Identity

WHAT ABOUT MY IDENTITY? 

Last Tuesday during the lesson we talked about IDENTITY, but, what is identity? How can we work with our pupils on identity? Well, here there are two activities that we did along the session that can be used with our future students. 

OUR IDENTITY CHART!

The first step in this activity is to engage pupils think about which aspects do they think had had an influence on them. And we have to make them aware that we pretend that they think about those aspects that made them unique and unrepeatable people.  Then we will give them some examples:  Local “aspects” : as family or friends  National “aspects”: as media  Transnational “aspects”: as urban lifestyle, group  We have to emphasize that they have to think about the aspects that have influenced their personality, their way of behave, that has contribute something new in them.  Once they have had some of the items they consider that have had an influence on them, we have to ask them to order from the most important “and the once they think has contributed more in their identity” to the one that has influenced less. Then, we will ask them to give a percentage % to each aspect.  The next step will be to order the concepts they have chosen in a chart. They will have to differentiate the three groups (put the local aspects together with their correspondent percentages, and the same with national and transnational). To make it more visual, we can ask them to paint it in three differentiate colors.  To continue with the activity, we can engage students to talk with a partner and explain why they have chosen those aspects and not different ones. By talking about that, pupils will realize that they all are different from each other, but despite of that they have things in common.

As we did this activity in class, you can see my chart below:

I have coloured the local aspects in green, the national aspects in blue and the transnational aspects in red. Has you can observe most of my identity has been influenced by local aspects, while national and international aspects have had a lower repercussion in my way of being. 

With this activity, we can promote that students apreciate diversity, and that they can experiment with it by themselves. It's an activity that let them know in which way are they different. 

Nowadays, there is a trend to show similarities, but, there is no problem on being different, thats why diversity must be shown. 

EXPLAIN A STORY IN A DIFFERENT WAY!

The next activity consisted on creating a story. 

We worked in groups of 12 students, and we had to order some flashcards that narrate a story. There was not a wrong way to order them. 

Once we order the flashcards each member of the group took one, and then little by little we had to explain our own story. 

The first time we did it in English to be able to understand the story we were creating, and also because if we were not inspired about how to follow the story we can get help from our groupmates. 

Finally, the idea was to explain the story to the other group but not in English. We had to explain the story using our mother tongue. That means that for each flashcard we changed the language having as a result a story explained in 8 different languages. 

An aspect that teachers must take into account is to make pupils aware that when they are explaining a story in a different 
language of the people that are listening they have to emphasize the gestures, make mimes and movements, point to the drawings to help the listeners understand better the story.


FIVE RESOURCES ABOUT MULTICULTURAL SETTING

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKEL237QU8o (It is Okay to Be different) It is a 2 minuts long visual book by Todd Parr. Personally, I think that it is a good resource to work differences with very young children, to make them realize that we are all different and we live in a diverse world. To make them think about how much boring could it be to live in an homogeneous world.

This author has some other books that talk about different topics, in the following link you can find more about him and his books:
http://www.toddparr.com/books/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF5M_BjLg8w (El circo de la mariposa) It is a 20 minutes movie. 

http://education.byu.edu/diversity/activities.html In this link you can find a brief description about the advantages of multicultural education activities. However, the most interesting aspect of this web is the amount of resources offered about activities that foster cultural sensitivity, critical thinking about diversity and multicultural education activities. Specially, I would like to emphasize the activity "Circles of My multicultural self" that is included in the Awarness activities' section. 

http://www.fundacionfide.org/red/categoria/materiales_didacticos.html (Red de educación intercultural) This is a website of the "Fundación Iberoamericana para el desarrollo". It is in Spanish, but it offers a very big amount of activities related with multiculturality and interculturality divided in different subjects. Through this, we can work with our pupils multiculturality and interculturality in a cross-curricular way.

http://masterjuanjopenafiel.blogspot.dk/2011/12/como-trabajar-la-interculturalidad-en.html This website provides a list of sites that have a big amount of resources to work on multicultural education, as games or more innovative ideas to work on this topic. However, you have to take into account that it's a Spanish website.



REFLECTION ON THE FOLLOWING QUOTES

“Globalization at the cultural level has brought about the fragmentation and multiplication of identities and this may require, paradoxically, a return to the familiar.” (Cohen et al.) 

Globalization has contributed lots of advantages to our world. Between these advantages we can highlight the diversity of cultures we can find in a city or even in a neighborhood. That means that the local sense of identity of a person can be influenced by other cultures. Without going too far, taking the example mentioned before, if we live in a neighborhood where there is cultural diversity, in some point you will get new traits that will contributed to the creation of your identity. Our daily life environment has a lot to do with our identity, and of course the environment has been conditioned by other cultures that are why we can say that we are suffering a multiplication of identities. However, despite of this fact, as people tend to be afraid of the unknown things, our own sense of belonging to a place is very strong and, by getting mixed with a big amount of cultures and by enriching us as people of it, we miss our backgrounds, that’s why most of the people tends to return to the familiar, because the local sense of identity is higher than the national and transnational brought by the globalization’s consequences.

“World citizenship is to be embraced, not feared. New forms of post-national understanding, responsibility, the state, justice, art, science and public understanding can emerge. This in turn can lead to more advanced forms of democracy, liberty and mutuality” (Beck).

World citizenship includes all cultures around the world. As I have said in the quotation above there is a trend to be scared of the unknown, and we as a teachers have an important function, to engage students and make them aware about all the positive aspects that other citizens from different countries of the world can teach us and the big amount of knowledge we can share, having as the most important consequence our own personal enrichment. By being open-minded and establishing relations with different people we can understand the world in a better way. And by understanding the world in a better way we can be able to face the problems from an objective point of view. Otherwise, if we are afraid about something that we do not really know and having prejudice about cultures, people, way of doing that takes part of our global world citizenship, we are not going to evolve as much as we can do it. 

IDENTITY CORE CONCEPTS

MODERNIZATION: refers to a model of an evolutionary transition from a pre-modern or traditional to a modern society. The teleology of modernization is described in social evolutionism theories, existing as a template that has been generally followed by societies that have achieved modernity. While it may theoretically be possible for some societies to make the transition in entirely different ways, there have been no counterexamples provided by reliable resources. 

IDENTITY: is all the traits of an individual or a community. These features characterize the subject or the community against the other. Identity is also the awareness that a person has about herself and that makes it different from someone else. Although many of the traits that are inherited or innate, the environment influences the conformation of the specificity of each subject. 

LOCALISM: describes a range of political philosophies which prioritize the local. Generally, localism supports local production and consumption of goods, local history, local culture and local identity. Localism can be contrasted with regionalism and centralized government, with its opposite being found in the unitary state. It is when there is a preference for one’s own area or region, when our identity is very influenced by the local area where we live. 

Diaspora: is the dispersion of a people for various parts of the world. In other words, the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established homeland. 

IDEOLOGY: is the set of fundamental ideas that characterizes the thinking of a person, a community or a time. Ideology tends to retain or transform the social, economic, political or cultural existent. It is the representation of a society, reflects on how the society goes one as a whole and, on that basis, develop a plan of action to approach what is considers as an ideal society.

NATIONALISM: is a belief system, creed or political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a nation. Nationalism also influences in our identity, as we can be limited to one ethnic, cultural, religious or identity group.