Marshmallow Challenge

I think a teacher could use the four skills of Cultural Competency in addition to the Cultural Iceberg as a way to determine the biases that they hold and fight against them so they aren’t favoring students over others. For example, a teacher can use the idea of the concept of Awareness to realize that not everyone is the same from the same culture and want to dive deeper into a certain student’s culture to be able to understand them better than just simply the surface level things. They might want to learn about the things on the lower level of the “iceberg” because they feel like it is important for that student’s culture. As I am in the great majority of “culture” (as a white person from America) I do not have a great example for this in my own personal iceberg. But a similar example would be if a student wanted to know how certain cultures/people can touch each other casually. Some cultures are very touchy upon close friendships or meetings, while others abstain from it as much as possible. Me personally, growing up in Alaska and my household, I typically shy away from any sort of touch unless it is from one of my most trusted friends or family members, which is something I grew up with not only because of general anxiety but because no one in my family really allowed other adults or people to touch them unless someone was specifically instructed to hug them. That’s just something I grew up with and it is an example of how a teacher might look deeper into cultural norms to see whether or not the student would be fine with touching without having to directly ask them. 

A teacher might use the Cultural Competency skill of Attitude in order to reveal their own implicit biases and not use them while teaching. As Awareness is a skill focusing on one’s beliefs and values based on differences in culture, learning about your own cultural and values would be a good way to remove and implicit biases as well as learning of other’s differences and embracing them instead of throwing them away as poppycock. An example of this from my iceberg (though not really because, after all, I don’t really have a culture to speak of–I just exist) is that one of my core beliefs is that even though all humans should be treated with basic respect (such as be spoken to normally or not be rude to a stranger), but actual respect of a human should be earned. This is not how it is in all–or even most–cultures. Such as in Chinese culture where sons of the family are expected to take care of their parents once they are old and have respect for them no matter what they do or what happens. As someone who is not in that culture, it might be a little difficult to understand that from a teaching perspective without properly learning about it, so I would likely develop that that is a “bad” practice because of my own beliefs. Being aware of your biases and why things in other cultures are the way that they are is a great way to combat this.

Knowledge is the Cultural Competency strategy of being able to understand the difference between different cultures and their similarities. This strategy is important for teachers to learn because of how it corresponds to the awareness of other cultures and not having yourself in prejudice when you are teaching. An example from my iceberg of things being similar but not quite the same is my beliefs that gods do exist even though I do not worship any and people who use pagan types of religion. People who are pagan typically hold belief in more than one god and they can go across pantheons, so we are similar in that regard. Being able to see that similarity can be very useful for teacher because you would be able to better understand someone’s culture when it’s at least sort of similar to your own and you would be able to better emphasize with them and their culture without having to go through the process of learning something totally new without any sort of familiarity.

Being able to use Cultural Competence to perfect communication is a crucial skill and tool (Skill) used by teachers in order to be able to teach their students without bias and with thoroug communication and understanding between their students without having to have any sort of negative feelings between you and your student.

I do not know exactly what I will be doing on this site so I will keep this updated whenever told to or possible

I just want to keep this site simple and to the point