Cultural awareness - trainer
1. Cultural awareness
1.3. Tolerance to diversity and multiculturalism
Tolerance to diversity and multiculturalism is necessary for understanding and building our international communication skills that empower us as active citizens, workers and agents of public good in an even more just and democratic world than the one we live and work in today.
Self-assessment: Carry out self-assessment to target learners about competences in tolerance to diversity and multiculturalism.
Aims of tolerance to diversity and multiculturalism competences:
- to provide vital insight into the relative nature of “normal standards”
- to raise awareness of a common human destiny
- to minimize anxiety or fear for the unknown
- to learn to build and enrich the public good
- to enhance democracy and justice
- to understand the importance of having “a voice”
Activity:
Let learners study the pictures of different family modes (hetero- and homosexual), sub-cultural representations (people with a lot of tattoos / body art), various clothing styles, age groups, religions and/or races. Help them remember whether they know some of these representations from their real life and then analyze the historical development of their wider acceptance in the society.
- Why are they more accepted nowadays than in the past?
- What do they all have in common?
- Who decides what is going to be accepted or not?
- What does it mean to be different?
- Do you have any prejudices about any social groups/representations?
- What can make you change your opinion.
- Are you different from someone else?
Activity:
Get learners to consider how different cultures see “others” and discuss the reasons for that. What do, for instance, Europeans think is typical for Asians and vice versa? Where do our generalizations come from?
Activity:
Choose some visual representations of various interpersonal communications from different parts of the world and make learners try to find out and identify the context :
- what is missing?
- whose voices are not heard?
- who is absent?
- how does it differ from your own surrounding?
