on Diversity and Culture

This assignment this week was interesting. I was expecting each person I ask to have the answer because I figure that they would Google the answer, so without giving them the chance to Google, I caught them off guard when asking the questions. 

The first person I asked was a very close person to me, my girls father, Kenneth L. Fuster. Mr. Fuster has strong opinions about the way people view others and I imagined his answer be somewhere off the wall, but by catching him off guard gave me this answer; Culture means one upbringing, one way of life, a group or organizations' way of life by the way of their history and belief. This is a great definition of culture because it incorporate the history in which we come from. This definition does not leave out the background information of where majority of individuals in this world come from. He said Diversity means multi-understanding of different ethnic groups. Like the term multi-understanding which means that we are able to consider that we are all different. 

The second person I chose was a preschool teacher, Barbara Williams. Barbara has been teaching preschool for the past 15 years and just recently retired this pass school year. I chose her because she has a great understanding of the early childhood field. Barbara stated that culture is the lifestyle of different nationalities. Barbara's response catered to what she was seeing in the classroom on a day to day bases. She said diversity describes how you integrated different culture into one setting. This was an interesting revelation because I never thought of diversity as being integrated, but it is especially when you are working in a classroom of children. The goal is to expose different diversities.   

The last person I chose was a former drum of the church, James Polk. James has been a drummer who has been in several different environmental settings which has exposed him to many different backgrounds. James said culture is embracing all walks of life no matter race, religion, or ethnicity. I love the term embraced he used because it shows that regardless of what you are made of you are still appreciated. He stated that Diversity consist of different colors, male, female, social background, and political party. It embarks all walks of life coming together. 

Each individual had their own views of culture and diversity, but each response was based off their personal experience with those of different culture. I'm thankful that I know individuals of different culture and embrace them because I understand the true meaning of learning from each other.