Perspectives on Diversity and Culture

How do people define culture and diversity?

My task this week was to find at least three friends, family members, acquaintances, and /or colleagues to share their definitions of culture and diversity, with at least one person being culturally different from me.

I intended to use several colleagues from work as we have a diverse staff and I thought it would be an interesting conversation to have. I explained that it was for my graduate school work but unfortunately most of my colleagues were very uncomfortable answering the question. I found this quite interesting and do not know the reason for their hesitation. Were they uncomfortable because of the diversity of people sitting at the lunchroom table at the time? Did they think there was a correct or incorrect answer? I explained there was not. Did they believe I or others would judge them for their answer? I will seek the answer to these questions over time.

 I did speak to one colleague who entered the field of Early Education straight out of high school after studying ECE for two years as part of our local poly tech. Next, I spoke to a friend and neighbor who is a Spanish Language teacher and of Cuban decent.  Third I spoke to my daughter, a recent college graduate with degrees in Political Science, International Studies and Spanish.

My colleague defined culture as someone’s ethnicity, race and family values. She saw diversity as the differences in hair and eye color.

My friend defined culture as what we bring to the table. Culture is what makes you a person and is a reflection of your heritage- art, music and food. She teaches her Spanish Language students that we shouldn’t generalize about culture. She teaches about culture to deepen the understanding of the language and open her student world view to make them more accepting. She believes it is easier to learn and appreciate the language if you understand the culture behind it. She shared that a professor once that stated we should not be teaching tolerance but teaching acceptance. Tolerance means I can just barely stand you, who wants to be tolerated?  Her definition of diversity means the differences from other things. Each one of us is different from each other. Even within each of us there are many differences.

My daughter stated that a culture can reflect a specific group of people that have a similar belief system.  Culture is formed because people live in the same location and have shared traditions and world view. Diversity has many levels. The same ethnic group may be diverse do to religious beliefs and geographic location. Every aspect of a person influences diversity. A person’s gender identity, education level, income level, political and religious views and ethnicity contribute to their diversity. Culture forms around those things. There are cultures that form with regard to ethnicity, gender identity and even education level. She also spoke about the cultural influence of language. Language within the United States often reflects the part of country you live in with differences in vocabulary and pronunciation. She also discussed how many of the Romance languages have words that are assigned a gender and how that reflects on the male/ female roles within that culture.

Many of the aspects of culture that I have studied in this course were reflected in the answers I received. The examples given show an understanding that a person’s cultural identity goes much deeper than their ethnic group.  Family values, gender roles, extended family were all touched upon.  Omissions included health care and housing arraignments. These might have been left out because I just asked for a definition and did not want to lead the responses in any way. The answers and non-answers that I received had made me aware that this topic still makes some individual uncomfortable. We obviously need more training in the field of Early Childhood Education to increase the comfort level because if we cannot have the discussion amongst ourselves how are we to have respectful conversations with the parents of our increasingly diverse students.