What tools can we use to become open minded?
The most important thing to understanding another culture is to understand your own culture, this is also the first step of intercultural effectiveness. The assimilation is learning by adapting new knowledge into your own knowledge. Learning through accommodation means changing your knowledge and replacing it with new, reorganized the plans in your mind. A discourse shitt so to say.
An example of this is the way we introduce ourselves to someone.The information that we give in the Western world may not be relevant to the other cultures.
So, culture shock may appear, it is the feeling of disorientation or confusion that often occurs when a person leaves a familiar place and moves to an unfamiliar place. The reaction may be both physical and psychological, and some people probably ask themselves why they chose to leave their familiar surroundings. They have this experience because there are a multitude of new things. You have to prepare yourself before approaching to the other culture so maybe you don't have much culture shock.
So, culture shock may appear, it is the feeling of disorientation or confusion that often occurs when a person leaves a familiar place and moves to an unfamiliar place. The reaction may be both physical and psychological, and some people probably ask themselves why they chose to leave their familiar surroundings. They have this experience because there are a multitude of new things. You have to prepare yourself before approaching to the other culture so maybe you don't have much culture shock.
We have also to recognize what it is familiar from other cultures for us and then we have to integrate it into our own. We have to ask questions to know more about these unfamiliar places or to know about understanding situation. In class we did an exercise about this. We saw three pictures about different classes in different places in the world: Laos, Denmark and Eritrea. Here is what is familiar and unfamiliar for us:
In this way progress can be made on the long way of globalization. If we can not accommodate a situation ourselves there is a risk of seeking understanding through stereotypes. But how can we look a new culture without seeing it from our own culture? We can’t do this. What we can do is to challenge the stereotypes that normally we have and then we try to change them, because they don’t really show the true essence of a culture. It just shows what society in general wants to see and that is not always truth or the most outstanding values of that culture. We don’t have to believe all stereotypes and prejudices when there is a feature that we don’t understand from other cultures. We must try to understand other cultures by asking questions about how they live, what are their customs or values, which are most important... this is the only way we can create an open-minded society because we can understand the essence of another culture, always taking into account all values of your own. So this is what we should teach in schools, because that's where we are training the future society, it is a globalization process that must begin in the early years and it evolves along the students' lives.
In this way progress can be made on the long way of globalization. If we can not accommodate a situation ourselves there is a risk of seeking understanding through stereotypes. But how can we look a new culture without seeing it from our own culture? We can’t do this. What we can do is to challenge the stereotypes that normally we have and then we try to change them, because they don’t really show the true essence of a culture. It just shows what society in general wants to see and that is not always truth or the most outstanding values of that culture. We don’t have to believe all stereotypes and prejudices when there is a feature that we don’t understand from other cultures. We must try to understand other cultures by asking questions about how they live, what are their customs or values, which are most important... this is the only way we can create an open-minded society because we can understand the essence of another culture, always taking into account all values of your own. So this is what we should teach in schools, because that's where we are training the future society, it is a globalization process that must begin in the early years and it evolves along the students' lives.
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