Compose a research paper outlining the questions that a cultural autobiography asks.The Cultural Identity Autobiography Project is a personal visual and verbal narrative in which you build your story of your cultural identity that impacts your views on teaching and learning. The purpose of these visual and verbal narratives is to heighten awareness of your cultural identity as a step in better understanding yourself and the diverse students you teach. The CIAP is a reflective, self-analytic picture of your past and present in which you investigate your life experiences and your individual, interpersonal, and cultural influences through a cultural-historical lens.
We each have many identities including those we were born as such as sexuality, race/ethnicity, body type and those we were born into and learn such as gender, culture, religion or spirituality, socioeconomic class, nationality, the norms of our families, etc. Our intersectional identity influences who we are and how we experience and interpret the world. This socio-cultural identity dramatically affects how we teach and how we interact with others. The more we understand our cultural autobiographies and build confidence in our own identities, the better we can learn to navigate the complex landscapes of learning to support students from all cultures. When we draw from our own socio-cultural strengths as teachers and improve from our limitations, we are open to learn from other cultures, negotiate cultural meanings impacting students, and maintain successful relationships with diverse communities.
Building upon the historic events and philosophical forces that you have learned about through this course along with your own recent teaching experiences, you will revise the visual CIAP 1 you created in Module 2 and write a 3-5-page Cultural Identity Autobiography Essay that should be guided by the following questions:
What changes did you make to your cultural identity autobiography? Why?
How do you think your cultural identity and your life experiences will influence how you view and interact with your students and their communities?
What personal bias will you self-monitor as you interact with your students, their parents, and their communities? How do you plan to self-monitor this bias?
What attributes of your cultural identity will help you establish a connection with culturally and ability diverse students and support your commitment to student success?’
You will earn a grade of Complete for this assignment by including these five elements in your CIAP Part 2:
You reflect on both born-as and born-into types of your personal cultural identities.
You explore at least 7 attributes of cultural identity (See the description above).
You include analysis of how your cultural values and experiences impact your views on teaching and learning.
You go beyond description and reflect on how your cultural identity brings opportunities and limitations for teaching diverse students.
You identify possible biases you acquired in the course of previous socio-cultural experiences.
Atrributes:
Race is a sociopolitical construct usually understood as a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society. In the United States, race is an important category and is judged largely based on skin color. The latest U.S. census included a category for “mixed race” in addition to such categories as “White,” “Black,” “Hispanic-non-White,” and “Asian and Pacific Islander.”
Gender is a social construct related to the roles, behaviors, and actions performed in a society. The attitudes, customs, and values associated with gender are learned and are not something we are innately born with. The concepts of sex and genderdifferentiate a person’s biological sex (the anatomy of an individual’s reproductive system, and secondary sex characteristics) from that person’s gender, which can refer to either social roles based on the sex of the person (gender role) or personal identification of one’s own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity) (Carlson, 2010; Prince, 2005).
Social Class is culturally defined based on those criteria by which a person or social group may be ranked in relation to others in a stratified society. Common terms you might have heard are “working class,” “poor,” “middle class,” “rich,” “owning class,” etc. There is considerable debate about the criteria that determine social class. Some identify class membership primarily in terms of wealth and its origin (e.g., inherited or newly earned). Others prefer to consider criteria such as amount of one’s education, power, and influence, as well as one’s choice of leisure pursuits.
Ethnicity/Nationality is defined according to the knowledge, beliefs, and behavior patterns shared by a group of people with the same geographic history and the same language. Ethnicity carries a strong sense of “peoplehood,” or loyalty to one’s community. Nationality is defined based on shared citizenship that may or may not include a shared ethnicity. In the contemporary world, the population of most nations includes citizens and resident non-citizens who vary in ethnicity. While we are accustomed to this idea in the U.S., we are sometimes unaware that it is also the case in other nations. Thus, we tend to identify all people from Japan as Japanese, all people from France as French, etc. Similarly, when American citizens of varying ethnic identities go abroad, they tend to be identified as “American.”
Religion/Spirituality is defined based on a shared set of ideas about the relationship of the earth and its people to a deity or deities and a shared set of rules for living moral values that will enhance that relationship. A set of behaviors identified with worship is also commonly shared. Religious identity may include membership in a world-wide organized religion (e.g., Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism), or in smaller (but also worldwide) sects belonging to each of the larger religions (e.g., Catholic or Protestant Christianity, or Conservative, Reformed, or Hasidic Judaism). Religious identity may also include a large variety of spiritualistic religions, which may or may not be connected to a religious institution.
Geographic location is defined by the characteristics of the ecological environment in which one lives. This may include the characteristics of one’s neighborhood or community (rural, suburban, urban), and/or the natural and climatic features of one’s region (plains, coastal, hot, cold, etc.). This may also include mobility and the number of places where you have lived.
Age is defined according to the length of time one has lived and the state of physical and mental development one has attained. Chronological age is measured in different ways by different social groups or societies. In most western societies, for example, age cohort groups are usually identified as infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. In many non-western societies, the cohort group we define as adolescents may not exist at all, and the classifications of childhood and old age may be longer or shorter. In addition, different societies place different value on age, some placing more emphasis on youth while others venerate the aged.
Language is the means through which most other cultural knowledge is acquired. German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that the limits of one’s language mean the limits of one’s world. Children even invent their own language systems, complete with syntactical structures, if no other language is available. Language is meaningful in terms of both its verbal properties (what we “name” things, people, ideas), and in terms of its nonverbal properties (its norms regarding interpersonal distance, meaningful gestures, etc.). Some of us speak dominant languages and dialects, others do not. Some are bi- and multilingual, others can only speak one language.
Other Categories: There are other ways we may choose to identify ourselves culturally, for instance by our health status, our ability/disability identity, our sexual orientation, or our social status.
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