WHAT IS CULTURE?

On the authority of Warren J. Keegan, “Culture includes both conscious and unconscious values, ideas, attitudes and symbols that shape human behavior and that are transmitted form one generation to the next". As we saw in class, culture involves many more things, such as people´s way of life, their world views, their spiritual and religous believes, history and collective memory, arts, language and literature, social institutions, social and personal relations In my opinion, culture is what gives essence to a society. A society without culture is a people without identity, without life and without self-recognition. We, as future teachers, have to involve our students in everything that concerns culture. Creating activities that foster culture in students will help us to acquire their intercultural competence. We'll talk later of this. Before accessing this subject, I was not sure what that culture was, well, I had a small notion of what it was but, totally wrong, or rather incomplete. I thought culture was religion. I had a misperception that it was culture. In our times, when we refer to the term culture, we do it always looking at the term religion, as if they were synonymous, but as we have already explained, culture encompasses many terms, as if it were a remix, a mixture of many terms. Another misperception that we see today in our society is that any culture other than ours is always seen as something worse, harmful and unknown. We have to be very careful when referring to another culture as deningrant or extremist, since, every culture is good and necessary to grow our society.It is clear, after our season in the classroom, that we have changed our definition of culture, as we did not have before.

Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash #culture