Culture and Diversity

This week as we looked deeper into culture and diversity, I talked to three persons to see what their thinking was about the two.  The first person was Dahlia my twenty year old niece, who is in her second year at college. She says that to her, culture is a person’s way of life that is learned or adopted from his family as he develops. This she says included the way she dresses herself, her language and the types of food that she eats. She defines diversity as the vast variety of cultures, and ethnicities that has to do with the many different traditions and individual differences including gender, race, language and beliefs systems. She believes that your daily lifestyle demonstrate your cultural heritage, and that there is great diversity in any given culture.

The second person I interviewed was Glen, who is a tile specialist, roots poet says that acknowledging diversity would be that practice that embraces the widest cross section of people in the society. He says that it is the knowledge that all people has a right to belong. He defines Culture as those practices individual to us that defines how we live.

The third person that I interviewed was Liz: She is a young working adult from Nigeria who says that, culture is what is used to define a particular people and their practices, a way of life maybe. She describes diversity as anything that separates two types of people from each other. She went on to say that it is the differences that people represent that creates a rich diverse population.

The responses that I received from the people I interviewed reflects the some of the basic idea about culture and diversity. However, as discussed by Janet Gonzales (Laureate Ed, 2011) Culture is much more than what we see in our heritage and daily lifestyles of different people. Culture is said to go very deep, much deeper than what we see on the surface, it is more than language, religion, class, race, gender and lifestyles.

This week’s activity gave me new insights into the thinking of many parents. It allow me to look closer into the fact that the families are from various cultures, and therefore creates a diverse environment in which we are learning together. This says to me that as early childhood professionals, we should involve the families as much as possible in our classroom planning. This is in an effort to totally include the whole child and their culture. It is wise to embrace the diversity that is now such a huge part of our society.

Reference

Laureate Education (Producer). (2011). Culture and diversity [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu