Perspectives of Culture and Diversity

A few weeks ago, I began a new course entitled Perspectives of Diversity and Equality. This week, my professor asked our class to gain a definition of the term culture from three friends or acquaintances that had a differing cultural background than ourselves. 

 

Here are the responses that I received from my three friends:

Culture:

• The ability to see, feel, and touch how people other than yourself live.
• A way of life for a certain group of people
• The traditions of individuals or groups of people.

Diversity:

• The exposure of multiple avenues of multiple groups to each other.
• The differences in culture amongst people.
• The uniqueness of individuals, groups, and races.

Throughout this course, we have studied several aspects of culture and diversity. In our main course text culture is referred to as " how particular groups of people live" (Derman-Sparks & Edwards, 2010). I believe that this is a similar yet simpler definition of those that I received from my friends.  I would also make the same statement regarding how the course has referred to the term diversity, which is also very similar to the definition of diversity provided by my friends.

 

I do not feel that the definitions provided by my friends omitted any information or aspects to the defining of the terms culture and diversity that differed from the ways that the terms have been utilized throughout my current course. Additionally, I must admit that I was not surprised by this fact not was I surprised that my friend's had very similar definitions to those of myself. Despite a differing of culture, I believe that we as humans inherently seek out those that have similar mind sets to our own so the discovery that I shared a similar perspective.

 

Reference

 

Derman-Sparks, L., & Edwards, J. O. (2010). Anti-bias education

for young children and ourselves. Washington, DC: National

Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).