I sure am glad that when our Founding Fathers set up the greatest country on earth that they recognized that providing recreation was governments job. If they didn't do that then maybe the city of Portland wouldn't be hiring a Recreation Coordinator.
Thankfully this recreation coordinator is required to "meet specific needs and desires of diverse communities; be culturally competent - having exposure to, recognizing the value of, and having the skills and ability to work effectively with a culturally diverse workforce and community..."
Otherwise I would wonder if government really was serious about living up to it's mandate to provide recreation for the masses.
6 comments:
And yet still, nobody has told me what the heck it means to be "culturally competent"?!?!?!?
don -- cultural competence is not the liberal buzzword you make it out to be. in a global marketplace that is increasingly interconnected (if I remember correctly, Daniel is about the only one on the planet who doubts the pervasiveness of global capitalism) it should be expected that employers of all stripes would start requiring this of their employees. it essentially means that one possesses some sort of understanding and appreciation for how cultural differences lead to different world-views among the people with whom one is working, with respect to business practices, social norms, etc. insofar as capitalism becomes increasingly more diffused globally, you can expect that cultural competency will increase in importance as a skill valued on the job market. like it or not.
It's a shame anonymous posters don't understand or appreciate Daniel's culture.
I doubt global capitalism. So that makes at least two of us. Leaving Mr. Anon, in the minority, at least here. Does that mean that anon will demand some sort of special rights?
To be culturally competent, to me means that you just have to understand that there are other cultures out there, and they are different. Knowing something about those cultures helps. It DOES NOT mean, that I have to support the views of those cultures, sympathize with their crappy economics and lifestyles, or really need to pay any attention to them at all.
Cultural competence, in this context, is APPLIED as a liberal buzzword. Remember the culturally competent math test (and the teacher who wrote and administered it) which took a lot of liberal flak? (This was a math test with word problems involving crack dealers, pimps, and other culturally diverse subjects encountered in urban environments.) This math test demonstrated a cultural competency directly tailored to the class to which it was given, but not in a way the liberals deemed acceptable. Cultural competency is a fuzzy concept which can and will be measured by political standards.
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