Abstract
Training emergency managers involves material that cuts across many different traditional academic disciplines. Historically, there has been a great focus on the natural science of hazards and the engineering of built human systems. The past few decades have seen the increase in prominence of cultural approaches to understanding the challenges of emergency management. From the 9/11 attacks to Hurricane Harvey and beyond, there is a growing recognition that effective practice in emergency management calls for also understanding the cultural dynamics of our communities—especially when engaging topics like social vulnerability, crisis communication, and public engagement. There have long been people working in this domain but their work is now becoming more central to emergency management training and education.
Available textbooks and other training material have not kept up with the prominence of these issues within the research in emergency management. The recent attention to issues of inclusion, diversity, and equity has only made this weakness more visible. Claire Knox and Brittany “Brie” Haupt have developed a useful toolkit for instructors in emergency management to integrate training in cultural competency into emergency management courses.
Cultural Competency for Emergency and Crisis Management provides a toolkit to integrate cultural competency training into a variety of emergency and crisis management courses. It is important to emphasize that this is a text targeted at instructors in emergency and crisis management courses. The text speaks directly to the instructor about setting up and executing cultural competency exercises in the classroom. This is not a textbook for students—but includes material that can be distributed to students to support these exercises. With this target in mind, the book does a remarkable job equipping instructors with a diverse set of options to integrate cultural competency into a heart of an emergency management course—rather than in a separate, specialized cultural competency course. In this respect, instructors may find that they implement exercises across a range of courses rather than in a single course.
The early chapters of the book provide an overview of the pedagogical foundations for cultural competency. This historical review provides the reader with a strong sense of the history, and diversity, of this emerging competency in emergency management. Readers will find references to work in other disciplines (like sociology, anthropology, and adult education) to chart the progress of cultural competency and ground the approach in a long-standing pedagogical tradition. A chapter also addresses the connection between cultural competency and the domain of emergency management—specifically. This chapter will assist readers in understanding how cultural competency connects to many other core concepts in emergency management.
One of the strengths of this book is that it is clearly intended for instructors to use this material in a variety of emergency management courses—from introductory courses to specialized subjects. This broadens the usefulness of the volume from benefiting just those programs with several emergency management courses (or an entire emergency management curriculum) to also benefiting people who teach a single emergency management class. One can integrate these exercises into discussions of other topics such as disaster communications, evacuation management, or functional needs planning.
The introductory chapters conclude with an important discussion of how to conduct “difficult conversations.” The chief concern many instructors may have in discussing cultural competency may be the difficulty of maintaining an appropriate tone in discussions that connect to politically sensitive topics like the advocacy for historically excluded group. The book provides some useful tools for managing these conversations. These tools are not simply general principles but practical strategies for intervening to dissipate conflict or to redirect attention to important issues. These conversations will never be easy (at least not in my life time) but the tools in this book will prepare instructors for these difficulty conversations.
The majority of the book involves the presentation of case-based exercises that engage topics of cultural competency. The book takes an unusual approach to these case studies and classroom exercises. Rather than providing a detailed, lengthy description of the cases, the book provides exercises based on micro-cases and exercises. The typical exercise is short enough to present the class with the material without prior preparation—only asking students to read a page or so of material to explain the case situation. The typical activity flow is a brief reading, followed by group discussions to develop responses to specific questions, concluding with the instructor providing synthesis and reaction to the group responses.
The case exercises represent a variety of emergency management issues. Readers will find cases based on emergency planning for a school, wildfires in the urban/rural nexus, evacuation communication, planning for residents with functional/special needs, and other subjects. The cases vary in their scope from highly localized issues to broader regional planning. Cases represent US-based locations, locations outside of the US, and even a fully fictionalized case. The diversity of approaches serves both to increase the options for instructors to integrate these exercises into courses at a variety of points.
The diversity of cases is inspiring. The cases provide a variety of models that one can adopt for the creation of one's own case studies to complement those present in the book. One can shop through the various cases to find a case that most closely resembles the sort of exercise one wants to use in the class. Some of the exercises are brief while others are more lengthy. Some exercises involve specified role-playing exercises while others rely on a parallel set of groups tackling the same issue and comparing responses.
My chief complaint with the book is that I wanted more. This is the best sort of complaint. I would like to see more cases that address an even wider variety of situation. It would be nice to see cases that address challenges of emergency management in rural communities, border communities, or involving a wider range of hazards (including cyber-security). The book can not only cover every situation and does an admirable job in the diversity it offers, but also it leaves one with the desire to see more.
Similarly, the book focuses on small exercises that are generally timed to require about 1 hour of classtime (assuming a synchronous class setting). This does not leave room for multistage or more complex exercises. Many of these topics warrant more time if it is available within the class. I plan to augment some of the cases to create 2–3 h experiences with changing conditions. The existing cases provide a model for how to do this—along with the inspiration to dive even deeper into cultural competency instruction. I hope that others will be similarly inspired and this book may serve as the starting point for a broader collection of classroom exercises to integrate these important topics into classes across emergency management curricula.
In conclusion, Knox and Haupt have blazed a trail for the teaching of cultural competency in emergency management. Readers will find in this volume the tools they need to integrate cultural competency into their classes and models for how to develop similar exercises targeted to their own need. The volume fills an important gap in the existing literature and its how to approach renders the material accessible in ways that the academic literature on cultural competency rarely is. I will be using this material in my classes and I hope that others who read the book will be similarly inspired.