Center for Cultural Fluency

Cultural fluency is the ability to move comfortably among cultures from the family culture of home and the ethnic culture of one's community to the educational culture of school and the corporate culture of one's workplace. A culturally fluent educator:

• Takes risks in learning about other cultures,
• Welcomes discoveries about self that emerge from learning about others,
• Responds to diversity not with fear and suspicion but with the courage to reexamine assumptions, and
• Collaborates to develop new perspectives and strategies for education that honor the dignity of all people.

The Center for Cultural Fluency was created to provide instructional resources and professional development opportunities to enable teachers to become culturally fluent and to develop cultural fluency in their students. In all activities, the Center strives to embody four educational values for a multicultural society described by Lawrence Blum in a Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of Massachusetts at Boston in 1991. These values are anti-bias, multiculturalism, interracial community, and respect for persons as individuals.