This reflection is about our fourth seminar, “When in Rome…” This seminar was unfinished but still a wonderful experience.
We started off with the first question: “What culture have you come across that you found shocking or hard to understand, and what were your reactions?” Many people talk about the Islamic culture, about the headscarf that women had to wear. Further on, Dr. T also asked a question about whether we should respect this culture that is clearly bad and and why not change it？We thought that Whether you can change a culture depends on your social status and your rights; normal people like us might not have the ability to change a culture.
The second question asked, “Do you expect immigrants to fully adopt your culture?” We believe that integration is a two-way process of respect and balance and not just a one-sided assimilation. We think that we don not expect immigrant WHO completely give up their own cultural identities and fully adopt the local culture; they should keep their own traditions, including their language, festivals, food, family values and cultural customs. And we should have a diverse society where people bring different cultures together.
The third question is, “Who defines the rules of government or the people?” The government create official written rules like laws and public regulations. The people create the unwritten rules like customs，traditions and some moral standards. These two types of rules influence each other.
This seminar was not fully finished and was stopped in the middle. However, I think it was still a wonderful seminar; we got to talk about cultures and should we respect culture or should we change it？
This seminar was managed well by the leaders Eric and rhett，They made sudi end of questions and they did there opinions about the the questions。There was also excellent moderate demonstrated and by calling on the students by a specific sequence from left to right and right to left gave everybody a chance to speak and made the whole atmosphere not as chaotic