This term has flown by. Yet, I think I can safely say that I have learnt a lot from this course.
I think that the most important thing I've learnt from this course is really not to take cultural differences at face value. It's easy to make generalizations like "Japanese are polite" or Americans are boisterous". Yet to be able to see past these appearances to try and understand the intentions behind these gestures is a different ball game altogether.
That is really what I think we have been doing in the past 13 weeks. By analyzing language and discourse not just to analyze the differences in cultures, but to understand why these differences are and what they mean.
I think my own project is a true reflection of this. Before the project, I was quick to make many assumptions, like American teachers are liberal but Chinese teachers are more authoritative. Perhaps that's true. But I've come to realize, these impressions have much deeper underlying reasons behind them, sometimes amounting to a cultural heritage of factors such as education, tradition, and simply differences in perceptions.
It's easy to judge other cultures based on the norms of one's own culture. But to be able to do that using the norms of the other culture is more difficult. It's like trading your pair of eyes with someone else's. Yet I think I've learnt a bit about that in this course and I'm much more aware of the sensitivities when conversing with people from different cultures.
You have spelt out the essence of the course, not taking cultural differences at face value and not judging other cultures using the norms of our own culture. But rather, we examine cultural practices in context and understand how they happen as they do and why.
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