by Laura Menezes Marques
After doing a college project, I was able to learn some new and cool things (and some other things not so cool). I could meet people from different countries and their cultures, and I could understand and realize a little better about stereotypes.
First of all, with this project, I made my own definition of culture: culture is a set of behavior of a social group that involves its knowledge, beliefs, experiences and values. I interviewed foreign students from China, Venezuela, USA and it was an amazing talk in which we all could learn about each other’s culture. I also realized that stereotypes are created through a model image assigned to a person/social group.
They think here in Brazil it’s all about funk, samba, parties, happiness and that we are very “open” (as they said), which is cool, but being “very open” includes their thinking that we don’t care about anything, only the things mentioned before. Despite that, it was fine because we were all exchanging thoughts and we could explain that it’s not like that, at least not all the time, and that we are more than only these things.
In conclusion, I changed my way of seeing people from other countries, but also changed my way of seeing myself and my country. I got surprised with how nice all of them were, but I also didn’t expect them to say that we are a very welcoming people. After all, it’s all about not judging people just because they are different from you.
After doing a college project, I was able to learn some new and cool things (and some other things not so cool). I could meet people from different countries and their cultures, and I could understand and realize a little better about stereotypes.
First of all, with this project, I made my own definition of culture: culture is a set of behavior of a social group that involves its knowledge, beliefs, experiences and values. I interviewed foreign students from China, Venezuela, USA and it was an amazing talk in which we all could learn about each other’s culture. I also realized that stereotypes are created through a model image assigned to a person/social group.
They think here in Brazil it’s all about funk, samba, parties, happiness and that we are very “open” (as they said), which is cool, but being “very open” includes their thinking that we don’t care about anything, only the things mentioned before. Despite that, it was fine because we were all exchanging thoughts and we could explain that it’s not like that, at least not all the time, and that we are more than only these things.
In conclusion, I changed my way of seeing people from other countries, but also changed my way of seeing myself and my country. I got surprised with how nice all of them were, but I also didn’t expect them to say that we are a very welcoming people. After all, it’s all about not judging people just because they are different from you.