Assignment: Cultural Influences in Development
In this assignment, you will apply your knowledge of cultural influences on development to create psychosocial workshops for a specific population.
Tasks:
Scenario:
As a human services administrator at a local agency, one of your duties is to write descriptions of the agency's community workshops to publish in the community's resource guide delivered free of charge to all residents. These are the titles of the workshops:
• Single Moms: A workshop for working mothers to help them balance work and home
• Community Living: A workshop for those transitioning from incarceration to society
• Caregiver Parents: A workshop for those taking care of aging parents, while also raising a young family
• Parenting Teens: A workshop to enable parents to help their teenage children transition to young adulthood
Your community largely comprises blue-collar workers, many of whom are working on either visas or green cards; thus, there are pockets of immigrant communities. Some of the workers are those who were reintegrated into society after prolonged incarceration (more than three years). The median age of the area is thirty-five years, and multigenerational households are commonplace. The public school system is underresourced, and truancy is a big problem. Many students do not complete high school, and standardized test scores are well below what is federally mandated for funding.
Directions:
1. For each of the four workshops, write a 100- to 200-word description on the basis of the following:
• Utilize what you have learned throughout the course to describe specific services that each workshop will include.
• Tailor each description to the community and the target audience for the workshop.
• Apply cultural and multicultural sensitivity within and across all descriptions. Remember, a single mother may also read the description for community living. Craft your descriptions to be readable and sensitive to all.
• Account for individual differences and environmental contexts that will influence developmental changes.
• Account for the role of culture in shaping attitudes, values, and behaviors.