IJSP Number 4, 2022

18 The term, cultural humility, nicely captures that spirit, being defined as “supervisors being open and willing to reflect on themselves as embedded cultural beings and open to hearing about and striving to understand the cultural background and identity of their supervisees and their supervisees ’ clients [48, p. 42]. ” Other critical characteristics of cultural humility identified in our findings and the literature include not making automatic cultural assumptions about supervisees/clients; championing a culturally self-aware supervision mindset; striving to overcome any tendency to view one ’ s own worldview as superior; recognizing that one ’ s own knowledge/understanding about supervisees ’ and clients ’ cultures are limited; and being deeply curious about, holding utmost respect for, and being genuinely interested in understanding others ’ cultural identities [48, 49]. Although a host of factors conceivably contributes to successful supervision experiences, our findings suggest that cultural humility was indeed a pivotal differentiator: Where supervisor cultural humility was present, supervision was accordingly best positioned for a favourable process and outcome; where cultural humility was absent, unfavourable process and outcome were rendered increasingly likely. Leading with cultural humility, we contend, is of paramount supervisory importance in working with international supervisees, and we highly recommend that supervisors strive to forever privilege and prioritize a culturally humble, not knowing stance over the course of the supervision process [50]. 6.3. Making Culture Practically Matter Let us bring culture to the forefront and place it front and centre, making it practically matter in the supervision with international students: That is one of the lessons suggested by these interview data. Culture is inexorably in the supervision space, not to be denied. Where such denials do occur, it appears that we do so at the risk of relationship, potentially imperilling the possibilities for fruitful supervision collaboration. Supervision consensus has converged down through the decades on this one crucial multicultural guideline: Supervisors are best served when they (a) initiate conversations about culture with their supervisees at supervision ’ s outset, (b) strive to consistently create a safe cultural space for such conversations, and (c) strive to open a collaborative dialogue where cultural co-learning can occur [48, 49, 51, 52]. Our interview data, from the supervisee perspective, robustly reinforce that guideline regarding international students. Where supervision appeared to be at its best, that responsibly collaborative, co-learning attitude appeared to permeate the supervisor-international supervisee relationship. Supervisors can initiate cultural conversations through two primary avenues: (a) having an open (document free) discussion; or (b) using the supervision agreement, wherein culture is accentuated as a critical supervision component, as a stimulus document for discussion [53]. Any such initiated cultural conversations ideally would be ongoing and become an integral part of the supervision process. Culture is forever and always omnipresent, not a once-and-done conversation [47]. In addition to initiating cultural conversations, our participating supervisees offered useful actions and conditions that contributed to making culture practically matter. Some of those often-mentioned actions/conditions, again taking us back to