Sunday, July 17, 2016


Perspectives on Diversity and Culture

What is your definition of culture?
Relative 1 (female):                 Culture is the practices or rituals that are taught.
Relative 2 (male):                    Culture is your background; where you come from.
Family Friend (female):          Culture is understanding where people come from.

What is your definition of diversity?
Relative 1 (female):                 Diversity is putting different people together in one
place.
Relative 2 (male):                    Diversity is accepting everybody’s differences
Family Friend (female):          Diversity is not necessarily agreeing with but being  
accepting of other peoples’ differences.
A cultural group’s practices and rituals can be thought of as a group’s surface culture or the  things people on the outside of the group can easily see, taste and define such as a groups costumes, holidays, food and historical artifacts. In addition, an understanding of where a group’s background and their ancestors are from can be thought of as a culture’s deep culture such as their language, their values, their ideas on education, their gender and children roles, their connections to the community and  their religious beliefs, etc. (Derman-Sparks, 2010).    
According to the responses I received, diversity is not necessarily agreeing with but putting people together in one place and being accepting of other peoples differences  such as their race, gender, age, abilities, disabilities, their language, social class, economical level, their ethnicity and national origin, their religious and spiritual practices, their sexuality and after considering the examples, I found all the responses to be on-target and somewhat inclusive of all the ways culture and diversity can be explained (Gonzalez-Mena, 2008).    
References
Derman-Sparks, L., Edwards, J.O. (2010).Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and

Ourselve. pp. 56–60.

Gonzalez-Mena, J. (2008). Diversity in Early Care and Education. Boston, MA: McGraw 
           Hill. 5th ed., pp. 8–1. 

2 comments:

  1. Hello Charlene,

    I agree that diversity is not necessarily agreeing with a person, but putting people together in one place and being accepting of other peoples differences. It's important to understand diversity and how it plays a major role in our everyday lives. Thanks for sharing their responses on culture and diversity.

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  2. It looks like all the people you have interviewed thought of culture as the past and not the present. Your culture does have a past but it also has a present and a future.
    As for the people you have interviewed about diversity, it looks like the common word is difference. However, female relative 1 defines diversity as "diversity is putting different people together in one place". You can be in the same place and still group a like people together. If you take a look at my senior high school group picture we all took a picture together but you do see most of the white teenagers group together while the rest of the group was black. Is that picture really diverse?

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