Teaching across cultures - Essay Example

Teaching across cultures There are certain common cultural characteristics which help people integrate together and move ahead to achieve the targets sets within any organization. The group that I am going to teach about the high risk of cardiovascular disease involves 2 female and 1 male members. All of them are African Americans and registered nurses. The primary cultural characteristics which help in binding the group as a single unit or entity are the common dressing, language, importance of education and knowledge for minorities like African American which face discrimination or sense that they are being discriminated and religious backgrounds.

Religion plays an important role in the lives of African Americans and this set out a sense of mutuality among the members. The common language helps in eradicating the communication barriers. Other secondary cultural characteristics like sense of thinking, moral values, food preferences etc. help in upholding a comfortable environment to the male and female members as they share common cultural values. Gender and learning abilities play an important role within the chosen group. The female members of the group have more stress of keeping a balance between their family and career life.

They face an additional stress of raising children and nurturing them keeping their educational and learning needs in view. All three members have children; however, females have more responsibilities to attend the children’s need than men. Moreover, the learning skills are important as all the members have limited time to understand and learn the lessons. The male member has to allocate time between job and education while females have families to be taken care of as well. The emphasis of African American culture on respect and moral values requires careful consideration when referring to elderly population, females etc.

African Americans share a sense of discrimination from others and such preexistent impressions may affect the learning environment. Hence, there is a need to emphasize on the equality in the learning procedures available to them. Their cultural minority requires higher motivation. The cultural emphasis on family events and ritual may also affect the learning process as their attention may be diverted due to frequent events important to them. There will be a need to emphasize more on the education and learning processes in order to maintain a stable learning pace.