The Cultural Identity Autobiography Project is a personal visual and verbal narrative in which a candidate builds a story of her cultural identity that impacts her views on teaching and learning. The purpose of these verbal and visual narratives is to heighten awareness of candidates’ cultural identity as a step in better understanding of themselves and diverse students they will teach. Cultural autobiography is a reflective, self-analytic story of candidates’ past and present in which they investigate their life experiences and 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. Each of our identities influences who we are and how we experience, interpret, and do everything. Our socio-cultural identities dramatically affect how we teach and how we interact with others. The more we understand our cultural autobiographies, 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, understand 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.
Your Cultural Autobiography will be guided by the following attributes. For each of the following cultural identifiers, answers the guiding questions (there are no right or wrong responses to any of the questions):
• How is it evident in your life?
• Is it something you think about on a daily basis?
• What benefits do you have in this country because of this attribute?
• How has it affected your learning and social experience/s?
1. Race
Race is 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."
2. Gender Identity
Gender is a social construct about the roles, behaviors, and actions men and women perform 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 gender differentiate 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).
3. Social Class
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.
4. Ethnicity/Nationality
Ethnicity is defined according to the knowledge, beliefs, and behavior patterns shared by a group of people with the same 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."
5. Religion/Spirituality
Religion and spirituality are defined based on a shared set of ideas about the relationship of the earth and the people on it 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.
6. Geographic Location
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.
7. Age
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.
8. Language
German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that the limits of one’s language mean the limits of one’s world. It is through language that most other cultural knowledge is acquired. 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.
9. 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.
Final Statement
State what cultural attributes influence the way you teach and learn. Consider the way culture will influence the way you will teach. Reflect on the ways you have benefited from our educational system in the US.
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