Experiencing a Culture at Home

This summer, students in the Pacific University School of Professional Psychology got a taste of another culture — while barely leaving home.

For several years, the school offered an immersion course in Mexico. Since 2009, however, a U.S. State Department travel warning has prevented travel there.

Instead, professors developed a new course that allowed students to experience Mexican-American culture within the Pacific Northwest.

The course is part of the Latino bilingual track of Pacific’s clinical psychology doctoral program (PsyD).

“Our mission has been to train fluent, Spanish-speaking psychologists to provide culturally relevant services,” said Professor Robin Shallcross.

Previously, the immersion course in Mexico gave students a deeper background in the culture by taking them to Oaxaca, Guadalajara and Morelia.

When they couldn’t go, Shallcross decided to try something different.

“We decided, ‘Let’s experiment,’” she said.

With a grant from the Oregon Community Foundation, she developed a course that took mini-trips within Oregon and Washington, visiting the small towns of Nyssa and Woodburn, Ore., and Yakima, Wash.

What they found may have been even more relevant to students, as they immersed themselves in the worlds of the very people they hope to someday serve.

In each of the short trips, students stayed in the homes of local families. They shared meals and stories, practiced their Spanish, and gained a better understanding of some of cultural traditions and practical realities that might make life different than that of the majority.

In Nyssa, they watched a presentation by a curandera, or native healer.

In Yakima, they rose at 4 a.m. to pick apples with migrant farmworkers.

In Woodburn, they met with a farmworker labor organization and performed community service.

“By all accounts, it was very successful,” Shallcross said, referencing response papers students wrote about their experiences.

One shared the challenge of language barriers: The host family mistook “psychologist” for “psychic,” worrying their minds were being read and asking for palm readings.

Colleen Griffin is a student in the doctoral program whose primary focus is the forensic psychology track. But she’s also an associate in the Latino bilingual track and participated in the trip. She said she was the student with the least Spanish language fluency, and it caused challenges in one of her home stays.

“I was under the impression they were calling me names and making fun. I got upset about that,” she said. Ultimately, she discovered that she was misconstruing a couple of words.

“It was a pretty easy misunderstanding,” she said. “But it ended up being an amazing experience.

“It helped me to better understand what other people must be going through. While I’m white from a majority culture, in that situation I was a minority and I lacked the dominant language,” she said. “Being able to experience what that’s like and gain more empathy for how immigrants in this country are being treated … helped me understand the everyday stuff they have to deal with and how easy it is to misunderstand based on limited knowledge of the language.”

Originally from New Jersey, Shallcross said her journey began long ago, when her mother chose her, of three children, to learn Spanish, what she called “the language of the future.”

Shallcross studied sociology and Spanish as an undergraduate and spent her junior year at the University of Madrid.

“In 1975, that and 25 cents wouldn’t get you a cup of coffee,” she joked, so she went to graduate school for clinical psychology.

She first came to Pacific in 1993 as a visiting professor and joined the faculty in 1997.

In 2005, she took a sabbatical and developed the Latino bilingual track, which opened in 2007 along with a bilingual mental health clinic in Hillsboro.

“It was in response to a community needs request,” she said.

The Latino population within Washington County — and throughout the United States — has grown rapidly. According to the latest U.S. Census data, about 15 percent of Washington County residents are of Latino ethnicity, many from Mexico.

Local community and social services agencies were, and are, desperate for students who could speak Spanish to help serve the population.

In 2012, Shallcross received a Fulbright Specialist Award that supported travel to Mexico to develop more partnerships with professors and practitioners there — and that led to connections that helped build the local immersion course.

At the same time, Shallcross’s son, Jonathan Schell '16, became a Pacific University student, studying film and video. He was able to put those skills to use, serving as driver and photographer for the summer travel course.

“I thought the idea itself was really cool,” he said. “I’d been to Yakima a few times before, but I had no idea what we were really going to be doing.

“Changing locations opens your senses more. In a new environment, you see more.”

“Seeing” is exactly what students needed to do.

Shallcross explained that it’s easy to consider your own culture, your own experience “normal,” but in providing mental health care, it’s critical to understand what “normal” means for the client.

“In the School of Professional Psychology, we’re very committed to training students to deliver services for diverse populations in the U.S.,” she said.

For example, Western culture might use the term “co-dependency” in reference to an adult child living at home for an extended period. In Latino culture, however, it would be perfectly normal.

Further, she said, the stress associated with being an undocumented immigrant — or having a member of the family be undocumented — creates unique pressures.

In her reflection paper, one student wrote about riding from Nyssa across the Idaho border with her host family and seeing a police car on the road ahead. The mother driving the car took a longer, indirect route home just to avoid passing the police.

“She was doing nothing wrong, but they live in fear,” Shallcross said. “In their world, police are not friends. It’s just a normal thing.”

For Griffin, the experience will play directly into her future practice someday.

She has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master’s in forensic psychology, and she’s working on her doctorate in clinical psychology.

Her particular interest is in doing psychological and competency evaluations for juvenile and family courts.

Learning about the tradition of a curandera, the native healer, opened her eyes to ways to connect with different spiritual beliefs, she said.

“It’s not necessarily a belief or practice I hold, but I have respect for it,” she said. “That’s definitely something I want to try and incorporate … as it works, when I work with Latino communities.”

And, she said, traveling to communities within the region was eye-opening.

“I thought that the exposure course was really amazing in the fact that we were able to do all these things in a semester, and they were all within a day’s drive,” she said. “The fact that we have all these Mexican-American families and Latino immigrants in our backyard — people we would be treating — is really great.”

Above: At top, Colleen Griffin, a student in the School of Professional Psychology, gains insight into Mexican-American culture during the excursion course. In the middle, a curandera, pictured at right, demonstrates a healing ceremony for students. At bottom, students sat in on the praying of the rosario with families on their trips. All photos by Jonathan Schell '16.