Two pieces of evidence that demonstrate knowledge, values, skills, and/or cognitive & affective processes in Competency 2: Engage Diversity and Difference in Practice:

- One from your practicum experience (identify learning activity(ies) that best exemplify the competency)

- One from Systemic-Oppression (5565)

A paragraph rationalization for each piece of evidence chosen. 

Competency 2: Engage Diversity and Difference in Practice

Social workers understand how diversity and difference characterize and shape the human experience and are critical to the formation of identity. The dimensions of diversity are understood as the intersectionality of multiple factors including but not limited to age, class, color, culture, disability and ability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, immigration status, marital status, political ideology, race, religion/spirituality, sex, sexual orientation, and tribal sovereign status. Social workers understand that, as a consequence of difference, a person’s life experiences may include oppression, poverty, marginalization, and alienation as well as privilege, power, and acclaim. Social workers also understand the forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination and recognize the extent to which a culture’s structures and values, including social, economic, political, and cultural exclusions,  may oppress, marginalize, alienate, or create privilege and power.

Social workers:

• apply and communicate understanding of the importance of diversity and difference in shaping life experiences in practice at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels;
• present themselves as learners and engage clients and constituencies as experts of their own experiences; and
• apply self-awareness and self-regulation to manage the influence of personal biases and values in working with diverse clients and constituencies.

Practicum Example

One of the best examples of engaging diversity and differences at my practicum would be the program manager’s focus and attention on having staff from every walk of life, that reflects the population we serve. She works hard to hire staff that can relate to our clients and are from a variety of backgrounds. The majority of the staff are people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. The program manager hires staff of all ages, but all of the staff over the age of 35 have left fairly soon after starting. Staff put a lot of effort into promoting a safe environment that places importance on everyone, staff and clients, feeling comfortable to be who they are. It’s the first organization I have worked with that has intentionally emphasized having a diverse staff like this. 

Systemic Oppression (5565) Example

Example: "This is where I stand on systemic oppression and social & economic justice": How knowledgeable am I?   Where do my beliefs come from?  Things I have consciously done to develop my standpoint on social and economic justice and systemic-oppression, things I might have learned in "the school of hard knocks"? A good way to structure your assignment would be in the form of a genogram, particularly the cultural genogram.  Hopefully you have already covered that in HBSE I.  Cultural Genogram: https://www.slideshare.net/JaneGilgun/doing-a-cultural-genogramLinks to an external site.Links to an external site. Basically this is the story of you.   Reflect on yourself, your person experiences and the experiences of your predecessors and make an honest effort to articulate how all that has informed who you are today and you will do fine with this assignment

I don’t have any of my past assignments for this class, as I took it a year ago, but I was able to get a hold of the syllabus. I remember writing this assignment but not what I actually wrote. I think this paper is a cool opportunity to kind of put your views and where they come from under a microscope and really dive into how you see the world and why you see it that way. Self-reflection is one of the biggest tools social workers have to check-in with themselves and think about their privileges and differences from others and how these affect our work and how we interact with clients.