I was going through old notebooks and came across some notes from a Cultural Competencies workshop I attended a few years ago. It was presented by the SF Asian Women’s Shelter and Luna Dance Institute.

These notes are by no means comprehensive, just a couple of salient points that I jotted down / walked away with from the workshop.

Culture
- The Mission of the Asian Women’s Shelter is to increase wellness for immigrant families.
- Culture matters and it’s complicated.
- All cultures are contradictory.
- Everyone is multifaceted.
- Culture is inextricably linked to social dynamics, equality, power, and oppression.
- We need a fuller more comprehensive definition of culture.
- Cultural identities are multifaceted.
- There are certain spaces in which the cultures that are allowed in are very limited.
- So much is going on in someone that we don’t know until we ask about it.
- Context plays a HUGE role when interpreting culture.
- Cultural misinformation = Stereotype -> group -> individual.
- Making assumptions is completely human BUT, do we slow ourselves down and not act on them?
- A good exercise: force yourself to find the similarities and differences in any given situation.

Dance
- An important question: How do we help people heal, right now, together? In this room? In this space?
- You have to be in the moment, problem solving together. People need to focus on a task at hand, in the present.
- If you have a translator, keep students moving while the translator is translating.
- Dance is not a universal language.
- In dance activities, you want to create an opportunity for everyone to make their mark in the space.
- Structure is is often a way for beginning teachers to handle classroom management.