Throughout most of my life I was exposed to a very limited world view. As a child I attended 7 different schools prior to eighth grade all of which were in completely new neighborhoods and cities. Due to this consistent stream of moving, the only world views that I was regularly exposed to were my dad’s and only brothers both of which mirrored each other closely. By the time I was in eighth grade I was much less open to learning about, experiencing, and accepting the various unique aspects of different cultures. This reluctance was unfortunately only strengthened by the people that I surrounded myself with in highschool.
Although my reluctance to understand and experience different cultures stayed quite strong throughout my highschool career it was almost immediately challenged at the start of my university one. This immediate challenge came in two forms: one was the requirement for me to take and pass a language course and the other was that every single person I met on my first day at university was from a unique cultural background different from my own. These two aspects of my university life forced me to become more and more accepting as time went on, however I feel that I didn’t become globally competent until much later in my university experience.
By the start of my third year of university I was quite noticeable more accepting, understanding, and educated regarding cultural differences and experiences, enough so that I decided to take the TESL 3030 course on global competency. It was this decision and subsequently this class that led me to really understanding the idea of global competency and what it means to be globally competent. Throughout my time in the class we explored various cultures, the reasoning behind the differences between cultures, and had various speakers from other cultures come into the class and talk about their culture and its differences to Canadian culture. Two of these aspects of the class really stuck out to me and affected the way in which I think and understand culture. These two aspects were the exploration of world cultures through projects and the presentations given by members of other cultures to our class.
Periodically throughout the class our professor would invite students and faculty from other cultures to come into our class and talk about their culture and the aspects of it that the students enjoyed and loved. These presentations play a large role in showing me not only the importance of global competency but also how to actually strive to achieve it as well. By this point in time I believed that I had become much more understanding and accepting of cultural differences however these presentations made me understand how much of my acceptance and understanding was actually me continuing to ignore cultural differences. Prior to seeing these presentations most people with whom I spoke about their culture and its unique aspects framed the conversation in a way that they spoke about which aspects of their culture differed from Canadian culture. Through these conversations I thought I was becoming more culturally and globally competent but in fact I was just learning more ways in which I could ignore and write off aspects of other cultures. In highschool I would write off cultural differences as people being weird and not understanding societal norms, while for much of my time in university I was simply using my knowledge of cultural differences as an excuse for me to ignore cultural and societal differences but not actually understand or even know why the ability to understand them is important. The presentations in this class however were all framed from the perspective on the other culture and the ways in which Canada differed and was weird compared to the presenters cultural background. Although this doesn’t seem to be much of a change from what I had been exposed to in the past, it completely changed my entire perspective of global cultures and what it means to be globally competent. I realized through these presentations that to be globally competent you should explore and understand other cultures as their own stand alone item and not constantly compare any culture you experience to that of your own.
Following my change in perspective when the opportunity for us to do a presentation on another country’s culture came up I ensured that I got to research the culture in Mexico. The reason that I sought out this country in particular to research is due to a trip I had taken to Mexico when I was fifteen years old. While on this trip I could have gotten to experience many unique aspects of Mexican culture through meeting various people, the food, their history, and many others. Unfortunately because of how narrow minded I was at the time I blatantly ignored and avoided any interactions or learning opportunities that I may have had. I used this project to not only learn more about Mexican culture as a whole but also as a way for me to at least in my mind correct some of the mistakes my younger self had made. By working on this project with my new mindset regarding global competency I feel that I gained a much deeper understanding of Mexican culture as well as confirmation that my new thought process worked positively for myself.
Overall I feel that through taking the TESL 3030 global competency class I was able to gain a much deeper and more realistic understanding of what global competency means both generally and personally. I feel that this has already changed and affected my future as I have changed my after school plan from teaching in Vancouver to teaching abroad, furthermore I have signed up for a cultural trip to Japan for three weeks and have taken greater strides to better understand and learn about the various cultures from around the world.