Present day educational and psycho-social services deal with broad
cultural diversity. Educators and psycho-social professionals need to become
culturally competent to be able to work with people from different cultural
backgrounds including race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual orientation,
religion, age, etc. To be able to do so, it is important to cultivate cultural
competence among these workers, the perquisites to which are the awareness and
acceptance of differences between people as well as reflection upon their own
attitudes and feelings. To create a profound and long-lasting effect of the
training, creative and experiential teaching methods are often applied. This
paper describes the use of children’s books in academic training for cultural
and context awareness and presents two training modules. The application of
this methodology is demonstrated with university students in social work and
with students in an Arabic-speaking teachers’ college in Israel.
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