Question
How can supervisors effectively integrate cultural competency into their supervision practices beyond just gaining knowledge about different cultures?
Answer
While knowledge about different cultures is important, it's equally vital to focus on awareness, attitudes, and skills. Overemphasizing knowledge can lead to oversimplification and stereotyping. Supervisors should prioritize self-reflection, exploring their own biases, strengths, and growth areas. Focusing on the processes within the supervisory relationship, ensuring relational safety, and addressing parallel processes between the client-therapist and supervisor-supervisee dynamics are essential. Utilizing frameworks like the multidimensional ecological comparative approach (MECCA) or the integrated supervision framework can help. Techniques such as the worldview genogram, which explores three generations of cultural influences, and addressing the addressing framework, which examines privileges and oppressions related to various identities, can also be highly effective. Moreover, supervisors should model self-disclosure appropriately, advocate for their trainees within the system, and encourage trainees to advocate for their clients, all while maintaining cultural humility and ethical curiosity.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, ‘Principles and Practices in Culturally Competent Supervision,’ presented by Giselle Levin, PsyD
