As a social work student, participating in this ARIA internship was a great opportunity to develop my research interest. Being supervised by Prof. Katherine Maurer and participating in their project was a learning experience. Their project is called Developing a trauma-informed care virtual simulation learning experience: Countering implicit cultural bias in service provision. It is in the early stage of development and my role during the internship was to conduct a literature review of the measures and principles of cultural safety used in the practice of social work.
Cultural safety is a concept developed in the nursing field and it started to be integrated into social work and other disciplines. Nevertheless, most of the literature comes from medical journals. Our main goal was to find what was the literature saying about how to provide culturally safe care and if it was congruent with Ball鈥檚 (2019) five principles of cultural safety. My second objective was to look for measures of evaluation of culturally safe care focusing on the service recipients rather than the perspective of the service provider. Unfortunately, I didn鈥檛 get to dive into this part as time was lacking.
At the start of the internship, I experienced a bit of a challenge, as I felt overwhelmed by the amount of reading I had to do. I was overwhelmed by the reading workload due to my high expectations of thoroughly understanding and summarizing the articles correctly. My process of summarizing and cataloguing articles in the Excel grids was taking way too much time. In addition, I felt unsatisfied with my work because I didn't think I was meeting expectations. After a few conversations with my supervisor, we were able to clarify the guidelines, and I felt more secure with my task, and I got better at paraphrasing and cataloguing information.
My work was centered around the literature review. Throughout the internship, I developed skills in searching specific databases for related articles. Additionally, I performed a forward-backward search to identify the sources that cited Ball (2019) and the sources that she cited. I was able to utilize my skills with Zotero software, and I also took part in a brief tutorial for other interns, as we had organized much of our literature in Zotero. I developed ways of organizing information and references. I also had the chance to assist at two conferences. It was amazing to be in a space with scholars in the social field coming from different parts of Canada and participating in discussions with them as a BSW student. It made me think of different possibilities for study exchanges and it was pleasing to see the diversity of people's interests in relation to social work. I also got to exchange with other racialized students at the graduate level from York University on their experience in their School of Social Work.
In sum, the ARIA internship stemmed from my overall experiences. I am very grateful to Prof. Katherine Maurer and the time they took to guide me during the internship. This experience opened doors for me in many ways. I met passionate scholars with whom I shared my interest in systemic racism and discrimination. I have gained skills in referencing, and I developed my understanding of critical perspective and post-colonial theories, which are cornerstones of the concept of cultural safety. But mostly, as a future social worker, I feel better equipped to provide culturally safe care to my future service users.
Lastly, I would like to thank again Prof. Maurer for sticking with me this summer and Dr. Leah Pope and Mr. Clayton Pope for their financial support.
