Expanding Conversations About Cultural Responsiveness in Supervision

Abstract

Culturally responsive therapy and supervision support openness and space for cross-cultural conversations and understanding, and thus, also supports a supervision environment of cultural safety. When I, as the supervisor role model, demonstrate in my supervision cultural responsiveness towards supervisees and their clients, I help create a sense of emotional space, openness, and respectful curiosity to fully understand the cultural and contextual experiences of my supervisees and their clients. This, I believe, enhances a sense of cultural safety in supervision, which then also impacts the cultural safety of my supervisee's work with their clients. In this chapter, I will illustrate how I use the common factors lens, combined with foundational couple and family therapy techniques such as the genogram and cultural genogram and the post-modern M.E.C.A framework. I believe that integrating the common factors lens with the genogram and MECA can promote cultivation of and expand culturally responsive conversations for supervisees in the supervision process as well as with clients in the therapy setting. Given that attunement to client and therapist factors is considered the hallmark of effective therapy models, clinical tools such as the Cultural Genogram and Falicov's multidimensional, ecosystemic, comparative approach (MECA) can be used in clinical supervision to understand the lived realities of therapists and clients and their diverse social locations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)