Supporting culturally reflective practice

Download printable PDF of Module 1: Culturally reflective practice.

Some practitioners may find working with families across different cultural groups challenging. We all come with our own culture, beliefs and values that may impact on our ability to build connections and engagement when working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners are a rich source of information and know their communities best. However, being the go-to person for any questions regarding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures means they bear a significant cultural load and are often overloaded. It is important to be mindful of this burden and, wherever possible, try to be responsible for your own learning. As a leader, you are essential in developing and prioritising culturally responsive practices for both yourself and your team, as well as emphasising that this work is everyone’s business.

By adopting a decolonising approach in practice, your team can enhance their ability to build relationships and trust with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. As you engage with this series, we encourage you to explore how you can support this work as a leader.

We ask you to think about how you can encourage practitioners in your team to:

• consistently and continually reflect on their own values, beliefs and ideas
• consider how these values, beliefs and ideas might get in the way of communicating and engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and communities.

Watch the following video (1 minute, 38 seconds) and listen as Shirley Young, an Aboriginal woman descending from the Nukunu people and a cultural consultant, talks about the importance of culturally informed reflective practice.

Engaging in culturally reflective practice is crucial to ensure the ways you work with people across cultures is respectful, promotes cultural security and achieves improved mental health and social and emotional wellbeing outcomes.

We encourage you to explore the following principles as you engage with this series:

• Regularly examining your own thoughts, values and beliefs
• Understanding your own emotional responses in your engagements with families
• Understanding and defining roles
• Seeking knowledge and understanding context for families
• Expressing cultural curiosity in conversations and understanding your line of enquiry.

Strategies to support learning

• Build your team’s culturally reflective practice by being interested and prioritising conversations centred around these principles.

Download printable PDF of Module 2: Regularly examining your own thoughts, values and beliefs.

Everyone has a culture. Being human implies being embedded in a cultural matrix in which characteristics and identities interact and inform experiences of the world.¹

Unconscious bias, or the unintentional prejudices we all come with, tends to inform our judgements and decision-making processes. Even the most open-minded people can have underlying, unconscious beliefs or assumptions that trigger automatic judgements about other people or groups when left unchecked.²

Most practitioners and leaders working with children and families understand that there are injustices in the world. A good leader cannot ignore the fact that injustices in the world will equate to injustices in practice.

No one leaves their biases and assumptions at home when they come to work. While you cannot change people’s beliefs, as a leader you can reflect on their behaviour in practice. It demands a paradigm shift and openness to different ways of thinking and doing things; it also requires intentionality.³

It is important to understand the way your personal biases influence you and the impact they have on your attitudes. Personal biases affect the type of communication we have with others. As such, bias should be recognised as a determining factor in respectful interactions.

Watch the following video (2 minutes, 56 seconds) as Darryl Bingapore, a Ngarrindjeri Community member, and Uncle Clyde Rigney Senior, a Ngarrindjeri Elder, share some tips for practitioners.

Strategies to support learning

As a leader, consider how you can explore personal biases. It could be through:

• demonstrating the competencies that you would like to build in your team
• making space for conversations where you can explore the values, ideas and beliefs that your team come with
• noticing the nuances of difference between members of the team and developing a language to help navigate them.

Thinking about your own leadership and team, which of these activities do you currently engage in? How might you consider these ideas in your work in future?

References

1. Botelho, M. J., & Lima, C. A. (2020). From cultural competence to cultural respect: A critical review of six models. Journal of Nursing Education, 59(6), 311–318.
2. Seven Dimensions. (2024). 4 lessons about inclusion and unconscious bias [Video recording].
3. Gordon, S. A. (2021). Unbias: Addressing unconscious bias at work. Wiley.