In Language Arts we took a deep plunge of culture. However some of us knew what culture was before this unit. What I knew about culture before was that people had traditions and celebrations when I thought of it when I was young in Indonesia. I’ve experienced 2 cultures growing up, Australian and Indonesian. A topic came to me from this experience related to this unit was that people could feel like outsiders to their own culture because when I was young I didn’t learn Indonesian first and English was my mother tongue. I felt like an outsider to my society because I didn’t know the language. Soon later the same topic came back when I was In language arts in grade 9 and wrote how people can feel like outsiders to their own culture when they haven’t experienced it.
What extended me in this unit was that I showed more understanding to different cultures and finding similarities to what I’ve experienced in my childhood but also overcoming culture shock. My knowledge about culture before was really vague and misunderstood which led me feeling alienated, an outsider, to most things that were new to me in different culture. So this unit really opened up my mind to culture through exploring different kinds of text with the same topic. I felt empathetic towards different kinds of culture and trying to respect them as well. An example of me showing empathy was we had a trip to Hei Shui in the Sichuan-Tibetan plateau. I’ve experienced Tibetan culture and saw what it was like for the people who were living there. Most of the people during the trip felt like outsiders to Tibetan things (ex. the food) but me I just pushed away feeling alienated and just ate what they had even though some of it I didn’t like I still had a little of everything. The most part that extended my knowledge of culture Is that to understand it you have to experience it and even though if you feel like an outsider try to overcome the problems and look for something new.
The challenge in this unit was to find the main idea in the various texts with different concepts of culture. It changed my thinking but I tried to connect the idea of culture to my experience, which helped me build empathy and understanding to different ideas about culture. I used to think that people were never outsiders and they never feel like they are welcomed but that changed when I was influenced by various authors text with this idea. Overall I think this was a great unit and to end this we are eating food from different cultures and that’s another good way to experience some culture.