cultural Tag

Posts tagged 'cultural'

The Power of Bilingualism

My introduction to learning languages and bilingualism happened 24 years ago, when we moved to Texas, USA, and our daughter started to learn English. As a Special Education teacher, I knew she would be fine, but as a mother, I was scared, because at the age of 4, with the language of a 10 year old, I was afraid she would be left behind.

She wasn’t!

Since then, I have been working with inspiring people who specialize in language acquisition and with many children of migrants around the world. I have learned that parents and teachers play an important role in supporting language development. If they understand the challenges and consider the myths around language, they can help kids with healthy language acquisition.

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Love without Boundaries

We learn about love from the second we are born. We are not always aware of the love around us, but it is always there – love without boundaries.

Some say that love is the energy that feeds us throughout life – it is food for our soul, and without it, we are doomed to die.

There have been many songs written about love. One of the interesting things about it is that most people learn to appreciate the love they took for granted when it is under threat or when it is tested.

On the flip-side, there is hatred and discrimination. For the last 8 years, I have been very active in the field of diversity education. I was sad to discover that there was a lot of discrimination and labeling, lots of bullying and bias towards others. And this was coming from children who simply cannot deal with others’ being different from them.

What makes this worse is that this happens among their parents too. Young children, from as young as 5 years old have discriminating beliefs towards others who are different in size, appearance, gender, language, height, weight, clothes, ability or disability, religion, likes or dislikes, character traits, skills, association, financial status, family status, relationships and the list goes on. So young and yet they already have so much hatred and fear.

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Life According to the Native American Code of Ethics

Through my work in diversity education over the past 7 years, I have taken part in many debates and conversations about religion, ethics, morals, values, and our role as parents and educators in instilling them in our children. Many people see conflicts between the different ethnic groups, religious groups, tribes and cultures. Personally, the more closely I look at it, the more I understand that these different groups have more commonalities than differences.

In life, you get what you focus on. If you focus on differences, you will see the conflict between cultures. If you focus on commonalities, you will see similarities and how we are all connected.

Recently, I had a chance to read the Native American Code of Ethics. This code has survived for thousands of years. This is probably one of the oldest cultural codes that still exist today. There is evidence that the indigenous American people migrated from Siberia over 11,000 years ago. Yes, 11,000 years ago! Can you imagine how long that is?!

To put it in perspective, Judaism is about 5,000 years old, Buddhism is about 2,500 years old, Christianity is about 2,000 years old, and Islam is about 1,500 years old. Meanwhile, the Native American tradition goes back 11,000 years. Fortunately, if you go deep into each of these belief systems, you will find very similar codes of ethics.

My work in personal development is in the service of all these codes of ethics. I believe that regardless of which one we follow, if each and every one of us strives to live by them, to the best of our ability, we will have a better world. Striving is the most important part. Eventually, if you keep going in the right direction, you will get there.

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Ronit Celebrating Diversity by Challenging Teachers’ Cultural Thinking

As teachers, we like to think of ourselves as very open-minded. We model this attitude and believe that open-minded teachers can raise open-minded students and when the mind is open, the possibilities are endless. Together with our students’ parents, we are the most important social agents in our society. Our best tool is to believe and be true to what we want to create. If we want to raise a whole generation of open-minded kids who are accepting, appreciating and celebrating diversity, we must first be living proof of what we want to teach and be able to ‘walk the talk’.

The first time I questioned my own open-mindedness was long before I became a teacher. I was 16 years old, and Israel and Egypt signed their famous peace contract. To start the official ‘relationship’ between the two countries, it was decided to send selected youth from both sides to meet each other. As a very ‘open-minded’ teen, I was chosen to be part of this unique delegation.

The Egyptian teens came to visit us in Israel. We had a great time together and one evening, the Israeli teens decided to visit the Egyptian teens in their room to see what they were doing. We knocked on the door and they were very happy to see us. They welcomed us in and we sat in one of the rooms and just watched them. We were completely shocked.

Why shocked? you might ask.

Because they acted like… teens. Same as us. They were listening to the same music we were listening to, their boys ‘hit on girls’, just like ours did, and their girls responded in exactly the same coy way as ours did. I vividly remember the question that popped into my head ‘What were you expecting?’

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Language Acquisition: Do Young children Need a Second Language?

For years, people have been researching the acquisition of languages. One aspect mentioned in some of this research is the distinction between Primary (“mother tongue”) and Secondary language. I believe this distinction is essential for maximizing the power of learning another language.

Primary and secondary languages are stored in different places in the brain and through a different process. First, second and third primary languages are learned by creating patterns from a load of seemingly random information, while secondary languages are learned by using the primary languages as reference and building a “translation net” to map the secondary language back to them.

Experts still argue about the critical age for forming primary languages, but they all estimate it to end between the ages of 7 and 12. This leaves the early childhood educators to deal with this important channel of education in the most critical age – the early years.

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I’m OK, You’re OK Parenting: Guilt

Guilt and shame are siblings in the family of feelings. Despite certain similarities, there is a clear distinction between them. Guilt is feeling bad about something you have done, while shame is feeling bad about who you are or a part of you. One is about behavior and can be changed. The other is related to your sense of identity and therefore harder to change.

In the ever evolving phases of parenting styles, the shift from physical punishment to shame was intended to use guilt more effectively than before, in the hope that it would teach children how to behave when their parents were not there. A bit like a GPS. Parents decided “guilt” was better than smacking because it worked even when mom and dad were not there. The purpose was still to monitor and control emotionally, but with good intentions; to create lasting discipline.

This post is part 3 of 7 in the series I'm OK - You're OK Parenting

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Know Your Partner: Beliefs & Attitudes

To continue our “Know Your Partner” series, I want to share questions about attitudes and beliefs with you this week. It is hard to admit, but many of our beliefs and attitudes are part of our identities and can be the cause of relationship breakup or relationship build up. They are extremely important and somehow a bit sensitive.

The important thing is to find out which of these beliefs or attitudes are “musts” – those things that you are not willing to compromise on. For example, Gal and I do not share the same political opinion or even religious beliefs but this has never been a conflict between us.

The idea behind these questions is to find out what we think we “must” have and what our partner thinks they “must” have. Agreements will be easier to keep once we know and make a conscious decision to accept our partner rather than ignore their musts.

The attitudes and belief we will discuss are about culture, race, ethnicity, difference, truth and law, politics and community, media and religion.

This post is part 6 of 8 in the series Know Your Partner

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Everyone Can Be a Hero

We often focus so much on what kids do not do well that we do not give them any chance to excel, to shine and to be heroes. This is the story of how a class of special education “troublemakers” proved that everyone can be a hero.

Last month, I traveled to North QLD to work with over 1,000 students on a special project I run here in Australia, called Together for Humanity. I was running all the workshops with my colleague, Imam Ahmad Abu Ghazaleh. We worked 14 hours each day and saw many different groups of high school students and teachers, but I want to share with you my experience with one class in particular.

It was the middle of the day and we were getting ready to run our “Community Building”, in which “Making a Difference” is a key message. A group of 28 Grade-8 students arrived with 5 teachers (two men) and their head-of-department herself.

At first, we did not know why so many teachers were needed and why they looked so worried while the students were settling down, until one teacher approached us and said, “This is the worst class in the school”.

Ahmad and I smiled. The head-of-department, who had organized those two full days of workshops and seemed an amazingly relaxed person, told us, “I’ve brought all the teachers to help you out. This is our special education class. They are challenging”.

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Perspective for Kids

One of our main challenges in life is that we don’t know what we don’t know. To overcome this challenge, we must actively question our own point of view and make conscious choices, instead of accepting what we have grown into as the only possibility.

A few weeks ago, Ronit had a few sessions with a lovely little boy called Lenny (not really). He was very intelligent and very curious and bombarded Ronit with “unfiltered” questions, which got me thinking about perspective.

While he was working away on one of his assignments, Lenny asked Ronit, “Do you know that you sometimes talk to me in a different language?”

She explained to him that because we talk to our kids in a different language, she sometimes confused the languages.

He asked, “So they don’t understand what you’re saying too?”

Ronit explained that our kids understand her when she speaks the other language, because they know two languages.

Lenny said, “I don’t know any language”.

Ronit said, “You know English”.

He looked at her surprised and then said in excitement, “Yes!”

Being only 6 years old, Lenny accepts everything in his life as the only thing possible, so sometimes, he does not even need to call it by name. It is just “the thing that is” for him. The language he speaks is so obvious to him, he had never counted it as such. It was just part of life. And it never occurred to him that other kids might know other languages, simply because he doesn’t.

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Racist Kids

As you probably know by now, I love stories and after you read this, you will know why I wanted to pass this story on to you.

“I am married to a Scottish man. Recently, our 3-years-old daughter’s birthday was coming. She said she wanted to invite friends from her day care center home, “But I don’t want to invite boys or blacks”, she said. I was very shocked. I’m as black as can be and always thought that because my husband has fair skin and comes from a different culture to mine, we are the perfect example of living in cultural harmony. I never thought my own daughter would say something like that”

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