WEEK 3- PERSPECTIVES ON DIVERSITY AND CULTURE

For this assignment I was asked to call at least three persons and to ask them to give a definition of culture and diversity. I decided to ask the following persons: My colleague, my eldest daughter and sister. These three persons are close to me. My colleague believes that culture is about our beliefs systems and the simple things in life that affect our lives every day and she believes diversity speaks to how unique an individual is. My colleague who is a very close friend works in the early childhood field as a sector support supervisor. She has to interact with many persons, including many of the external stakeholders. My colleague’s definition speaks to one of the main characteristic of what culture is. She mentioned that the nature of her job must take culture into perspective because in planning projects and workshops it is integral to understand the culture of families and practitioners. Although diversity is not a big issue in her job, she also believes that diversity must also be taken into consideration because the early childhood field is slowing changing in Jamaica. There are small evidences that diversity will soon be a factor to contend with in the future of early childhood. My sister is older than I am and she teaches and is a guidance counselor at very prominent Catholic high school. My sister believes culture relates not only to our way of life but to our value system. She also sees diversity as having a various persons who might share different cultures and religions. My sister says diversity is not prominent at her school but there is a small population of children from two particular ethnic groups present, that is, the Chinese and the Indians. She says it is important that as a teacher of religion she must be very mindful of the diverse groups in her class because they are small in numbers they become lost in the system. My sister also pointed out that although many of the children shared many common cultural attributes, the families from which these children came from had what we could refer to as a sub-culture and so it was sometimes difficult to get children to align their cultural beliefs and adopt to the belief system of the school because this high school is influenced by the Catholic faith. This simply means that the children had to conform to the belief system during their time at the school. My daughter was the youngest of the three persons I chose to ask about culture and diversity. My daughter has had her encounter with different cultures and diversity as early as her prep school years and so I thought it would be interesting to get her opinion about what she believed culture and diversity are. My daughter defined culture as the way we live our lives such as the traditions, the lifestyle such as fashion, food, trends and how we interact with each other. She sees diversity as very paradoxical; because even though we might be different in the way we look, our language and our heritage she believes we are so similar because our human nature is that need to want to have a feeling of belonging and to be loved. She believes that we all do things differently but most times it ends up with the same result. I learned from this experience that different persons have a different view of what culture and diversity are. It is also important that we learn to accept each other for who we really are and be open -minded and be willing to learn from each other. I also found my daughter’s reaction to diversity really different from my colleague’s and my sister’s because my daughter believes that no matter how different we are we are similar. Diversity and culture are very wide topic but I believe my daughter came the closest to incorporating many of the characteristics of culture and diversity.