MSW 511 Week 8 Synthesis Reflection Example Example

Synthesis Reflection: From a Competence Checklist to a Stance of Humility, Argued From My Own Coursework, the Week 2 Desk Error, the Week 6 Grant and Door, and What I Carry Into Practice With a Date Attached

Student Name

Chamberlain University

MSW 511: Social Work in a Multicultural Society

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Synthesis Reflection: From a Competence Checklist to a Stance of Humility, Argued From My Own Coursework, the Week 2 Desk Error, the Week 6 Grant and Door, and What I Carry Into Practice With a Date Attached

The Claim

I began the term treating cultural competence as knowledge I could collect about Marshallese families. I end it treating my own position, and the agency's procedures, as the first thing to examine. That is a move from a checklist to a stance, and my own coursework shows when it happened.

Evidence, Week by Week

Week 1: I located myself as an insured English speaker but still described what I knew about the community as my main tool. Week 2: the late arrival at the intake desk showed that knowing about shift work had not stopped me from enforcing a schedule; asking would have. Week 4: the referral note's "does not prioritize health" turned out to describe the clinic's failures, and I had nearly accepted it. Week 6: the broken door, the Sunday clinic and the interpreter contract showed that most of the harm I saw came from procedures and funding rather than from any individual's attitude.

Week 3 was where the evidence shifted most: writing the population analysis forced me to look up the 1996 exclusion, and once I saw 24 years of policy behind the blank forms, the desk looked different.

What the Readings Added

Tervalon and Murray-García (1998) gave me the language for the change: humility as lifelong self-critique and attention to power, rather than a finite competence. The NASW standards still use the word competence, but their emphasis on critical self-awareness and on institutional change fits the same stance (National Association of Social Workers, 2015). I no longer see the two as opposites; competence without humility was what I practiced at the desk in week 2.

What Remains Unresolved

I do not know how to practice humility at a busy front desk without slowing the line for everyone else. The community health worker manages it by knowing families; I do not have that relationship and will not have it by the end of the placement.

What I Carry Into Practice

Three practices, each with a date. First, from January, I will ask what happened before acting on any late arrival or missed visit. Second, by the end of my placement in April, I will bring the interpreter contract gap to the language access review. Third, in my next placement, I will read every referral note's judgments as inferences until I have heard the person's own account.

I will also keep the habit of writing down, after a hard moment at the desk, what I assumed and what I learned, since that record made this reflection possible. And I will ask the community health worker, before I leave, which of my habits still get in the way.

References

National Association of Social Workers. (2015). Standards and indicators for cultural competence in social work practice. https://www.socialworkers.org/Practice/NASW-Practice-Standards-Guidelines/Standards-and-Indicators-for-Cultural-Competence-in-Social-Work-Practice

Tervalon, M., & Murray-García, J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 9(2), 117-125. https://doi.org/10.1353/hpu.2010.0233