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What is Cultural Literacy - Coggle Diagram
What is Cultural Literacy
Local Cultural Awareness
Formal education tends to place little value on such practical knowledge and skills, preferring instead abstract, technical or generalisable skills suitable for further advancing industrialisation and economic expansion.
Outdoor learning is particularly suitable for drawing on the grassroots expertise in sustainability found in local communities.
The ability to accept and respect knowledge within local cultures and communities are more successful as it passed on intergenerationally through tradition and non- formal education.
Having learners choose their own community-based project to complete the assessment makes the learning real and has immediate consequences for the learner's life and sustainability of their locality or region.
The ability to accept and respect knowledge within local cultures and communities is also necessary for developing cultural literacy.
This direct experience of sustainability within local communities can act as a basis for an increased understanding of international development issues, particularly the need to conserve, rather than destroy, aspects of cultures around the world that are already sustainable.
Cross-Cultural Awareness
The purposes are not only for increasing trade and growth for one community, but rather uses it to maintain local cultural and social sustainability for both communities.
One activity that can help raise awareness of how sustainability development can be tainted by economic values of market expansion is to involve students in critical analysis of how sustainable development is represented by transnational corporations.
E.g. certain communities continued their cultural outdoor lifestyles but worked with the external agencies to enhance sustainable living practices and increase the quality of life for communities in relation to health, education, environmental protection and conservation.
Cultural literacy can help prepare learners to contribute to developing sustainable societies that reflect and maintain local cultural traditions rather than imposing dominant cultural values and social systems.
Paralleling is a method where we can reflect our culture with other culture to find the similarity so that we believe in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.
Protocols that provide guidelines for cultural appropriate behaviors that assist with cultural sensitivity, awareness and respect when working with local cultures are often developed by the government of the host nation itself.
We can learn about other cultures in deeper and respectful learning by ‘paralleling’ different cultural traditions, beliefs and social systems.
These guidelines are extremely useful in coming to an understanding of the complexity of cultural issues and the importance of cultural literacy for sustainability.
Learning about other culture are easier these days as we can use nowadays technology ( internet, consulting academic literature, popular media).
Cultural literacy includes the ability to examine other cultures critically and gain ideas to sustainability from them.
Personal Skills for Coping with Being a Change Agent
Being a part of a group with shared values can provide learners with valuable social support.
Self confidence and self-esteem can be built through involvement in supportive networks of people with common goals but within local communities and globally in wider sustainability and global citizenship movement.
Skills in resisting bullying and harassment. Requires a deep sensitivity to the cultural context and important part of cultural literacy.
Skills in confident, persuasive public speaking to express their vision of a better world plus evidences as back up.
Practical research skills through self-directed learning and mentored projects.
Knowledge, skills in seeking out reliable up-to-date and accessible information of latest climate change to neoliberal critiques of sustainability and global citizenship.
Critical Reflection and Thinking
Critical reflection and thinking process would naturally progress in higher education until a comprehensive and critical examination is undertaken with innovative and achievable actions for cultural and social change being provided by the learner.
One activity to encourage critical reflective thinking is provideing learners with a piece of discourse about sustainibility from popular media (magazines, websites, advertisements, newspaper).
It demonstrate an awareness that actions and events are located in, and explicably by, reference to multiple perspectives as well as influenced by multiple historical and socio- political contexts.
Critical reflective thinking is a dialogue between learners and educators on aspects of cultural or social discourse. It considers the experiences of the group as a whole and provides a way of accounting for ourselves.
This hyperculture is detrimental to sustainability literacy as it silences the need for self-critique, self-reflection, or reflection on the trajectory that society is taking.