Saturday, November 17, 2012

Perspectives on Culture and Diversity

I spoke to three different people on what they thought culture and diversity is.  Their responses are below. 


Culture is:

·         my background, how I was raised to believe and traditions that I was taught as a young child. Most come from my Norwegian/English relatives which are integrated with my Christian family values. These cultural values dictate how we celebrate holidays and birthdays, how we live day to day and what we do when someone dies.

·         is all the unique ways of living within a group such as the food you eat, the way you communicate, verbally and non-verbally, the way you raise children, the way you dress, the entertainment that is accepted, etc.

·         not only the environment in which you are born and raised in but the environment that you partake in everyday. 

Diversity is:

·         how accepting we are of other’s beliefs and traditions. How do I immerse myself with another culture that I live in and around and how much do I follow what other people believe.

·         the opposite of same and monotone. Diversity is plural. It’s the many ways of doing things, seeing things, speaking things, etc.

·         unknown.  There is culture, ethnic and sexual things to consider. 


After getting their responses I thought about how the two words can sometimes be thought as one in the same but they are different.  We have not discussed in class the issue of homosexuality.  I think that this is a topic that needs to be discussed more even though people are very passionate about the topic.  We need to be able to put aside our differences because in today’s world we are seeing how diverse families are.

Their responses touched all many things that we have talked about in the class – traditions, values, beliefs and holidays. 

 The responses also help me to understand why people are the way they are.  Two of the responses came from co workers.  After talking with them I can see now how their definitions reflect in the work that they do. 

4 comments:

  1. Malinda,

    I see how diversity and culture goes hand in hand. Diversity is an aspect of culture and everyone's culture is diverse from other cultures. I think of diversity as the differences among individuals or groups.

    Luci

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  2. Malinda,

    I believe that diversity and culture go hand in hand because culture is who we are and diversity is what makes us different. I agree with you we all need to put aside our biases and difference and we are all different and we can learn from each other.

    Catherine

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  3. Hi Malinda, I think it was interesting that you said two of the persons interviewed were co-workers and you can see how their opinions of culture and diversity are reflected in their work. Getting to know a person's culture and beliefs, helps us to understand them better and why they do the things they do in the way that they do them!

    I know we did not speak specifically about homosexuality in this course, but it was mentioned in one of the articles that we read that families can be made up of same sex parents. I agree this is something that we need to be aware of and perhaps discuss how to deal with so that we will not be taken aback if we find ourselves dealing with this at some point.

    Delores

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  4. Thank you for your post! I enjoyed reading your interviewers responses. My favorite was ‘’Diversity is how accepting we are of other’s beliefs and traditions’’. This was a powerful statement for me because when I think about diversity I think of intermingling different things, but I do not think about tolerance. For us to coexist we need to be accepting of things are different from our own culture. I like that…diversity is hand-in-hand with tolerance!! Thank you!

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