Challenge 5

Make your own reflection about this picture... I've alreay done it mine!

WHAT IS IDENTITY, BELONGING AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY? AND HOW ARE THESE CONCEPTS IMPORTANT FOR PROFESSIONAL PEDAGOGICAL WORK?

Cultural identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. Cultural identity is similar to and has overlaps with.

Belonging: is the feeling of being a member of a group. Acceptance as a natural member of a group. In my opinion that sense is not focused only in cultures, it’s for any group, a group where the person is able to feel and share some aspects with the others, even inside the main culture.

Cultural hybridity: Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture, so cultural hybridity is the mixture of different countries, however that mixture doesn’t include the respect or tolerance. That’s why it can exist racism, ethnocentrism, etc. The cultures that coexist in the same place can, or can not live without ethnic, ideological and cultural conflicts.

Nowadays these concepts are really used by everybody, including in the educational area. So, as a teacher we should be able to understand the meaning and the consequences of their existence to be prepared to cope diversity.

Some of the students in the school have been forced to leave their own country because their parents wanted to find new opportunities for them and for their children. However, those pupils are not able to understand why they have to learn a new language, in a different school where nobody acts as they did in their old school.

It’s really difficult to start a new life, especially when you haven’t decided it. That’s why teachers have to be prepared for some rejection attitudes. This kind of behavior is not a personal attack against the culture; it is, probably, a consequence of a “cultural identity robbery” feeling.

For sure they need to belong to some group but at first it’s really difficult to connect with more than 20 students that don’t speak the same language and, moreover in some cases even they laugh about you.

I believe that they have to feel welcomed, and teachers need to work on this. As we have seen on the class video, some teachers don’t do anything special to introduce and make comfortable atmospheres for new students. It’s really important to try to present new people with care, trying to establish common things between pupils although they come from different countries, cultures or neighborhoods.

When someone arrives in a new place, she or he has the necessity of keep some cultural aspects, and it’s important not to force him/her to adapt to the new ones. All in due time…It’s more interesting to discover and adapt to a new culture voluntarily. If is not like this, racism, in hybridity societies, could appear. 

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