Cultural Impressions

IEP Professional Development Session

Thursday, April 19, 2012

1:30- 2:30

AL/ESL Conference Room

Cultural Impressions
Your student could be a big fish in their country. Encourage them to be a big fish in a big world.

Jonathan J. Orr, Ph.D., LPC, NCC
Clinical Assistant Professor
Department of Counseling and Psychological Services

Managing Within-Group Differences: Balancing Competency with Complexity

Dr. Jonathan Orr will discuss his work on cultural competency and the importance of recognizing characteristics of individual people when working with groups of people from other cultures.  The session includes experiential exercises designed to cultivate a more complex view of cultural competency. 

  

    When encountering second lanaguage learners, the lecturer said we should keep in mind that your student was a big fish in their counties and encourage students to be a big fish in the big world. Personally, this comment was very impressing.Emphasizing the culture influence, the lecturer, Jonathan provided us with a simple exercise.

My name is…(Joohyun Chun)

My mountain is …(high and steep)

My valley is …(peaceful and full of flowers.)

My river is …(narrow)

My people are …(kind and friendly)

I am…(humble)

       When interacting with others, people presume a number of things about others. The presumption is about you and others around you. Individual is more than culture difference. The lecture points out that we tend to rely on published book made out of cultural capsulation when we understand people from different countries. This kind of book can help people to have general background knowledge or to understand distinctive cultural patterns. However, there could be exception and unusual patterns out of typical characteristics. Even within one culture, individualism exists. Furthermore, people often change their persona based on the client who they talk with. According to the ecological theory, we can formulate the interaction and presumption among individuals like P(erson) x E(nvironment) = B(ehavior). People’s behavior could be decided by their personal background elements and environment about them. Person implies gender, age, education, socioeconomic situation, birth order and so on.

P(erson) x E(nvironment) = B(ehavior)

Reflection: People attending the lecture were English teachers or second language teachers’ teachers. The most impressive part of the lecturer presentation was that we’ve got to understand students’ cultural struggles. He also stated that the students could be a big fish in their country, but they are a small fish in this country. The point is teachers can encourage the students to be a bigger fish in the bigger world and validate the reason they should keep working to adopt themselves to a new environment.