Supervision and Multicultural Issues

 This text-based course is a transcript of the live seminar, “Supervision and Multicultural Issues,” presented by Shelley Victor, Ed.D., CCC-SLP.>>Amy Natho:  It is my honor and a pleasure to introduce Shelley Victor, Ed.D., CCC-SLP who will be presenting “Supervision and Multicultural Issues.  Dr. Shelley Victor is a program professor at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.  She was coordinator of ASHA’s Special Interest Group 11: Administration and Supervision steering committee and former editor of its Perspectives.  She is a member of the ASHA Governmental Regulations and Public Policy committee and the Florida Speech and Hearing Association Vice President of Governmental Education.  She teaches graduate courses in supervision and professional issues and chairs doctoral dissertations in the area of supervision.  She became an ASHA Fellow in 2000.  Welcome Shelley, we would like to thank you for being here today and we look forward to your presentation. >> Shelley Victor:  Thanks to SpeechPathology.com for asking me to present on this topic.  The topic of supervision is probably one of my favorite topics to discuss and I have been very involved in the area of supervision for many years, most recently with the Special Interest Group on their board.  I continue to be involved in supervision although my term has ended. The topic of supervision and multicultural issues is one that is not discussed a lot.  As I did the research for this presentation, I find that it is a topic that may make us uncomfortable.  I want to let you know in advance there may be some things that we discuss that perhaps you have not thought about or may think about in a different light.  How many of you currently supervise?  For those of you who are supervising currently, how many of you supervise in a university setting?  How many of you have supervised in the past?  I can safely make the assumption that everyone has been supervised at some point, particularly if we all have our CCC and our licenses.  As we discuss this topic, you should look at this information from the perspective of both being the supervisor and the supervisee.Multicultural supervision is a subset of supervision, which in and of itself is a whole body of knowledge.  I teach doctoral courses in supervision and we will only skim the surface today.  How many of you have ever participated or taken a course, workshop, or presentation in supervision?  In this presentation we will define what multicultural supervision is, look at what are considered successful and unsuccessful behaviors in the multicultural dyad which is made up of the supervisor and the supervisee, what are some challenges that surface in multicultural supervision and focus on some strategies to foster a productive supervisory relationship.  Embedded throughout this discussion, I will be talking about some of the research that has been presented on this topic. The way that I thought I would introduce this topic, and it lends itself very well to the type of research that has been conducted in the field, is through the use of stories.  These will not be full stories, but snippets or excerpts from what both supervisors and supervisees have said on this topic.  We will discuss later about the kind of research that is done within this field of speech-language pathology and audiology.  These stories come directly from the research. In the first story, the supervisee says, “I feel that my supervisor and I did not acknowledge and honor our different assumptions, beliefs, and values, nor did we explore how these factors informed the way that we conceptualized clients (Hird, Cavalieri, Dulko, Felice, & Ho, 2001, p. 118).”  This is probably an overriding statement that you might hear someone say in that there was not a discussion about any kind of cultural beliefs, cultural values, and it was not explored at all.  We will talk about the topic related to clients, but much less so.  Our focus here is on the supervisor and the supervisee. Here is another story.  “When I eventually broached the topic of unintentional racism with my supervisor (which I believed played an insidious role in our supervision) I heard a slight gasp of discomfort (Hird et al., 2001, pp. 120-121).” I think this is not uncommon.  We have a situation where the supervisee, for whatever reason, felt she needed to talk about this.  She believed that the supervisor was racist and brought up the topic, and the supervisor is obviously uncomfortable with the discussion.  We will talk about things you can do to avoid a situation such as this.Another story reads, “Early in my training, I was supervised by a white professor who had practiced for well over 20 years. However, it was not until late in his career that he had come to see the importance of attending to cultural variables in himself, his clients, and his supervisees. Our discussions ultimately formed the basis of a trusting supervisory relationship. His disclosure of where he was in the process of multicultural supervision….was instrumental in my developing a sense of respect for him (Hird et al., 2001, p.123).”  This is someone who supervised for 20 years.  It is not uncommon in the process of supervision to feel comfortable in your own skin in the actual process of being a supervisor.  So here is a man who spent a lot of time honing those skills and then much later, he thought this was another component he needed to address.  He looked at both himself as well as the supervisee.  Important words to remember when talking about strategies is what this trusting supervisory relationship is and how do we get that trust, and then also the concept of disclosure is really important. In another story, it was said, “One dynamic that I have recognized within my own supervision has been one of dominance-subordination. I believe it can become especially critical in multicultural relationships in which the supervisor is from a minority background (Hird et al., 2001, p. 120).”  When we talk about dominance-subordination, one thing we refer to is the...