5/18/20; Week 5: Response to Cultural Paradigms Videos

The assigned videos for the Cultural Paradigms lesson this week were very interesting. As Brother Ivers explains, a paradigm is a sort of culturally constructed world view. We all have paradigms, or ways we view the world, and they are shaped by the culture we inhabit as we grow up. Our different cultural paradigms impact the way we interpret the world around us, and people from different countries (and sometimes even people from different places or different families in the same country!) can interpret the same event in very different ways, because they have different cultural paradigms.

A good example of this was given in the TED Talk video, “Cultural Clashes in Defining Beauty.” The woman who gave that talk was raised in western Africa, where being thin, like she was, was considered poor, unhealthy, and ugly. All of that changed when she moved to America, and suddenly, with the very same, thin, body, she was considered beautiful, because the cultural paradigm in America is different.

Another example of this occurred in the third video we watched, where different Sudanese refugees to America were interviewed and filmed showing the tremendous differences between the country they came from (the Sudan) and the country they now live in (America). They had to be overtly taught even small things we take for granted, like throwing trash in a trash can in their own home, instead of throwing it out the window outside.

For me, the concept these videos taught was not new. I have lived abroad before, and I have experienced many cultural differences when doing so. However, I was still surprised at the extent of how many things were so unfamiliar for the Sudanese refugees – in the video, some of them didn’t know what a butter packet was in their airplane food, and since they didn’t know what it was or how to use it, they ate the chunk of butter whole, thinking that was what they were supposed to do. It would never have occurred to me to teach a refugee how to use butter, or that they need to use a trash can instead of just throwing trash out the window. It was a good reminder that even though I have lived abroad and dealt with people from many different cultures before, there are still likely to be cultural differences between me and some of my future students that I don’t – and can’t – anticipate, and I’ll have to be aware of that and find ways to work through it.

I think one of the first steps to working through differences in cultural paradigms is being aware of them. Delali Bright, the woman who gave the TED Talk, shared that when she moved to America, and was suddenly considered beautiful for her thinness, she experienced some confusion, and didn’t know which cultural paradigm she should believe. In the end, she realized that simply buying into either of them, without thought and awareness, was damaging. We need to be consciously aware of what cultural paradigms we have inherited. Only by being aware of them can we choose whether or not to buy into them. Only by being aware of them can we avoid judging others who don’t share those same paradigms. Only by being aware of them can we best interact with, understand, and help our students.