Minnesota Department of Human ServicesDisability Services DivisionOne DHS People, Access and Culture
View
One DHSOne DSD
Start with shared knowledge, tools, and support routes for work across DHS.
← Learning and resources

Curriculum I · Intercultural

Intercultural Competence without a Score

UNESCO, Bennett, and the continuum are maps. A quiz in this hub is not.

30–40 minutes · 4 lessons · Voluntary learning

Four colleagues talk in a hallway with coffee.

Course outline

  1. Maps, not badges

    You already have Minimization and Acceptance. This is why those maps exist — and where they stop.

    7 minutes

  2. What these maps are not

    Not race. Not a people. Not a pass on the toolkit.

    6 minutes

  3. How to use a map on an ordinary workday

    Notice the orientation in the process — not in a colleague’s character.

    6 minutes

  4. Next on this spine

    Conflict styles, critical incidents, humility vs. checklist — still no score.

    4 minutes
Share this course

What you’ll be able to do

Explore and practice

  • Identify how intercultural competence without a score affects a DHS decision, service, or workplace process.
  • Use the course concepts and evidence to examine one live policy, form, meeting, service, hire, budget, or engagement plan.
  • Choose and document one defensible change, the person who owns it, and the date the team will review it.

What you can take into your work

  • Make and reconsider scenario decisions without being assigned a score.
  • Complete the practical activities and record a one-minute transfer commitment.
  • Apply the learning to a live work object in the Equity Analysis Toolkit.

Bring one live work object into the application workspace. Name who it was built for, who may carry the burden, and one change or formal escalation.

Listen to the introduction

Read the introduction

Intercultural competence is a map, not a badge. UNESCO, Bennett, the continuum you already met — useful. A quiz in this hub is not. This course is what those maps are, what they are not, and how Minimization still hides who a process was built for. Voluntary. You will not be scored. The IDI stays where it already lives.

Competence Map Job Aid

Maps for the process. No quiz. Race is not “culture.”
You can be culturally aware and still ship an English-only form.

Use this aid while applying Intercultural Competence without a Score to a live DHS work object.

  • You can be culturally aware and still ship an English-only form.
  • Use the relevant formal door when a right, complaint, labor process, safety duty, or Tribal consultation is involved.

Bring one live work object into the application workspace. Name who it was built for, who may carry the burden, and one change or formal escalation.

Use

  • Orientation of the process, not the person.
  • Minimization / Polarization / Acceptance / Adaptation as work habits.

Do not

  • Homemade IDI.
  • A stage in a performance review.
  • Collapse race into culture.

Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.

Sources and further reading

All research and sources across the program