Knowing more about a culture from single stories

As I have come to understand, preconceived ideas about a specific culture have two sides. On one hand, one can get the picture of what the person might be like, how the person might behave or what kind of traditions the person might the person have. This is somehow advantageous in the sense that we activate cultural awareness, and we may not face uncomfortable encounters when sharing with the person being encountered some of my costumes, which can be normal to me but not to that person. On the other hand, if we just get carried away by negative ideas towards that culture, we will end up thinking that all people belonging to a specific group behave in the same way.

Last week, I got surprised by having Jonna Kay Beck, a guest speaker from Texas, in my course on culture. In previous classes, I had made myself believe that knowing just one single story may obscure the perceptions we can have when referring to a cultural group. I, however, acknowledge the value of knowing single stories as elements of a big puzzle.

Due to the origin of this lady, my classmates and I came up with stereotypes that aimed to feature a Texan. Some of them were true for most of inhabitants of this state but not for her. She has a lot of characteristics in common with her fellow citizens, though she has some others that are just unique for her.

Moreover, this encounter was meaningful enough to understand how language shapes culture. Since Texans have Hispanic ancestors, some of the names of the places and names of activities are like the ones you can have in Mexico. We also can see it the other way around; culture can shape language. I suppose that being a learned professor, the speaker has developed sort of a standard American English accent due to her academic roles; although her pitch is high, she does not show the very particular marked speech that you can hear in the region where she is from.

Once again, it is advisable that we provide our students general stories that can help them identify people from other cultures without falling in the mistakes of having them believe that those stories are the truth indeed. Instead of that, teacher should be very careful and set a clear cut that get our students to understand that are lot of untold stories that break the general picture. Doing so, we will be promoting an essential goal when teaching culture, that of making them be motivated to research about a given culture and the sub-groups that co-exist in it.