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Intercultural Practice and Equity · Foundations
How to pick something worth learning from the work already in front of you, without rating yourself or anyone else.
40–45 minutes · 4 lessons · Voluntary learning
Why choosing what to learn from a self-rating produces a number instead of a next step, and what this curriculum asks you to use instead.
Decisions you shape, moments that did not land, questions you keep deferring, and people your process rarely hears from. Any one of them beats a quiz.
A focus that is too big never starts. Four tests that turn an interest into something reachable, and three kinds of focus worth setting aside.
Five lines you write for yourself: the work, the question, the first step, the expertise you are missing and how it is paid for, and the date you will look again.
Walk the four doorways once, narrow the strongest candidate until it names one document, decision or meeting, and write your intention in five lines with a date to look at it again.
Most learning programs start by asking you to rate yourself. This one does not, and this module explains why. A rating gives you a number on somebody else's scale. A focus gives you a piece of work to look at, a question with an answer in it, and a first step inside your own authority. You will practice finding a focus through four doorways into work you already do, narrowing it until it fits an actual month, and writing a private learning intention in five lines. Nothing you write is collected, counted, compared or reported. You can start anywhere in this curriculum, take modules out of order, change your mind, and come back.
A rating tells you where you placed yourself on somebody else's scale. A focus tells you what you will look at, in which piece of work, and when.
Keep the four doorways, the four tests and the five lines in reach while you decide where to start in this curriculum, or where to go next after a module.
Walk the four doorways, narrow the strongest candidate until it names one document or decision, and write your five lines with a date to look at them again.
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.
The design reference for this curriculum: learner choice, multiple ways to engage, plain language, and no forced disclosure or self-rating. It is the basis for letting staff enter anywhere and choose their own focus.
Source of the intercultural development continuum named in Lesson 1 — denial, polarization, minimization, acceptance, adaptation, integration. The assessment itself is licensed and administered by qualified administrators; this program uses the continuum to design content and describe organizational movement, never as a score, label or record about any person.
The department's own guidance on first-read understanding, familiar terms and writing suited to the reader; used here as the standard a staff member can test a notice or instruction sheet against once a focus attaches to one.
Federal plain-language guidelines and techniques, including testing documents with the people who have to use them — the practical method behind the narrowing examples in Lesson 3.
Minnesota's advisory council on disability policy, accessibility and rights, and a public starting point for staff whose focus turns out to concern accessibility obligations rather than optional practice.
The department's public overview of disability services and supports; useful for locating which program, notice or process a candidate focus actually belongs to.
National standards for culturally and linguistically appropriate services, including the expectation that organizations partner with the communities they serve in designing and evaluating services — the basis for paying advisors rather than consulting them for free.
International accessibility standards and introductions, including guidance on involving people with disabilities early in design rather than reviewing a finished draft.