On Thursday March 1, the Multicultural Services Committee participated in an Intercultural Communication Train-the-Trainer workshop held at the Burnaby Public Library – Bob Prittie branch. Jointly presented by Ravi Basi, Manager of Multicultural Services, Surrey Libraries and Wendy Jang, Coordinator of Multicultural and Chinese Services, the two workshop goals were to (1) provide a safe and non-judgmental environment for dynamic dialogue across cross-cultural topics and (2) to help staff build upon existing skills and learn new skills when interacting with multicultural communities.
In attendance we had six librarians representing Burnaby, Vancouver, West Vancouver, and North Vancouver Public Libraries, and myself, a current SLAIS student. A combined description of 2 activities – ‘What is culture?’ and a Photo Exercise – will hopefully provide a sense of how impactful it is to be having these discussions amongst colleagues.
I knew that culture is more than meets the eye. However, it was news to me that 90% of culture is ‘under the iceberg’ and includes some very nuanced characteristics like ‘attitude towards problem solving’ or ‘loyalties (towards friends, country etc).’ Those were some post-it examples of culture that I hadn’t necessarily thought about before. Following that, we formed pairs and discussed stereotypes, pre-conceived ideas, assumptions, and quick judgments through a very illuminating picture exercise. We invariably made short-sighted claims about what we could deduce from scenarios represented in photographs. The takeaway lesson here was that stereotyping really puts people into ‘freeze frames’ and I think the group consensus was that you never know where you’ll find undercover female police officers.
How does this connect to improving services for all patrons at the library? We can answer this question by going back to the workshop goals: keeping and open mind and empathizing will go a long way to helping us understand the diversity of patrons walking through library doors.
Written by ES