As helping professionals, it is important to meet clients where they are. However, that can be challenging as they bring a range of diverse personalities, dispositions, life experiences, values, and worldviews to the table. It can also be challenging because we as helpers also come to the table with entrenched personalities, dispositions, life experiences, values, and worldviews. Therefore, helping professionals must build the capacity to “step outside of themselves” to develop an authentic understanding of individuals other than themselves. In this assignment, you will be challenged to “step outside of yourself” by engaging in an experience called The Voice Project.
The Voice Project was created by Dr. C. Carney Strange at Bowling Green State University to deepen students’ experiences with, and understanding of, diversity paradigms alternative to their own. These paradigms include ones with which you are familiar: race, age, class, gender, sexual orientation, orientation, religion/spirituality, socioeconomic status, ableism, generational status, and many other diversity statuses. To engage in this experience, each student will be asked to select a “voice” representing a diversity category: a) different from their own identity; b) with which they have had limited or no exposure or resistance to and c) that strikes an appropriate balance of risk and comfort for that individual student in carrying out the project’s tasks. Through a series of smaller initiatives, students will engage in various meaning-making strategies to become an in-class advocate for the experiences of that voice. Although students may endeavor upon this project with creative license, the following elements should be present in each student’s efforts: (More details can be found on Syllabus)
A. Journal Entries (12 total)
B. Initial Understandings and Assumptions (1/12 entries)
C. Exploration of Literature (3/12 entries)
D. Exploration of Experiences (4/12 entries)
E. Trying Your Voice on for Size (1/12 entries)
F. Giving Voice to Your Voice (1/12 entries)
G. Advocacy Initiative (1/12 entries)
H. Increasing Multicultural Competence (1/12)
I. Summary of Lessons Learned and Final Thoughts
J. Final Voice Presentation (5 slides)