Title: Beyond Awareness and Education: Innovations in Diversity and Multicultural Training to Create Individual Behavior Change and Advance Equity and Inclusion
Presenters:
Shamaila Khan, Ph.D. - Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology (CMTP)
Martha Vibbert, Ph.D. - Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology (CMTP)
Olivia Moorehead-Slaughter, Ph.D. - Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology (CMTP)
Since 1972, The Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology (CMTP), at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), has hosted an APA-accredited clinical internship program uniquely dedicated to training racial/ethnic minority and other cross-culturally oriented psychologists to work with underserved and racially/ethnically diverse populations. BMC is a national leader in advancing technology, training, and community innovations to promote highest quality access and care for urban, low-income patients, and CMTP benefits directly from the hospital’s mission to actively address racism, language barriers, and social determinants of health in designing and delivering ‘exceptional care without exception.’ CMTP’s related mission for the past 47 years has been to place the ideals and practice of multicultural humility, aspiration towards multicultural competence, and action for social justice at the very core of psychology training. See CMTP’s defining diversity philosophy at t http://www.cmmh-cmtp.org/cmtpposition.php. We have three goals for our presentation:
1) To share training curricula and methodology that CMTP psychology faculty and interns have jointly evolved and refined over the course of our history to operationalize core diversity practice ideals for multicultural competence. Our trauma-informed curricula offers trainees access to diverse cultural exposures and explorations within protected environments that encourage risk-taking and self-care. We use a variety of individual and group exercises to enhance self-reflection and empathic patient interventions; and we build trainees’ facility with interpersonal skills to address phenomena such as implicit biases, structural inequality, racial/gender/spiritual identity development, social exclusion, and power differentials. Our methods include experiential routines, classroom activities, and clinical training exposures that challenge trainees to examine their patients’ and their own lives with increasing perspective and sophistication. These methods include ‘identity dialogues;’ public ‘autobiography;’ behavioral role modeling; and intra and intercultural mentorship.
2) We also plan to share CMTP’s current project to implement and test a new ‘2.0’ diversity training curricula for use with other trainee programs at our institution. This project is designed to move beyond the standard (and largely outgrown) outcome expectations of ‘awareness and education’ to instead tackle the goal of changing individual behavior in order to enhance patient care and promote institutional equity. One of the key challenges of this work is how to rigorously measure personal and institutional change, and how to engage in rapid cycle implementation and learning to iterate and pilot new strategies. We intend to invite our audience to collaborate in our process and to lay a foundation for future dialogue among participants.
3) Finally, we will illustrate specific examples of mentorship --- a key tool for establishing ‘action for social justice’ as a pillar of trainees’ future professional lives. CMTP faculty have made profound career investments in social engagement and social justice action. By deliberately exposing trainees to these activities and inviting them to collaborate on these projects, we believe that we fundamentally transform the goals of professional training. Our diversity and inclusion philosophy holds that a multiculturally competent psychologist must be well-versed in multicultural professional practice and must be an agent of social change.
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to identify and explain the significance of having training curricula that extend beyond the knowledge and awareness models of multiculturalism to experiential ones incorporating individual and group exercises and processing.
- Participants will be able to identify and describe the role that mentorship can play in addition to that of supervision, particularly in the context of diversity and inclusion factors when training students and mentees.
- Participants will be able to demonstrate the ways in which training programs can include notions of social justice and social action/engagement in their curricula and how trainees can be agents of social change.
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