Culture of English Speaking Countries - Week 7 - Additional Perspectives on Culture
Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 7 of the course Culture of English Speaking Countries for the bachelor's in English teaching at ULACIT. This week we will continue our exploration of the topic of cultural perspectives by analyzing Hofstede's Dimensions of Culture model.
Today's Goals:
- Analyze the national anthem of Costa Rica and the United States to identify hidden cultural perspectives.
- Discuss the role of schools as aculturation institutions for transmitting dominant cultural values.
- Classify behaviors and perspectives according to Hofstede's Dimensions.
- Interpret a culture learning experience of a foreigner living in Costa Rica.
Guiding Questions:
- How are cultural perspectives represented in national symbols?
- What role do institutions play in transmitting cultural values?
- How can Hofstede's dimensions help me compare different cultures?
- What can an outsider's perspective teach me about my culture?
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Warm Up: Pictionary
Click the group link and follow your teacher's instructions to play the game.
- Group Link: CLICK HERE
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Task 1: Group Recall
Let's take a moment together to recall the topics we explored last week.
- We discussed cultural perspectives and values that are sometimes embodied in popular expressions. Did you come across any expressions with cultural values this week in English or Spanish?
- "En carreta y gritando"
- "Como chancho, en carreta y gritando"
- We also described different acts and scenarios. Can you remember what the four kinds of cultural practices are about: operations, acts, scenarios, lives?
- We introduced the topic of cultural perspectives. What is a cultural perspective?
- What do these terms refer to?
- Perceptions
- Beliefs
- Values
- Attitudes
- What do the terms emic and etic perspectives mean and why are they important?
- We also discussed different ways to think about culture. Do you remember what these models refer to?
- Functionalist View
- Interpretive View
- Conflict View
Theory Break: Perspectives
- “Perspectives are the explicit and implicit meanings shared by members of the culture, manifested in products and practices. These meanings reflect members’ perceptions of the world, the beliefs and values that they hold, and the norms, expectations, and attitudes that they bring to practices. To name the perspectives that underlie practices is to answer the question, “Why do the people of this culture do things in the way they do (p. 74)?”
- Perceptions: What we perceive, what we ignore; what we notice or disregard
- Beliefs: What we hold to be true or untrue
- Values: What we hold to be right/wrong, good/evil, desirable/undesireable, proper/improper, normal/abnormal, appropriate
- Attitudes: Our mental and affective dispositions - our frame of mind, our outlook - charged with feeling or emotion
- “Understanding perspectives, in my opinion, represents the most challenging aspect of teaching culture. The task, simply put, is to identify the perceptions, values, beliefs, and attitudes of the culture. However, culture consists of numerous communities, all coexisting under the same umbrella of national culture…some of them are in opposition – sometimes in open conflict… Given shifting points of view, how can language teachers hope to offer accurate explanations of cultural perspectives (p. 83).”
It boils down to this: Culture perspectives depend on your point of view. Given shifting points of view, how can langauge teachers hope to offer accurate descriptions of cultural perspectives (Moran, p. 83)?"
"The working solution I propose is to present alternative vewpoints as part of knowing why, or discovering interpretations. In simple terms, these can be defined respectively as culture as a unified whole culture as distinct communities, and culture as competing communities (p 84)."
Functionalist: Takes the broad view of culture, most often at the national level, using the nation as the focal point.
Interpretive: Does not address the notion of a national culture community. All culture, in the interpretive view, is local.
Conflict: Accepts that each community has its own perspectives but does not assume harmonious relationships among them, rather, they are in competition, struggling for influence, power, or control over the core institutions of society.
Task 2: Values in American Culture
For your Culture Learning Journal this week you were asked to read a chapter called "Traditional American Values and Beliefs". Click the link below and follow your teacher's instructions.
- Group Link: CLICK HERE
Task 3: Schools as Acculturation Institutions
Institutions like school are cultural products. However, they are very special products because they serve the purpose of promoting cultural practices and perspectives and they help to create a shared sense of national cultural identity. Watch this video clip documenting some of the daily routines in a typical elementary school in Japan and answer the questions below.
- What were some of the routines?
- What was similar and different to your own elementary school experience?
- How do these practices give you insight into Japanese cultural perspecitves (perceptions, beliefs, values, attitudes)?
- How do practices in Costa Rican elementary schools promote cultural perspectives and contribute to a shared sense of national identity?
Morning Routine in the US
Variations by School and Region
Task 4: Cultural Perspectives: Insights from National Symbols
Symbols of national culture can give insights about broad underlying cultural perspectives. These are examples of emic perspectives, ways that insiders in the culture view themselves. Let's take a moment to analyze cultural imagery connected to values, beliefs, and attitudes from the national anthems of the United States and Costa Rica.
Theory Break: Hofstede's Dimensions
- “Hofstede’s approach [to cultural analysis] is based on the assertion that people carry mental programs, or software of the mind, that are developed during childhood and are reinforced by their culture. These mental programs contain the ideas of a culture and are expressed through its dominant values (Lustig & Koester, p. 113).”
- “In the 1970’s (Hofstede) ... got access to a large survey database about values and related sentiments of people in over 50 countries around the world. These people worked in the local subsidiaries of one large multinational corporation: IBM (Hofstede, p. 6)."
- "The database contained more than 100,000 questionnaires. Initial analyses of the database at the level of individual respondents proved confusing, but a breakthrough occurred when the focus was directed at correlations between mean scores of survey items at the level of countries. Patterns of correlation at the country level could be strikingly different from what was found at the individual level (Hofstede p. 6).
- Hofstede began noticing trends among members of certain countries when he controled for different demographic variables leading him to discover and describe 5 (now 7) cultural dimensions which function like scales. Countries can fall somewhere on each scale between two extreme perspectives. Hofstede is emphatic that this model should only be used to describe cultures at the national level based on statistical trends in large data sets. There are considerable variations at the individual level when it comes to cultural perspectives.
- “Individual members of a culture may vary greatly from the pattern that is typical of that culture. Therefore, as you study these approaches to cultural patterns, we encourage you to make some judgements about how your own culture fits into the pattern. Then, as you place it within the pattern, also try to discern how you, as an individual, fit into the patterns described (Lustig & Koester, p. 108).”
Click the link below and go to your group tab. Organize the table for your assigned dimension and discuss how this relates to Costa Rica at a national level.
- Group Document: CLICK HERE
- Country Comparisons: CLICK HERE
Task 6: Etic Perspectives on Costa Rica Culture
For your culture journal this week you read a short chapter from book The Green Season called "The Autobus Diaries". Let's take a moment to explore this text and identify dimensions of culture that we found there. - Group Link: CLICK HERE
References:
Isenberg, R. (2015). The Green Season. The Tico Times Publication Group.
Moran, P. (2001). Teaching Culture: Perspectices in Practice. Heinle, Cengage Learning.
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