Developing Cultural Awareness: CMN 6095

Course Description: 

"Examines culture from three pillars: awareness, language, and history/politics. Offers students an opportunity to investigate their personal identity and barriers by incorporating two assessments to determine personal implicit bias and cultural intelligence. Interpretations are constructed from self-reports employing the cultural intelligence (CQ) assessment and Implicit Bias Project. Next, the focus is on the impact of languages on cultures. By identifying nonstandard language and discussing the meaning of words across different languages, students have an opportunity to gain understanding and formulate sensitivity when communicating with different audiences, albeit intergenerational and/or international. In the last pillar, the yesterday-and-today section examines the impact of history and politics on cultural groups, specifically as related to cross-cultural communication. The written signature assignment is a personal reflection analysis on insights gained throughout the course and career aspirations."

Course Reflection: 

This course offered many insights and was very memorable! Some major things I gained include an understanding of the connections between history and culture as well as the ability to conduct a cultural audit. The class also granted me useful skills such as heightened presentation and public speaking abilities and improvements to my own cultural awareness and communication skills in multicultural environments. My research in this course focused on examining the culture of women workers in the United States workforce. 

A major part of this course involved self-assessments in the form of the CQ Assessment and the Implicit Bias Project. Prior to reviewing my results, the assessment encouraged me to consider my experiences interacting with different cultures. I expected some results to be higher in some areas and lower in others. My big takeaway is that planning for communication situations through learning about cultures that differ from my own, and recognizing my own cultural behaviors will make me a more effective communicator and manager. 

Culture audits are an analysis of the behavior, history, and linguistics of a culture. This is a valuable resource within culturally diverse organizations. Understanding the major historical events that have impacted a culture can offer a more thorough understanding of the root culture and current challenges. Other useful resources involved in a culture audit are examining Hofstede's cultural dimensions to assess behaviors. 

This class offered a focus on presentations and independent research. While I have a background in public speaking through previous positions training canvass teams and running workshops at schools to teachers and students, I was still able to strengthen my public speaking skills through this course. Being able to perform independent research and offer continued presentations on this ongoing research allowed me to gain useful insight from my class and professor that was invaluable. 

This video shows my full final presentation with audio. Please feel free to leave a comment on this page about this presentation.