Working with Diversity in Youth and Community Work

Sangeeta Soni

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781844452989
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781844457809
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This book focuses on the nature of cross-cultural practice, an inevitable aspect of working as a youth and community worker in multicultural Britain today. It enables students to understand how cross-cultural dynamics can set the tone of their relationships with their clients and helps them to understand how individual action and some processes in society can contribute to the marginalisation of others. This book looks at the processes involved in the everyday relationships forged through practice and how these can inadvertently influence the dynamics of oppression through lack of self-awareness or lack of awareness of ?others? in society.

Chapter 1

Identity and culture

Achieving your Youth and Community Work degree The Professional and National Occupational Standards for Youth Work covered by this chapter are: 1.1.1 Enable young people to use their learning to enhance their future development 1.3.1 Facilitate young people’s exploration of their values and beliefs 1.3.3 Enable young people to representthemselves and their peer group 2.3.1 Develop a culture and systems that promote equality and value diversity 5.1.1 Work as an effective and reflective practitioner

Introduction

This chapter explores definitions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ and enables students to think about what is important to them with regard to their own identity and culture.

The aim is for you to be more self-aware of the many influences in your life so that you can be more self-aware of the impact that you have when you intervene in the lives of others as youth and community workers. Essentially by understanding yourself more fully, and by understanding how others may perceive you, you become more skilled in understanding what is important in the lives of others with whom you work. This is at the heart of good youth and community work. The ultimate aim is, therefore, to better understand yourself and others (especially those different from you). However, this seems to be something that we struggle with.

As Rogers and Stevens (1967, page 93) point out:

It is not surprising that we shy away from true understanding. If I am truly open to the way life is experienced by another person – if I can take his world into mine – then I run the risk of seeing life his way, of being changed myself. So we tend to view this other person’s world only in our terms, not in his. We analyse it and evaluate it. We do not understand it.

Good youth and community work demands that we both understand ourselves and how we impact on others, including those we are engaged to work with. Since no one person is the same as another and since the tapestry of life in fact ensures that diversity abounds in all its glory around us, it is inevitable that our encounters with others, personally and professionally, are fundamentally encounters with difference, with diversity. This chapter begins the journey of understanding these encounters.

The importance of identity

Identity is very important because at its simplest, it is about how a person understands themselves and how they make sense of their relationships with other people and with society in general. Therefore, the concept of identity encapsulates a sense of one’s individuality while at the same time recognising the need for the individual’s connections with others around himself/herself. As Woodward (1997, page 1) suggests, ‘Identity gives us a location in the world and presents the link between us and the society in which we live’. Woodward (1997, page 1) also says:

Identity gives us an idea of who we are and how we relate to others and to the world in which we live’.

The first of the following two activities will help you think about your relationship with others and help make some sense of how you feel about yourself and about these relationships. The second will help you think about and record key events/activities or people that have influenced and helped shape your identity.

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ACTIVITY 1.1

First, complete the sentences listed under the exercise titled ‘Me’. Try and do this as instinctively as possible by writing the most important or first thoughts that come to mind when completing the sentences.

After you have completed the exercise ‘Me’, go on to think about and complete the table titled ‘Identity Influences Timeline’.

‘Me’

As a child I...

As a son/daughter I...

As a friend I...

As a youth I...

As a man/woman I would...

As a man/woman I could...

As a man/woman I need...

As a man/woman I should...

As a man/woman I might...

As a son/daughter I...

On the inside I feel...

On the outside I feel...

When I look at my life I...

Who I was is...

Who I am is...

Who I want to be is...

What I want in life is...

What I need right now is...

As a person I...

Identity Influences Timeline
Events and people who have influenced/impacted me

It is important that you complete this exercise on your own, but then you may want to share it with one other person or with a small group.

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These exercises can help an individual appreciate the importance of particular relationships and also help map the key events and people that have helped shape an individual’s present identity. The second exercise particularly helps illustrate how both people and events can help shape who we are and what we value. An example of an event from my own life would include the fact that when I was a child my family migrated from Kenya to Britain, while a key relationship that stands out in my memory would be one with a close friend who was white and South African. I realise that both these have been particularly significant in shaping my values and therefore attitudes with regard not only to how I see myself (as an immigrant and member of Britain’s ethnic minority population) but also to key issues in society such as immigration and the politics of race.

The notion of identity is inextricably linked with our self-image – how we see ourselves – and with our self-esteem – the extent to which we value ourselves. However, both our self-image and our notion of self-worth are often influenced by the ‘messages’ we receive from others. Those that we consider as significant in our lives can have a particularly strong influence on our levels of self-esteem/self-worth. How they perceive us seems to matter to us. These could include teachers, siblings, parents, relatives, colleagues, partners and children, among many others.

In short, our notions of self-worth can be directly affected by how others we have some contact with perceive us. This idea has its roots in the early work of Cooley (1998), who coined the concept of the looking glass self (pages 2 and 7). He suggested early on (in his work from 1902) that each individual continuously monitors how his/her self is reflected in the reactions of others. For example, if someone is rude to us, we may get upset or angry and react accordingly. If we are praised by others, then that may make us feel proud and increase our sense of self-worth/self-esteem. Thus, Cooley demonstrates how our self-image and sense of self-worth reflect how others react to us.

An individual’s identity helps us understand and accept the ways in which we may be similar to others, but also marks our differences from others. As Woodward (1997, page 1) suggests, ‘ Identity marks the ways in which we are the same as others who share that position and the ways in which we are different from those who do not’. Head (1997, page 8), in fact, emphasises that, ‘someone’s identity distinguishes them from other people, it is a point of difference’.

This idea of having a sense of belonging to a group or community, or being conscious of one’s differences from others, is important in how an individual’s identity can be affirmed both by a sense of being similar to others and by being conscious of one’s differences from others. Often, individuals from ethnic minority groups in Britain will speak about going ‘back home’ to where they clearly feel that their sense of belonging to and being part of the wider community, and therefore not being in a minority, is fulfilled. Class, culture and religious affiliation among other things may contribute to developing a sense of belonging and connection to others.

Although it is generally accepted, therefore, that our sense of self-worth and self-esteem can be affected by those that we have direct tangible links with, there are also other forces in society that can have an influence on our levels of self-esteem. For example, if the group or community we belong to is stereotyped negatively, for example by the media, then that too can reflect the self-worth of members belonging to that group or community (e.g. refugees, asylum seekers, homeless people, single parents).

Stereotyping is an example of a negative message that can have an adverse effect on an individual or a group’s self-image and therefore self-esteem. Other examples of negative messages that can have an influence may include physical and verbal abuse, rejection, contempt, showing displeasure and lack of acceptance. This connection between an individual, his/her identity and a wider group/community or the wider society at large is at the heart of inter-cultural dynamics, that in turn are an inevitable aspect of our lives as the citizens of multicultural, multiracial Britain. Thus, understanding the importance of identity also leads to the need to understand how cultures can influence an individual’s identity and how this in turn links the individual to a group or community with a whole sense of being, with a past and a future. This movement from the individual to the wider group or community shows how complex the connections between individual personal identity and groups in society can be.

A mature sense of identity means a sense of being at one with oneself as one grows and develops; and it means, at the same time, a sense or affinity with a community’s sense of being at one with its future as well as its history or mythology.

(Erikson, 1974, pages 27 and 28)

This sense of belonging that an individual needs to feel with a wider group or community is particularly important as the individual (like all of us) lives in a fast and ever-changing globalised world. As Woodward (1997, page 51) points out:

Our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us as one people, with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history.

Yet, as individuals they are often also very conscious that they are, nevertheless, different from the very people with whom they have a sense of affinity and belonging and that they are perceived as such by the very people that they are or have gone to be among. In short, as an Indian woman, I never feel more British than when I am in India and yet I love being among the Indians in India.

Hall (1992, page 275) defines identity in a slightly different way. He suggests that the concept of identity has three different elements: ‘... those of the (a) Enlightenment subject, (b) sociological subject, and (c) post modern subject’.

The Enlightenment period in Western civilisation emphasised the possibility of human progress and the rational understanding of the social and natural worlds. As such, the individual was seen as a unified being who was capable of reasoning. A person’s iden...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword from the Series Editors
• Introduction
• 1 Identity and culture
• 2 De-mystifying some concepts
• 3 Some concepts and theories
• 4 Trust and ‘storying’ in practice
• 5 Understanding the consequences of Islamophobia
• 6 The challenge of globalisation
• Conclusion
• References
• Index