My own culture awareness began to take form during my Spanish coursework in high school, where we would talk about ancient civilizations of Latin America or present-day celebrations practiced in Mexico or Peru. From there, I started to understand that there was another world, very different from my own, and I was fascinated by its 'otherness'. Since high school, my mindset has changed a great deal. Through my TESOL coursework and various literature and "culture" courses through my major and LALS (Latin American and Latino/a Studies) minor, I'd like to believe that this sense of 'otherness' has been diluded, although I doubt it can ever entirely be erased. As Robinson (1991) claims, we can learn to see the world through a lens (red) different from our own (blue), but to expect that we can ever negate our ideological upbringing, to me, seems unreasonable (Kuma 270). We can simply expand and build upon what already exists, creating a new way of looking at the world that combines aspects of our own "culture" and that of anyone else.
But still I have a hard time using these terms, because I feel that the world "culture" inherently creates an Other. In attempting to homogenize a group of people, it automatically stigmatizes another as different or dissimilar. At the same time, I cannot deny that differences--political, social, historical, linguistic--exist between certain populations. Thus, a person could be considered ignorant if they fall on either end of the spectrum of trying to negate culture or overemphasizing it (e.g. stereotypes). This is what I feel often happens when we talk about "culture", is that we simply refer to stereotypical notions of people magnified to a much grander scale. Each person is so complex and multidimensional that it seems impossible to group sets of people together and label them. So yes, I believe we can attempt to categorize people based on similarities and differences--as this is the tendency of the human brain--but this should never be taken as the absolute truth nor should it be used to make sweeping generalizations about any group of people.
If every person is so complex, I think the first step any educator should make in raising cultural awareness is to cultivate a sense of self-critique and reflection in each student (271). How can we ever hope to "understand" (or at least empathize with) anyone else if we don't first comprehend the hidden ideologies, values, and biases within ourselves? This is a powerful realization for the student, and a necessary one in language learning (and all learning).
After reading the two pieces by Kuma, I am still skeptical as to how culture can effectively be taught. Even as I wrote that sentence, I wondered, what does effectively teaching culture even mean? He presents a list of microstrategies at the end of chapter 12, but they all seemed fairly superficial to me. Can culture ever be taught in a way that's not superficial? Perhaps only when the student experiences it--whatever "it" may be--in the native context, such as a study abroad experience. Otherwise, I think culture must be treated differently within the classroom, and what is typically regarded as Culture can be analyzed, based on the self-reflective cultural knowledge, to determine underlying beliefs or assumptions. This oftentimes happens in literature classes, and I think much can be learned through historical exploration through current events. I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe culture shouldn't be as explicit in the classroom as Kuma presents it, but rather explored through the products of the culture itself.
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