Perspectives on Culture and Diversity

            For this assignment, I asked my mother, husband, and best friend/work colleague to define culture and diversity.  My mother is a former elementary school teacher, my husband is a lawyer, and best friend and work colleague is about 3 years younger than me and is African American.  My mother said that culture was the way of life of a particular people.  My husband defined it as your family history and traditions.  It is the thing that connects one to other people.  My friend said it was the commonalities and traditions shared amongst a group of people.  My mother defined diversity as the differences in people and everything, differences in race, culture, income, etc.  It is everything about them that is different.  My husband said diversity is differences based on culture.  My friend defined diversity as the valued variations or differences between people.

            When reflecting on their definitions of culture, I noticed that everyone said it was a way of life and culture is shared between people.  People are connected through culture.  This is also one of my definitions and what we have learned in class.  People identify themselves by their culture.  It reminds me of social identities and our first reflective journal assignment about “I am.”  People connect to each other through their cultures because of shared ideas, beliefs, and identities.  The word diversity itself speaks of differences.  Everyone commented in their definitions that diversity is about differences between people.  My mother went to describe ways people are different and aspects of diversity that we have discussed in class such as race and income level.  I love how my friend said that diversity was valued variations and differences.  I think the word value is key because that is what we are learning and striving for:  to value everyone and see differences as beauty.  The word “variations” was another important word in her definition because as we have learned, there are variations within cultures that create diversity.  This is something we need to remember so we do not make assumptions about someone based on what their culture may be. 

            For me, a huge omission in everyone’s definition was the idea of deep culture.  Each definition alluded to surface culture and did not speak of the cultures that are hidden.  My husband did touch on family traditions, which is an aspect of deep culture. But for the most part, people were speaking of culture in broad surface culture terms.  Also most spoke of culture as a way of life or tradition, but culture is more than that.  We are also born into certain cultures such as genders and races.  These necessarily do not define us but we do not need to forget that each one is an aspect of culture.  I am struggling to find omissions in the diversity definitions.  Diversity does mean there are differences between others.  I would have hoped that one of them would have gone further into diversity and talked about how it was not a bad thing and that diversity should not define us.  I guess through my learning and newfound knowledge, I had high expectations of what people would say.  Through that, the biggest omission is not going into further detail about differences.

            The biggest influence on my thinking is that we need to further educate everyone on culture and diversity so they can see past the surface of these two words.  I would like for people to dig deeper and contemplate the meanings of culture and diversity.  I suppose I am being idealistic.  However, it is important that people consider these words and what they mean.  Both influence each other and have a huge impact in early childhood.  I realize that we need to work harder than ever for people to understand the importance of culture and diversity and its impact on early childhood.