Blog Post 1: Culture

            I found this week’s readings about culture to be very interesting. As a Bilingual Education major, we learn what we can do to use the different cultures in our classroom and how we can incorporate culture into our teaching. It is important to get to know our students and I think that by knowing and understanding their culture will help as a teacher to know the student and their needs better. On the first day of class, we were asked to write our definition of what culture is and after reading the articles, I have never realized how much culture is constantly changing and is a very difficult term to define. Now, I am not sure what I think culture really means.

            After reading the Dwight Atkinson’s article, it helped me reflect on my own beliefs about culture as a future educator. Before reading the article, I did not really know what the relationship between TESOL and culture. It helped me to understand that “one cannot really be understood without seeing one as part of the other,” which not many people understand either (Atkinson, p. 648). One thing I found to be interesting in this article were the Six Principles of Culture. As the article states, “one cannot talk about culture in any very satisfying way without discussing its theoretical background, especially when such discussions are currently so important in related fields and disciplines,” (Atkinson, p. 641).

            In the Kumaravadivelu article “Cultural Globalization and Language Education,” he discusses the impact of cultural globalization and its affect on second- and foreign-language education. It made me think of how cultural globalization will impact the students in my classroom and what I can do to deal with these kinds of issues.