Eight USC School of Social Work students recently tested their textbook knowledge on cultural sensitivity in a real-life training workshop with the staffers of Teen Line, a confidential peer hotline.

Clinical Assistant Professor Valerie Richards and Center on Child Welfare Consultant Lorena Vega, who organized the workshop, coached the master's students on facilitating small group discussions with about 50 teenagers from local high schools while Richards and Vega led a discussion group with the 12 Teen Line staff advisers, who oversee the teen listeners.

Founded more than 25 years ago on the premise teens were more likely to open up to other teens than they would to adults, Teen Line staffs its phone lines with trained teenagers who have completed a 60-hour training program. Teen Line teaches its youth volunteers specialized listening and communication techniques to interact with callers, including how to clarify their concerns, discuss available options and make referrals to community resources. The USC workshop was designed as an extension of that training to help teens acquire an additional skill set that allows them to work more competently in the area of inter-ethnic communication.

"We want to make sure the counselors are sensitive," said Richards. "We know that all of the teenagers calling in aren't going to be white, and so their ability to understand and assess certain things is going to be important."

Many of the teens who volunteer to work the phone lines come from affluent neighborhoods where the ethnic makeup tends to be more homogenous than diversified. For Richards and Vega, this factor only stressed the importance of cross-cultural sensitivity training.

"The kids who work at Teen Line come from a very privileged group, and they may not have direct interaction with kids who have different experiences from their own," said Vega. "Besides counseling skills, they need this other piece to stay connected to the caller to give appropriate advice."

Richards and Vega, who have previously led these workshops for the Teen Line high schoolers, invited MSW students to participate for the first time ever this year and found their involvement to be a key factor in reaching the young teen audience.

"They had to facilitate a topic that many people are anxious about and avoid," said Vega. "Teenagers are hard. To keep them focused on a difficult topic – I commend them for that."

Richards and Vega believe the workshop training offered graduate students a completely different learning experience from their regular field internships, giving them the chance to participate in a host setting away from their usual working environments and exposing some to a new population and new issues.

"In the social work school, we're challenged constantly to work on our self awareness and to realize what our stereotypes are," said Shoshana Garisek, a second-year MSW student in the mental health concentration who participated in the workshop. "But I think generally people aren't asked to do that on a regular basis and [think about] how that might affect the work that they do."

Garisek has had previous experience working with teens but not with issues of cultural diversity. "I thought talking about diversity with that age group would be really rewarding," she said. "It gives them another perspective and another way to look at the issue, and it gives them a well-rounded approach to assist their callers."