How Do You Teach Cultural Awareness?

When searching for a blog about cultural awareness, I came across this entry from a blog on Flat Classrooms: Transforming learning through global collaboration.  It seems to have been written by several different people.  "Where are We Really from: Developing Cultural Awareness in Citizens" explains the importance and process of teaching students about other cultures.

I really like how within the first paragraph it explains, "the core of cultural awareness is respecting and embracing cultural difference and valuing the cultural learning taking place." This is such a true statement.  People need to learn how to respect and embrace different cultures.  When they do that, they will begin to enjoy learning about other cultures.  Additionally, people will notice when you are excited about learning their culture.  They will probably be more willing to associate with you as well as work with you.  This idea can be applied to businesses as well as my future missionary travels.

The blog post then goes on to explain the importance of understanding students's prior knowledge about particular cultures.  Teachers need a starting point.  They need to know what stereotypes students have in order to begin to eliminate those stereotypes. I feel like that it the same for me.  I need to sit down and document the prior knowledge I have about all the countries I will be traveling to in the next year.  It would not be good to enter into these countries thinking incorrect things about them.

Another aspect of the blog post that I found useful was the the section of Language and Cultural Awareness.  It explains how words can have different meanings in different cultures.  The authors then provide various websites that can be used as resources to learn about language differences.  All of these resources just further my opinion that technology is a very important aspect in discovering more about cultures.

Finally, I really liked how the post was concluded with explaining that the whole point of cultural awareness was to better cross-cultural interactions.  The world is growing so much smaller through the use of the internet.  People need to be able to interact with each other positively and respectfully through its use.