The Model for Teachers
The Purnell Model is used in many different professions and organizations, but it is most associated with the healthcare profession and nurses. However, teachers can use the tenets of cultural competency in their classrooms as well.
Cultural competence is important for those in the healthcare profession, so that they understand and respect the cultural differences of their patients, so that they don't allow their own personal beliefs to interfere with the level of care they give to those they treat. Teachers, too, need to be culturally sensitive to their students to give them the best level of education possible and free from bias.
Teachers can also assist their students in their own process of becoming culturally aware and competent by modeling. Cultural awareness is understanding your own thoughts, feelings, and bias, so that you are aware of how they affect your interactions with others.
Teachers should be aware of their own feelings, so as not to transmit any bias to their students. As students make their own way through the Purnell Model, teachers play an important role in aiding this process, but only if they are culturally aware themselves.
Cultural Sensitivity and Stereotyping
Cultural sensitivity and stereotyping are both parts of the Purnell Model. Cultural sensitivity is both verbal and nonverbal language that exhibits a person's appreciation and understanding for the diversity of another person. Stereotyping is when we use our experiences with diverse populations to develop prejudices and cultural insensitivity.
Studies completed on the Purnell Model and healthcare professionals have shown that stereotyping and prejudice lead to differences in the levels of care that patients receive. Teachers should be aware of this danger as well in their classrooms when their students are from diverse communities.
When teachers fail to see beyond their own stereotypes of the cultural heritage of a student, they do that student a disservice, as well as their own selves. Teachers should strive to not only become culturally competent, but to assist their students to become culturally competent as well. By recognizing instances of stereotyping and cultural insensitivity in themselves, teachers can be a helpful tool in helping their students do the same.
Lesson Summary
The Purnell Model for Cultural Competence is a sequence of circles or rings that each contain the development of awareness of culture, and how it continues to expand from the person, to the family, to the community, and finally, to the global community.
This model can be used by teachers in the same ways in which it is used for healthcare professionals: to assist them in giving the best education possible to a diverse classroom free from prejudice and cultural bias. Teachers interested in using the Purnell Model in their classrooms can keep the following in mind:
- Cultural competence is understanding not only your own beliefs and values, but those of students from diverse backgrounds.
- Cultural awareness is identifying one's own biases and prejudices, so that they can be avoided when dealing with their students who are culturally different.
- Cultural sensitivity is identifying one's own verbal and nonverbal language, and how it can transmit bias and prejudice or cultural awareness with their students.
