Cultural competency training for the social service professions: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Social justice movements have sought public awareness and positive change for marginalized communities, including the intersection of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and disabled students. Despite significant strides made to decrease the inequities experienced by marginalized communities, gaps still exist. Increasingly, the fields of special education and related services (e.g., social services providers who support disabled students in schools) have been encouraging and requiring their practitioners to be taught culturally relevant content, such as cultural competency. Despite the push to incorporate cultural competency training, no systematic approach to providing this training has been identified. The current systematic literature review was conducted to identify common practices for training cultural competency within social service professions. A search across five databases yielded 53 studies that met inclusion criteria. The results demonstrate that cultural competency content and knowledge is taught and measured using a variety of methods and assessments; cultural competency was most often taught within academic programs and assessed using the Multicultural Counseling Inventory. This review contains a variety of methods that have been shown to teach cultural competency and thus can be used by educational programs and organizations across the social service professions to aid in creating trainings for their practitioners.