During the previous week I observed a lesson where culture was taught. It’s very interesting to see how students like to learn about culture and how interested they get on this topic. During the lesson they were learning about clothes, hair styles and attitudes toward fashion not only in general terms, but also inside our country and others.
Students learned that culture is in everything we do, say and the way we act; they are very conscious that now that they are learning a new language implies learning a new culture too. For knowing their opinion about the topic an interview was done, and the results surprised me in the way how conscious they are about this.
Students mentioned the following:
“Everything means culture, in this case we need to understand that they way people dress is going to reflect their culture and we must respect this even though we don’t understand why”
“Culture helps us to have an easier conversation. We can know which topics we can talk about and which ones we should avoid”
“We should be always interested on learning about culture. That’s how we can understand why people act the way they do”
“It’s good to learn about people’s habits and the origin of their traditions”
“It’s important to learn about other cultures but we must analyze our own too. We see culture even when we talk with our classmates. Everybody is so different”
As we could see, it is very important to include culture in our plannings. I learned from this experience that students really need that we teachers teach them culture, not only because we want or because it’s very important. It’s also because nowadays they are conscious about the importance it has. We need to teach them values such as respect and tolerance, so they can develop their critical thinking and analyze why people are and act the way they do. We need to erase prejudices that society has impose along many years and teach them that they are free to decide and give opinion about different cultures. In this way we will prepare students with different perspectives and analytical minds to receive different cultures and understand them.
