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The purpose of this paper is to introduce the idea of cultural humility, distinguish it from cultural competence and explore how it fits within librarianship.

The authors use an interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of humility to understand what cultural humility means and how it differs from cultural competence and other approaches to intercultural communication in libraries.

Despite some reservations with the term itself, the authors find that a practice of cultural humility is more appropriate to front-line interactions in library contexts than cultural competence models.

Libraries looking to address issues in intercultural communication and services to multicultural populations will find an approach that may be better suited to their contexts than prevailing models of cultural competency.

Librarians need to commit to redressing the power imbalances and other structural issues that interfere with library service, for the benefit of the patrons, the library and librarians themselves.

While cultural humility is increasingly being used in librarianship, there has not been a systematic exploration of the concept and how it applies to library contexts.

For decades, expatriate scholars have understood that the individual factors of cultural humility and ethnocentrism and the contextual factors of feedback and support affect expatriates’ outcomes. The study, rooted in the observation that great advice and support are often ignored by expatriates, seeks to uncover why. Based in the humility literature, the authors test whether individual differences interact with support to affect expatriate performance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors surveyed a matched sample of 62 expatriates and their supervisors from one multinational organization.

The study found that expatriates higher in cultural humility benefit more from the support and feedback offered in the host national work environment which, in turn, facilitates better supervisor ratings of performance. The authors also found that expatriates’ ethnocentrism has a direct negative influence on their ratings of performance.

The findings in the study are focussed and robust, but tested within a single organization. That said, the authors believe the results have implications for expatriate selection and for ways to manage the host national environment to improve expatriate performance.

The study joins the research conversation on how expatriates’ individual differences interact with the environments in which they are placed to affect their success. This study also underscores the importance of humility in the global professional context.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how to build and implement information and communication technology (i.e. ICT) to help vulnerable people when significant social, cultural and economic barriers exist between the stakeholders.

The authors followed an action research approach to design and implement a mobile health hypertension education application to help India's most vulnerable populations. The authors used interpretive analysis, guided by the sustainable livelihoods framework, to uncover key findings.

Successfully implementing information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) requires understanding that all stakeholders (i.e. donors, facilitators and the beneficiaries) have important assets to contribute. Facilitators play an important role in connecting donors to the beneficiaries and fostering cultural humility in donors so that the donors will understand the role beneficiaries play in success. Stakeholders may use the ICT4D in unintended ways that both improve the people's health and increase some beneficiaries' financial livelihood.

This research expands the definition of information systems success when implementing ICT4D in resource-constrained environments. Success is more than creating an mHealth app that was easy for beneficiaries to use and where they learned based on a pre- and post-test statistical analysis. Success involved development in all the stakeholders impacted by the social innovation collaboration. For the beneficiary community, success included getting screened for noncommunicable diseases as a first step toward treatment. For the facilitator, success involved more resources for their community health program. Amongst the donors, success was a change in perspective and learning cultural humility.

Although universities encourage faculty to work in interdisciplinary research teams to address serious world problems, university researchers may have to exert considerable effort to secure contracts, approvals and payments. Unfortunately, universities may not reward this effort to build ICT4D and continue to evaluate faculty based on journal publications. When universities undertake social innovation collaborations, administrators should ensure responsive and flexible university processes as well as appropriate academic reward structures are in place. This need is heightened when collaborations involve international partners with limited resources and time needed to build relationships and understanding across cultures.

This study discovered the importance of fostering cultural humility as a way of avoiding potential conflicts that may arise from cultural and power differences. Cultural humility moves the focus of donor-beneficiary relationships away from getting comfortable with “them” to taking actions that develop relationships and address vulnerabilities (Fisher-Borne et al., 2015). This research shows how the facilitator helped the donor develop cultural humility by involving the donor in various initiatives with the beneficiary community including allowing the donor to live in a dormitory at the hospital, work in an urban slum and visit health screening campus.

This study (1) extends the ICT4D literature by incorporating cultural humility into the sustainable livelihoods framework, (2) provides a contextual understanding of developing cultural humility in ICT4D projects with a complex group of stakeholders and (3) describes how facilitators become a catalyst for change and a bridge to the community. The culturally humble approach suggests revising the livelihood framework to eliminate words like “the poor” to describe beneficiaries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how leader humility affects the engagement of employees in creative processes, using perceived organizational support (POS) as a mediator and leader competence as a moderator.

Data were collected from a two-wave sampling of 113 dyads of leaders and subordinates in China.

A curvilinear relationship was found between leader humility and employee engagement in creative processes. Further, POS partially mediates this relationship, and leader competence positively moderates the relationship between leader humility and POS.

First, organizations should select and train leaders who show humility as a character trait and foster a supportive organizational climate. Second, managers should study the benefits of moderate and harms of superfluous humility, especially in the Chinese cultural context. Third, competent leaders are more effective as humble leaders.

Few studies have concentrated on leader humility in the eastern cultural context. The results challenge traditional views of the impact of leader humility and shed light on its mechanism and the conditions under which it promotes employee engagement in creation. This study also clarifies the nonlinear influence of leader humility, building a fine-grained theoretical framework integrating the motivation-opportunities-abilities model and Chinese Zhong-Yong theory.

The purpose of this paper is to chronicle the efforts of a new White teacher in her first two years of teaching in an elementary school with a largely Hispanic population as she forged connections with her students’ families while drawing on continued, constructivist mentoring from her university professor. The case points to the need for new teacher mentoring programs to include some emphasis on family-teacher relationships.

The new teacher kept a weekly journal of her interactions with families over a two-year period. Notes were taken during and after mentoring sessions. Data analysis was conducted using the case analysis format designed by Miles et al. (2014).

The goal of fostering constructive family-teacher relationships was not fully realized for this teacher in her first year. Through reflections, readings, and discussions in mentoring sessions, she gradually learned to respect the wisdom and expertise of families.

As with all case studies, the results are not generalizable in a traditional sense (Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2001); however, a larger issue can be addressed in a case (Stake, 1995). In this case, the larger issue is that White teachers working in high-poverty schools are likely to encounter differences between their cultural backgrounds and those of their students’ families. New teachers must determine how to respond in this situation, and mentoring offers support in helping them to act.

Action steps and guidelines developed by the teacher are included, along with a list of selected articles to spur discussions in constructivist mentoring sessions.

Coordinators of new teacher induction programs are encouraged to include a component in their curriculum for best practices in developing relationships with families.

This paper presents recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2020.

The paper provides a brief description of all 440 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested in a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

The dramatic population growth of Hispanics and immigrants, combined with the issue of diversity, in the United States population raises several important questions about the future role of public administration and the delivery of culturally appropriate and culturally responsive public programs and public services in the post modern era of diversity. What is cultural competency in public programs and public service delivery? Can public agencies become culturally competent organizations? What is a cultural competency model for public administration and public service delivery? Aims to answer these questions that point to the need for a “new” kind of public servant and public service agency provider– one who possesses explicit cultural competency skills to work with racial/ethnic and cultural/linguistic groups in the delivery of public programs and public services.

Utilizing a literature review approach, the paper examines the concept of culture in public administration and argues that “culture” and “competency” must be tied together thereby leading to a contemporary standard and operational framework for advancing cultural competency in public administration and public service delivery. The article argues that cultural competency can enhance public administration/public service delivery normative values by increasing an agency's ability to work efficiently, effectively, and equitably in the context of cultural differences.

The paper concludes that there are five reasons for incorporating cultural competency into the study and practice of public administration/public service delivery and moving a public agency toward cultural competence.

Embracing cultural competency in public service delivery recognizes the salience of understanding the cultural context in which any direct public service encounter occurs. Advancing cultural competency presents an opportunity to address the incomplete and often times inaccurate public services and public programs provided to minority populations. A focus on cultural competency increases the relevancy of a public agency's administration, services and programs to the groups that can best utilize them. Having knowledge, awareness, and skills in cultural competency, service delivery professionals are better prepared to do their jobs.

This paper should be of value to both academics and practitioners as they grapple with diversity and immigration issues, public administration, public programs and public service delivery.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the findings from focus group interviews conducted with librarians and library staff, faculty and students. It highlights the significance of implementing inclusive teaching and culturally responsive strategies in instructional settings and interactions with library patrons and seeks to emphasize the importance of developing guidelines, best practices and effective strategies.

Using focus groups, this study interviewed librarians and library staff, faculty and students. This research approach identified, reviewed and assessed existing programs and practices in instruction and library interactions.

The findings from this paper indicate that while faculty and librarians are making individual efforts to promote inclusivity in teaching and interacting with patrons, many participants expressed the necessity for institutional-level training, guidelines and good practices on how to achieve and implement culturally responsive and inclusive teaching strategies.

The methodology utilized in this study can be adapted by other libraries or institutions aiming to explore the practice of inclusive pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching within their own context. The insights from the study inform the development of strategies that librarians, faculty and staff can employ to integrate inclusive and culturally responsive teaching into their instruction and services for the wider academic community.

Service users very often interpret and respond to their experiences of death, dying and bereavement through a religious or spiritual lens. However, recent trends in religion and belief have influenced how professionals respond to indicators such as faith. Since the post-war years in Britain, and due to the transfer of services from church to state, as well as the change in the religious landscape, language has largely secularized. When people start addressing religion and belief again, they lack the appropriate literacy to do so, this is termed religious literacy by Dinham (2015). The purpose of this paper is to explore how professionals in end of life (EOL) care respond to service users’ religious and spiritual indicators, through the lens of religious literacy.

The paper draws from an ethnographic study undertaken across hospices in England, UK. In this study, healthcare professionals (HCPs) were observed for one calendar year.

Results show that lack of religious literacy on the part of HCPs may lead to subtle and unintentional microaggression. Three types of indications of microinvalidation have been noted: verbal, non-verbal and environmental.

This paper innovates in offering a first-hand phenomenological interpretation of observations in the field. The research data capture visually the impact of lack of religious literacy, an achievement which adds to the dialogue about service user rights in EOL care.

Progress toward health equity is necessary to reduce health disparities, and health literacy is key to achieving this goal. Because libraries provide access to knowledge and insights about their communities, they are effective partners in advancing health equity and implementing programs to reduce health disparities. A literature review on library programs and activities that focus on promoting health equity was conducted.

A literature review on library programs and activities concerning health equity and social determinants of health was conducted. Relevant literature was identified from searches of databases, library publications and grey literature.

The authors found 224 eligible sources and many types of libraries advancing health equity. Libraries frame their role in advancing health equity through external programs in three ways: (1) providing access to high-quality health information, (2) delivering health literacy training and resources and (3) connecting their communities with community health services. Libraries also advance health equity by focusing on internal library operations and providing research services focused on cultural humility and competence as they apply to health care.

This literature review will help the National Library of Medicine (NLM) develop a strategy to support libraries advancing health equity through information made available by programs and activities of NLM and the Network of the National Library of Medicine.