Perspectives on Diversity and Culture

         

            I found it very interesting that the assignment this week was to find out what other people thought about the meaning of culture and diversity because it just so happened that in my second grade classroom our Language Arts story this week had the word culture as a vocabulary word.  I was able to ask my entire class what they believed culture means and I actually only had a couple of children raise their hand.  The first student that I called on (a boy) told me that culture means when people are from different countries.  I then took it a step farther and asked them if they could tell me what diversity means.  This seemed much harder for them and the answer I ended up getting was that it meant they spoke a different language.  I was able to use this assignment as a learning tool for my second graders and teach them what the two words actually mean.  We then did an activity where they had to look through magazines and find pictures that show what each vocabulary word means.  They put pictures of all kinds of things (people celebrating, people talking with each other, people eating together) on the poster for the word culture.  I could tell by the end of the activity that they now knew what the word meant. 

            I then came home and asked my son (who is also in second grade but in a different school from where I teach) if he could tell me what either word meant.  He thought for a long time but was not able to give me a definition for either word.  He told me that he had never heard of them before.  This led me to ask my 9 year old daughter.  She also had to think about this for a long time but finally told me that culture means where you live and what’s around you.  When I asked her about the word diversity, she said she didn’t know because she had never heard of that word. 

            Next I talked to my 17 year old niece and asked her what she thought culture was.  Her first words were “That’s a hard one; I need to think about it.”  She then said that culture is something in a certain group of people’s history that affects the way they live, their religious beliefs, and the way they raise their children.  I then asked her about diversity.  She said that diversity is people from different cultures joining together.

            After talking with these kids, I realized that I needed to speak with someone from a different era so I called my 87 year old grandmother.  I asked her what culture is and she paused and had to think and then she gave me a couple of things that she thought it was.  She said culture is different names of things and then she said that it means the different things you do.  When I asked her about diversity she said she didn’t know about that without having to look it up. 

            In reflecting on these responses I can see that the definitions that people had about culture was mostly the surface culture that we discussed.  They talked about people from other places and religious beliefs.  I think my grandmother had it the closest to what we have learned when she said that it is the different things that you do.  This reminded me of what Janet Gonzalez Mena said in the video when she said that culture is the unconscious rules that govern everything that we do (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010).  I have learned so far through this course that diversity is the ways in which we are different in all of the aspects of our lives and no one that I talked to said this for a definition.  Actually most of the people I talked to were not able to give me a definition at all because they didn’t know or had never heard the word before.   

            I think that most of the answers that I received omitted things that I learned like the true definition of diversity being how we are different and that the cultures that we have are what make us diverse.  No one talked about how culture is everything about us from our race and religion to the traditions and customs that are shared within a family.  No one also mentioned how everyone comes from a different culture and can suffer or soar because of it.   There was not one response about people not being accepted because of their culture or mention of biases related to culture.

            I was extremely surprised by the responses that I received about culture and the way it has influenced my thinking is that we are not doing an adequate job of educating our youth about what culture truly means.  I think that there is the misconception (especially in my area) that culture is basically when someone is from a different country or speaks a different language.  I realize now that as a nation in general we need to be aware of culture and the depth of it.  Many people are just seeing the surface of culture and not seeing how deep it goes within a family and also how it can help to shape the people that we become.  I have seen from these responses that I need to educate my own children more and teach them that their culture comes from our family and the way that we do things together.  I also need to make sure that they know that diversity means the way in which we are different and the differences that people have need to be celebrated.  This assignment really opened my eyes to how important it is to talk about these two topics and teach them as well.  Knowledge is power and everyone (especially our youth) needs to be armed with the knowledge that we are all diverse and that diversity makes up the cultures that shapes us as human beings. 

References:

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer) (2010). Culture and Diversity. [Course Media].

            Baltimore, MD: Walden University.