Topic 7: Demonstrating his/her ability to work with people from other cultures.

Biniecki and Kang (2014) indicates that for adult educators who are in need of practical guidance when working with culturally diverse populations, exploring adult learning through the lens of culture offers the potential to help them understand: ​

(1)the necessity of critically examining one’s own and the others’ cultural stories (Clover, 2010; Rose-Cohen, 2004; Taylor, 2006;), ​

(2)which sociocultural approaches are the most appropriate to facilitate or guide adult learning (Dass-Brailsford & Serrano, 2010; Sparks, 2002); ​

(3) the importance of developing and maintaining a continuous dialog between one’s own culture and others’ cultures to assure the success of adult learning [3].​

Regardless of which strategies employed to improve cultural awareness and competency of adult students, the most important to adult educators is the ability to critically reflect on their identity and cultural perspectives and be well aware of the associated limitations to their teaching practices. ​

Critical self-reflection is seen as a process of spiritual growth and also a main phase to transformative [3].​

​Critical self-reflection is important for responsive adult educators to develop a positive cultural identity and a precondition to fairly conduct culture related learning activities without allowing the dominant culture to dismiss minority.​

For this, adult educators not only need to be creative and flexible with their instruction, but also need to take a holistic approach to improve cultural awareness and competency of adult students. ​

If  the content area is less culture focused, Barber (2003) and Daniels (2003) suggest incorporating collaboration-based teamwork into the curriculum to minimize possible negative impacts of culture. Most students are far more comfortable​

talking to a few classmates at the same time than interacting with the entire class. Being engaged in dialog with a few classmates, individual learners have sufficient time to get to know each other at a personal level, which helps build a learning tie that later may become very important to support learning. The strong presence of this tie makes learners willingto tolerate differences existing within the group to avoid embarrassment[3]​