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| Cultural Communication |
With more and more Organizations handling their
business globally you are dealing with people from all over the world and good
communication techniques are critical in fostering your success in business and
in your career. Even in my daycare business, I am dealing with all types of
races, religions, and cultures and this has opened my eyes to new and creative
ways to communicate.
This can be especially true from the Linguistic
relativity view of the Sapir-Whorf hypotheses. This hypotheses theorizes that
people from different language communities perceive the world differently
(Trenholm, 2011), therefore each situation that you are faced with during
communication is a learning tool and I want to make sure that each culture is
receiving my messages and understands what is being said without it being
taking the wrong way or not being able to understand.
Learning about other cultures is key and will enhance
how your interaction will go because the understanding of their views, celebrations,
holidays, religions, and customs are completely different than mine (Hahn,
2005).
I have a Muslim family in my daycare and I wanted to
learn all about their customs, values, and celebrations so, in addition to
reading articles, I decided to ask them during our interview if they would not
mind sharing some of these things so that I would be more informed. They were
more than glad to explain how they do things. I found out that this family does
not celebrate Christmas the same way I do. They do not have a Santa Claus
because of their customs and beliefs system. Their children do not go crazy
when they see him. They perceive Santa Claus as just another person in a
costume therefore, it is not celebrated. I showed respect to this without
judgement and was very flexible and so were they to our customs. I asked them during our Christmas celebration
to bring things that had value to them for the holiday and some things from
their history and culture to share with the other day care kids and the rest of
us since they did not celebrate the same as the rest of us here. I invited the parents to come and help explain
how they celebrated. This helped increase my cultural sensitivity in addition
to helping my daycare children and aides learn about a new culture and their
values, customs, and celebrations.
Following the celebration we decided to do a unit with
the families help on the Muslim culture along with crafts they make to help in
learning more about their cultures history, values, and customs. We made a poster off all the different things
they do in comparison to how we do things.
References
Hahn, Martin. (2005, December 30). Ten Commandments
of Intercultural Communication. Ezine articles. Retrieved from http://ezinearticles.com/?Ten-Commandments-of-Intercultural-Communication&id=120247
Trenholm, S. (2011). Thinking through communication: An introduction to the study of human
communication (6th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education.
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