Essay. Patchwork quilt piece

On Wednesday July 21st, 2010 we had a cultural interchange activity with foreigners’ students in ULACIT. Through the Patchwork activity as a student I got an interesting and a broader understanding of their culture and how that culture could be compared to ours by talking about each other´s idiosyncrasies. Being able to share with different nationalities, it facilitated to be more sensitive about cultural differences gaining outside conscious awareness by observing, comparing, and sharing information regarding different intercultural learning point of views in order to have a wide outlook experience. The cultural awareness became at some point the main subject by the time I was interacting more and more with them because misunderstandings happened during the conversation, when using meanings to make sense of what I was saying of my culture and vice versa.

Using the Patchwork quilt also helped to break the ice on how to start a conversation with the foreigner students, making more defined and interesting ours and their cultural background. Everything was a valuable experience where all of us learned, observed regarding different points of views on how intercultural we really are. After all, one of the basic reasons for having this activity was developing an appreciation for new cultures.
However, becoming aware of our cultural dynamics is a difficult task because culture is not conscious to us. We have to be very careful and sensitive regarding (sometimes) of our lack of awareness in behavior towards others. In absence of better knowledge we tend to assume things, instead of finding out what a behavior means to the person involved.

Since we are born we have learned to see and do things at an unconscious level. Our experiences, our values and our cultural background sometimes lead us to see and do things in a certain close, inappropriate way, considering correct only our behavior or manners putting aside others.

Sometimes we have to step outside of our cultural boundaries in order to realize the impact that our culture has on our behavior. This activity was very helpful to gather with foreign colleagues and get some feedback on our behavior in order to have more clarity of our cultural attributes in general.