Week4: The video and the reading from this week made me think a lot about my own personal experiences with intercultural communication. The video specifically made me reflect on how I grew up, which was in an area where I was really only surrounded by people who were extremely similar to me. I went to a very small school where everyone looked like me and had similar political and religious views to me. However, when I turned 16, I got a job that was kind of far from where I lived, and so I started interacting with people who were very different from me on a regular basis. I think that this video from this week really helped me reflect more on how to interact with those around me who have different cultures from me. I liked how they broke down the different ways to communicate and the different important things to focus on, such as social and self competency. The reading, however, made me reflect more on my education growing up. The school I went to had a heavy focus on western literature, so almost every book I read in school had protagonists who were incredibly similar to me. While this helped me to relate to the protagonists, I really had no experience with diversity in my reading. I think about what the author of the reading said, that, “When we teach with diverse books, we can push open doors and encourage students to fully explore worlds and lives unlike theirs. In doing so, we can support the “myriad cultural influences (values, practices, experiences, etc.)
affecting both readers and authors.” I think that in my own personal education, my teachers really did not help that much with opening the door into learning about different cultures.