Cultural Proficiency Brought to us by Easten!

“Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of
differences.”
-Mikhail Gorbachev

Another week of spring semester has now flown by! We have arrived at the time of the semester when peer mentors will begin planning and teaching part of each week's seminar and I was very happy to learn from none other than Easten this week!

The focus of this week was on cultural diversity and I thought that Easten did a fantastic job of incorporating material from the book into the class activities. One of his main points was that we need to be empathetic, not sympathetic, to other people's situations. The "All my neighbors activity" was great because it really helped demonstrate the similarities we all have as peer mentors and how we are each unique!

I thought the sheet we filled out with our unique cultural influences was a great way to wrap up the seminar because it gave us a chance to reflect and piece everything together! I realized that we all have very diverse influences but that makes us a much stronger group. We have varied perspectives on different issues and we have a lot that we can learn from each other by keeping an open mind. Open-mindedness will be essential as a peer mentor too because our students will have unique experiences that have shaped them!

Since Katie and I are leading seminar on helping relationships next week, I thought this was a really great step in our learning! I can see now how all the topics in the text are starting to weave together and I'm really excited to see what my fellow peer mentors have in store for lesson plans!

I'm looking forward to this week! It was a really great learning process to put together a lesson plan and then have it critiqued! I think that tweaks we made are good and I hope you all learn something and enjoy class on Wednesday!!