Enhancing cultural competence of the staffs of culture-based public organization is important because their authentic understanding of cultural diversity will lead to the better opportunity of providing culturally appropriate services to the community...
Enhancing cultural competence of the staffs of culture-based public organization is important because their authentic understanding of cultural diversity will lead to the better opportunity of providing culturally appropriate services to the community. This research in this context purposed to develop an educational program of cultural diversity for the staffs of the culture-based public organization and to analyze the result of implementation. As for the contents, this program deals, beyond focus on race and ethnicity, with diverse cultural groups and categories which include gender, generation, class, sexuality, language, North Korea defectors and ethnicity as well. Learning resources used in this program are basically from genres of art and culture, for the purpose of providing both fun and seriousness to the program. The methods of this program also attempts to employ educational methods such as continuous self-reflective thinking and actions, equal and active participation of the learners within collaborative learning environments, and experiential learning for self-expression, which have been emphasized by many researchers of multicultural education. This program consists of total 30-hour four sessions. Yet, 10-hour pilot program as a pilot study was implemented on February 22-23 in 2013 to 29 persons. Through the analysis of both the pre- and postmindmaps, and reflection journals, it was found that the participants enhanced mindset changes as well as understanding of cultural diversity.