Understanding the importance of culture and diversity can help people better understand each others ' narratives. This can change how we think about each other and our discussions about sensitive topics to a more constructive approach.
There are a few important concepts that we discussed in the past few weeks. The importance of diversity, narratives, and how culture defines these ideas. These are not typical things that we think about daily, so it was interesting to take a step back and study these concepts from an academic and engineering standpoint.
There are many reasons why these ideas are important. We read a long article by WM. A. Wulf detailing just how and why diversity is important, specifically in engineering. He discusses many
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You might think about your narrative itself, but you often don 't take a step back and analyze how your narrative formed and even how other people formed their narratives. Narratives are a very important aspect of everyone 's lives. They shape a person 's thoughts and behavior, they affect your beliefs, feelings towards others, and many more. Narratives are closely related to diversity. Typically, people with different backgrounds and experiences will have different narratives. This may seem obvious, but it is not always obvious how different they can be. Narratives are learned from many sources including family, friends, people in your community, and other people of authority. All of these sources are different in different cultures, leading to different narratives across a diverse set of people. In 'A Class Divided ' we saw just how easy it is for a person of authority to instill a narrative. In this case the person of authority was a teacher. The teacher, Jane Elliott, was able to convince a group of 3rd graders that the ones with brown eyes were superior to the ones with blue eyes. In just one day the students were completely convinced of these and showed signs of violence, aggression, and hatred. This was accomplished in one day. This leads me to think of how easy it is to teach a certain way of thinking to a child over a span of many years. Seeing the effect it had on children in