Own Experience With Culture and Identity in Education

My experience with culture and identity in education relates strongly to multicultural psychology, which is ‘all aspects of human behaviour that occur when people from two or more cultural backgrounds encounter each other’ (Leung, Maddux, Galinsky, Chiu 2008). While attending a selective schools catered towards year 11 and 12 students in Sydney’s West, I found myself surrounded by a huge range of cultures, religions and ethnicities where Caucasian people were in fact the minority group within the 400 or so students in my year. So this was a huge change from my school in the Blue Mountains which was predominantly white, as was the community, but not one that I took for granted. Being exposed to real people from other cultures for a dense period of time rather than just being taught about differences in the world in a classroom really helped my learning and understanding of culture and identity in education.

This new environment was possibly the best thing for me as a student, the school offered such an integrated and supportive approach to learning that race was not even thought of during interactions, it was acknowledged but not a significant factor within such a multicultural school environment. In particular, the one thing that helped my understanding most and brought us all together was discussions in my English class. My English teacher was an incredibly intelligent and very strict woman of Malaysian descent and close to retirement. During class we would get very off topic, far away from the course and find ourselves, as a whole class, discussing the philosophy of religion and race and cultural identity. It was fascinating, our teacher held no religion to her name; she always told us that she just believed in being a good, moral person and leading a good life. And so that led to how Muslims led their lives, with personal accounts from students, and how their morals were justified by their religion. And then how that compared to Christianity, Catholicism and Buddhism etc etc etc. Even having not much to add, all I had to do was sit there and listen and be astounded by these people who were my age and going through the same schooling processes as me, but led such completely different lives.

I think the most important thing my teacher did was not identify individuals as Muslim or Christian or black or white, there was no labelling, simply a discussion prompted with questions and input invited into the conversation. So we ended up with so much information from different sources that I personally got an extremely well rounded view of where religion and culture and identity all sat in relation to each other, our school and the world.

The understanding I gained from this exposure to learning was that in merely being immersed in and exposed to only one culture, the learned routines and conventional knowledge of that culture had the potential to limit my creative conceptual expansion. But because I was learning about incongruent concepts, they provoked an exploration into their interrelations and so ‘the process of resolving incongruent ideas may lead to greater cognitive complexity in those with multicultural experiences than in those who have had exposure to only one culture or a limited set of cultural norms’ (Leung et. al, 2008).

Therefore, being a part of a densely populated multicultural school environment is very important. Because learning from discussions with real people rather than from a text book promotes a true understanding of culture and identity, assisting with sensitivity and empathetic views of race that can be integrated into our everyday lives and most importantly, a high functions school environment.

References

Leung, A. K., Maddux, W. W., Galinsky, A. D., Chiu, C. (2008). Multicultural Experience Enhances Creativity: The When and How. American Psychologist, 63(3), p.169-181