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.

Welcome to the second module of Emerging Minds’ series for leaders focusing on culturally reflective practice with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, families and communities. In this module, we will discuss the importance of regularly examining your own thoughts, values and beliefs, and encouraging those within your team to do the same.

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?

Welcome to the third module of Emerging Minds’ series for leaders focusing on culturally reflective practice with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, families and communities. In this module, we will talk about times when we may feel uncomfortable engaging with families from a culture different to our own.

When we are working with families from a different culture to our own, there may be times when it feels uncomfortable. This could be due to language barriers, different ways being or differences in how we express ourselves.

While you should always feel safe in your practice, it’s important to remember that occasional feelings of discomfort are both normal and OK. However, it is also important to be aware of your discomfort and to understand what may be triggering your responses.

The more you interact and build relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families, the more comfortable you will be with any differences that arise. Cultural competency starts by accepting our experiences of difference – and the discomfort that comes with them – in order to learn something new.¹ What you learn in this process will enrich your ability to connect with all families.

Watch the following video (4 minutes, 1 second) in which cultural consultant Dana Shen explores discomfort in practice.

Strategies to support learning

Consider a past or current experience of being uncomfortable. How can you:

• explore these reactions with your team, being patient with the feelings of not understanding and with the discomfort of not knowing?
• listen deeply, look for direction and ask what is expected if you are interested and want to learn?
• notice the circumstances that may have caused resistance and be curious about why these circumstances might have triggered that reaction?

Welcome to the fourth module of Emerging Minds’ series for leaders focusing on culturally reflective practice with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, families and communities. This module will explore how to understand your role in engaging in culturally reflective practice.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people live their culture; they experience the world as an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person and know their communities best. Therefore, a good ally appreciates their need to make decisions about the things impacting them. An example of this could be asking parents if you are the right person to support them, rather than making this decision yourself.¹

On a deeper level, non-Indigenous practitioners are part of a system that has left significant, lasting scars on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, causing many to feel wary of contact with government and community services. The resulting barrier is complex, difficult to navigate, and takes time to overcome.

Non-Indigenous practitioners providing care or support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families need to engage in a continuous process of self-reflection. They can engage in this process through learning, listening and building relationships, and by considering the role they play as an ally for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Allyship requires non-Indigenous practitioners to constantly cast a critical eye on themselves.²

Self-awareness is an essential element of providing safety in a service, program or practice setting.

Self-reflective practice is vital to help practitioners understand how they might be perceived by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. This involves querying your role and relationship with the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person you are working with, as well as the way you view your own and others’ expertise.

The use of ‘expertise’ can be an obstacle when it comes to working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families. It can reinforce a history of marginalisation and can deny Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the opportunity to tell their stories. Without an understanding of the ways expertise can create barriers, it may not be possible for you to develop relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.

Strategies to support learning

• Know what space you are taking up and when to step back. Always remember that you are in community as a guest, in a supportive role.
• Always remember these histories come from hundreds of years of ongoing trauma and discrimination, so be mindful in your enquiry.
• When supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, parents or families, think of it like an ongoing self-check-in about the purpose and context for engagements.

Welcome to the fifth module of Emerging Minds’ series for leaders focusing on culturally reflective practice with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, families and communities. This module is about seeking knowledge and context when considering strategies to engage with in practice.

While many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are willing to share knowledge about their culture and history, it is important for non-Indigenous practitioners to take responsibility for their own learning. It is also important for practitioners to understand that some history can be highly traumatising to recount, and some knowledge cannot be shared for various cultural reasons. In your role as a leader, you can encourage your team to be mindful of developing their learning carefully and respectfully with these things in mind.

The strategies that non-Indigenous practitioners use to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families need to consider the diversity of context for that family’s unique experiences, including their culture, family processes, parenting practices and community setting. There isn’t one story when working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families; every community and individual has a different history and context. As such, every relationship practitioners develop will need a different approach. It is, therefore, essential for you and your team to take on a ‘learner’ stance and embed cultural curiosity into your interactions with children and families.

Strategies to support learning

• Provide a foundation for your interactions by learning about the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in your area. Find out more about their local historical and cultural context, as well as their current experiences.
• Who are the Traditional Owners and Elders of the Land/s you are on?
• How can you build strong relationships within ACCHOs to develop partnerships?
• How can you learn about your local Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander community’s historical and cultural context and experiences?
• Remember that it is not the responsibility of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to educate you; it is important for you to develop
  your own understandings and strategies.

Welcome to the final module of Emerging Minds’ series for leaders focusing on culturally reflective practice with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, families and communities. This module will explore the understandings that inform our curiosity.

As a practitioner, it is important to understand and be curious about why you are asking certain questions and what knowledge base they are coming from. Being curious about which knowledge base or system your enquiries are coming from will help you frame questions from a different perspective. The way you think and ask questions is unconsciously based on your cultural lens. Consider your curiosity as being embedded within cultural and sociopolitical constructs that are deeply ingrained and maintained by Western systems and society. Within this context, curiosity must unintentionally work against cultural understandings that are not aligned with the dominant culture.¹

Being aware of, reflecting on and actively addressing your unconscious bias, worldviews, beliefs, values and assumptions can help you to connect and build relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families on a deeper level.

To gain a balanced understanding of the families you support, you need to consider the subtle aspects of your curiosity alongside those that are invisible yet present. When working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, focus on shaping your enquiries to intentionally prioritise and listen for what is unseen, unasked or unexplored. This can help to support a deeper level of understanding of their needs and complexities.

Watch the following video (2 minutes, 16 seconds) as cultural consultant Dana Shen explores the importance of cultural curiosity in conversations.

In your role as a leader, you can encourage continued culturally reflective practice through supervision and ongoing learning, working alongside Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, and actively addressing issues as they arise.

Strategies to support learning

• Draw on the National Strategic Framework for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ Mental Health and Social and Emotional
  Wellbeing 2017–2023.
• Complete Supporting the mental health of children in out-of-home care course from Emerging Minds.
• Connect with local Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations (ACCHOs) or groups of Elders.
• Explore the SNAICC website – a valuable resource for information about child protection and cultural ways of being for Aboriginal children.