Teaching, Learning and Working in Cultural Diversity

Running head: TEACHING, LEARNING AND WORKING IN CULTURAL DIVERSITY
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Teaching, Learning and Working in Cultural Diversity
Name
Institution

TEACHING, LEARNING AND WORKING IN CULTURAL DIVERSITY 2
Introduction
Culture refers to the social character and norms that guide an individual in a society.
Culture is considered an essential concept in anthropology. Culture different differs from one
community to another (Richardson et al 2017). Generally, culture refers to the way of living
ranging from dance, music, eating, ritual, religion and clothing.
An identity is a sense of belonging to a defined group of people. According to Tajfel,
1979) he proposed that the groups (such as social class, clan, and hockey team) individuals
are related to were a valuable source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a sense of
social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world.
Cultural diversity refers to the existence of two or more cultures in one society. The
different cultures should integrate and respect each other religion is paramount. Cultural
diversity occurs in places where people from different ethnicities come together to do a
particular activity. For example learning institutions, churches and meetings
Culture, Identity and Cultural Diversity
Migration or rather movement of people into different places results in cultural
diversity. When people migrate from one place to another, they carry with them their way of
life and the norms in their homeland (Geddes and Scholten, 2016) .For example, one might
migrate from Australia and work in Canada in which the person will develop other cultures in
the new working place, and it would have led to multi-cultures existing in the same
community or a society. Culture is never permanent since people interact in all aspects of life.
Identity of an individual usually develops when one has mastered the culture of a
place. The sense of belonging to a particular group or society generally means that there are
certain characters or behaviour in a person that can be identified to be belonging to one

TEACHING, LEARNING AND WORKING IN CULTURAL DIVERSITY 3
specific group or a community. A good example is for those students who take their further
studies in Australia. You find that the student in the initial stages may feel isolated from the
significant population because of not fitting the current culture in Australia. As time passes
the student adapts and adapts in the new culture, and hence the sense of belonging is
developed.
Even though culture is ever changing in nature and presence of cultural diversities in
our working, learning and teaching environments, one should learn to coexist with each other
so that the sense of belonging can develop hence peaceful co-existence between cultural
diversity (Zembylas, 2011).
Culture, acculturation and intercultural interactions
Studying or working in an environment whereby a person is from a 'small' culture
may be challenging and encouraging at the same time. The challenges come with adapting to
the new environment, but encouragement comes when one invents ways of tackling them
more effectively and efficiently, which the great culture may not be expecting. For example,
a person may have a job transfer from a car assembling industry in Nigeria, and land in
German in a similar industry. The worker may be stereotyped by the notion that Africans are
primitive and incompetent and cannot work with the new machines competitively. However,
the worker may even perform better than some of the longs serving workers in the company
and disapproves the thinking of the large culture.
Van Oord (2008) argues that international and intercultural belonging of the students
cannot be used to determine the fundamental values and character of the learning institution.
For Von, changing from global to cross-cultural view for learning purposes may fail to shed a
light of knowledge to students, and mislead them instead. He suggested that a more
comprehensive ground of handling linkages between the groups, such as social identity