Blog Post: Learning about Intercultural Education

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Blog Post: Learning about Intercultural Education

ID # 3744

In class, we have learned many concepts that have helped me understand global education.  One concept that was particularly fascinating was learning styles.

As a converger, I didn’t realize how I my subconscious preferences affected how I learned. More importantly, I didn’t realize how I reacted to people with different learning styles.

In my service-learning placement, one of the students I often worked with individually always seemed distracted to me. He liked to tell personal stories and talk about ideas for the assignment extensively, to the point that he left little time to actually do the assignment.

After learning about learning styles, I was startled by how much he exemplified a divergent learning style. I also realized why I had so much trouble understanding his method of learning. . It was very difficult for me to adjust myself to his learning style, as I am the opposite, but being more aware of this allowed me to help him focus his ideas and personal stories to leave enough time to finish his assignment.

After helping him and his classmates, I have come to understand how vital learning styles are both to education and interactions between people. For global education, I feel that teachers should determine their own learning style and told about others before they attempt to teach intercultural concepts. Like it did for me, understanding learning styles would help teachers learn how to adjust themselves to the needs of students with various backgrounds.

This class has been particularly fascinating for me because of how it made me more aware of my culture. There are many aspects of my culture, and even myself that I never noticed till they were mentioned in the class.

The varying concepts of time and space were particularly fascinating. I always knew that Indians tended to loosely interpret time, as made famous by the phrase “Indian standard time”, but I never understood why.

After understanding how polychromic cultures tend to view time as a servant of the people, I was able to make sense of the loose interpretation of time in my culture. The emphasis on relationships and group dynamics in my culture also helps explain why Indian culture tends to be polychronic because people and relationships are seen as more important to time.

I was also able to connect this concept of always having time readily available to the Hindu concept of reincarnation. The idea of constant rebirth after death gives a sense of having infinite time. This idea permeates the culture and contributes to the more open interpretation of time.

After learning about these concepts, I have been able to look at my culture differently. I would often get frustrated because of the way people from my culture easily forgave lack of punctuality, but after understanding this background I can see how there are many aspects of the culture that contribute to this sense of time.