Cultural Awareness

EDU321: Introduction to Serving English Language Learners
Janet Cagley
February 1, 2013

Cultural Awareness
As an educator, how will you ensure that you are sensitive to and aware of the cultures represented in your classroom, school, and community? Well that’s a good question, but before we can talk about that lets define the word cultural awareness. It is define as the ability to look outside of ourselves and be aware of the cultural values, and customs of the culture we are in. Now I can go back to the question and what I would do is take each child’s culture and incorporate it in my lesson for the week; by that I would take a culture each day and gather information about it with the help of the student or students in that culture. Starting off with a discussion about the different cultures and then we would make flashcards of words they might not know or understand with the help of the children from that particular culture. After that we would do different activities such as a few I remember doing back when I was in school like student fishbowl and dialogue role plays. In the student fishbowl activity this activity allows each student to share their ideas and experiences with the class because each child’s story will be different. With the dialogue role play this gives students the opportunity to know what to do when they might be in a situation concerning topics like racism, heterosexism, and sexism. It will prepare them to know what to say and what