Chapter 1: An Introduction to Culture and Psychology

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Chapter 1: An Introduction to Culture and Psychology

© 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.Activity Workbook of Culture and Psychology

Chapter 1 (An Introduction to Culture and Psychology)

Activity 1 [Objective] This activity will give your students the opportunity to reflect on their own culture and realize diversity in the definition of culture.

[Direction] Ask students to find one object which, they think, represents their own culture and bring it to class. In the class, have them talk about the reasons for their choice. One way to do this is to give them a speech assignment. While each student is talking about his or her cultural object, tell the other students to take notes, and ask the speaker questions after the speech.

If you have limited time, the students can share their thoughts in small groups.When time permits, after the group work you can bring everybody back to a large class discussion. Then, ask the students to report their learning experience in a small group discussion.

If you do not have time either for speech or a group work, give this exercise as a take-home assignment. In that case, tell the students to take a picture of their cultural objects and submit it with a short essay in which the reason of their 1 / 4

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Chapter 1: An Introduction to Culture and Psychology

© 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.choice is described. Your students may bring something which is associated with the categories, such as race, ethnicity, nationality and/or gender. When you conduct a debriefing of this exercise, draw their attention again to the teaching point of this unit, that is, the uniqueness and diversity of culture. 2 / 4

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Chapter 1: An Introduction to Culture and Psychology

© 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.Exercise 1

Groups that have Cultures: Identity Groups

[Objective] This exercise will enable your students to become aware of a complex nature of culture and get a better understanding of what culture is and how it influences many aspects of our life and living. This exercise will give your students the opportunity to realize that culture exists on multiple levels—across individuals within groups and across groups within a larger group.

[Direction] Assign Exercise 1 as either a take-home assignment, a material for group discussion or for individual presentation. You may want to use this exercise after discussing or introducing issues, such as how culture can be understood on multiple levels of analysis. A teaching point here is that members in the same culture tend to share the same attributes, and our behaviors tend to be culturally specific.

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Chapter 1: An Introduction to Culture and Psychology

© 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.Exercise 1

Groups that have Cultures: Identity Groups

Student Number:

Name:

Date:

*According to Marshall Singer (1998), the term identity group refers to groups that have cultures or in other words, it refers to a group of people who perceive some aspects of the world in a similar way, which makes the individuals in a specific group culturally unique. Answer the following questions.

• How many different identity groups do you belong to? List three groups

which you think are especially important to you.

Identity Group 1

Identity Group 2

Identity Group 3

• Describe what attributes you share with the other members in each identity

group you listed above. When you think about the shared attributes, you may want to refer to some of the following dimensions of culture in your descriptions: (1) basic social and/or cultural values, (2) social structure, (3) stressors and coping mechanisms, (4) gender roles, (5) work-related values, (6) communication style, and (7) rules for social interaction.

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