A Practitioner’s Guide to Cultural Humility: Autoethnography of a Mexican-American Woman Overseeing Compliance in Higher Education

his product dissertation provides insight into the lived experiences of a compliance
officer through the work of autoethnography and provides a practitioner’s guide informed by
Tervalon and Murray-Garcia's seminal article Cultural Humility Versus Cultural Competence: A
Critical Distinction in Defining Physician Training Outcomes in Multicultural Education. The
application of cultural humility’s tenants, life-long learning and critical self-reflection,
recognizing power imbalances, and developing mutually beneficial partnerships with the
communities we serve were applied as an instrument for the implementation of student conduct,
regulatory compliance, advocacy, and implementation of institutional policy and procedures in
higher education.
The development of the Practitioner’s Guide to Cultural Humility merged tactics
informed by the lived experiences of a Mexican American woman who oversees student conduct
and compliance in Predominately White Serving institutions and provides tactics that merges the
application of cultural humility tenants to balance between providing due process, adjudication
of institutional policy, regulatory oversight, risk assessment, and providing behavioral
intervention with advocacy.