturation A Discussion of Multiple Culture
  Contact and Change
• Use of Mental Health Testing in Eugenics,
  Immigration and Race
• Considering Transgender Issues in Training and
  Supervision

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Goals accomplished

• Faculty ownership of their own learning
• Draw on and develop expertise
• End product included a curriculum package each
  could use as s/he wished