The unexpected intersection of personal and professional identities: Reflections from cultural safety teaching for LGBTAQI+ health.

PURPOSE

Teaching can be likened to a performance. Instructors can portray themselves as they wish, concealing their personal identities and vulnerabilities to whatever extent they choose. For certain topics, such as cultural safety, there may be a role for intersecting personal and professional identities and sharing one's own personal experiences in order to better connect with students.

DESCRIPTION

Tasked to develop and implement Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Asexual, Queer/Questioning, Intersexual, and others (LGBTAQI+) health content for the first time, I stepped outside my comfort zone by exposing my vulnerabilities and sharing personal experiences with students as an LGBTAQI+ community member. I partnered with a Māori colleague who helped to relate cultural safety concepts back to previous teaching on Indigenous health.

ANALYSIS/INTERPRETATION: This experience taught me that simply providing facts, statistics, and textbook descriptions would have been suboptimal for instilling knowledge and shifting the mindset of students when considering LGBTAQI+ health. Incorporation of personal experiences into teaching was effective at stimulating reflective thought and will hopefully result in better resonation of concepts in practice.

CONCLUSIONS

Traditional textbook-based teaching methods may not be optimal for all topics. The role of personalizing content through sharing and connection should be further explored as a strategy to promote cultural safety in pharmacy education.

IMPLICATIONS

Educators and institutions should promote reflective practice for curricula designed to facilitate cultural safety. Sharing oneself with students may not always be a favored strategy but there could be other strategies identified through further reflection and research.