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Take a research-based look at cultural competency to expand your understanding. What Competence? Openness, respect, curiosity, awareness, desire, evaluation, strategies, flexibility--all of these are characteristics that culturally competent people have, researchers say. competence is a highly developed ability to understand and respect cultural differences and to address issues of disparity among diverse populations competently, as described by Patricia Overall in her article Cultural Competence: A Conceptual Framework for Library and Information Science Professionals. competence encompasses both an intrinsic personal desire to know others and a behavioral change to make it happen. It built by reflecting, working, and developing cultural awareness toward many facets of culture, including, but not limited to, ethnicity/race, sexuality, gender, socioeconomics, religion, disability, language, and literacy. Being able to confront and accept one's cultural background and set of prejudices will allow one to be able to understand, relate, and respond to others better. Why Competence Important for Library Staff? Even though we like to think that libraries are the epitome of democracy and equality, they are still the product of their social and political environment, which set up by those in power. This has sustained and reaffirmed inequities of power. We can learn from Solange Lopes-Murphy and Christopher Murphy's study, The Influence of Cross-Cultural Experiences and Location on Teachers' Perceptions of Competence, that teachers must understand their students and their cultures, develop relationships and connect with their students, and provide them with the educational experiences they need. Developing cultural competence an imperative to reach these goals. Current library administrations, whether at the local level in each library all the way to the national level with LIS programs and the ALA, need to make cultural competence a cornerstone of their staff's training, and look at their policies so that they become more inclusive. According to the most current data (ALA Diversity Count vs. U.S. Census), library staff currently does not accurately reflect the ethnic diversity of the American population. How can libraries be a real agent of change unless LIS programs recruit and retain diverse students, and library administrations hire them? Only then will they have an active part in changing libraries to become more inclusive. While recruitment efforts have been made, retaining diverse students remains a problem. Lately, studies have been trying to understand the roots of this problem in order to remedy them, and to that effect, culturally responsive pedagogy seems to be undergoing a revival. How Competence Developed? Overall's cultural competence framework includes a scale, starting from cultural incapacity, to cultural blindness and lack of cultural competence, moving on to some or limited cultural competence, cultural competence, all the way to cultural proficiency.Thus, cultural competence a set of skills acquired during a multistep process: 1. Developing a heightened awareness of one's own culture and values, and how they drive one's behaviors. In the library world, realizing that the Dewey Decimal Classification System extremely Western centric can be our first step toward cultural competence. Just look at the 200 class, which gives so much room to Christianity and so little to other religions. So, let's first study our collections critically. A homogenous collection preserves a dominant culture's perspective that very few nondominant individuals have made worthwhile contributions in their discipline. This reinforces certain patrons' feelings of cultural dominance, all the while creating a culturally passive-aggressive message to underrepresented patrons. …
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