Assignment: Defining Culture

You will likely recall from the course objectives that a large portion of this course is focused on having you examine your ethnic heritage, cultural identity, values, and assumptions and analyze their impact on the provision of culturally competent services.

In this assignment, you will be asked to write a 2-page paper outlining how you define yourself culturally. If you recall from Module 1, you were asked to reflect on how the person you are today has been influenced by your group affiliations. You can include components of that discussion in this assignment although you will certainly need to substantially expand on what you wrote in Module 1. In fact, you will need to indicate your ethnicity, race, gender, religion, language, and age and discuss how each of these has contributed to who you are today. You will also need to think critically about which of these factors is the most important to you (i.e., on which factor do you base your decisions, values, and opinions?) and which is the least important to you. You will be asked to apply what you have learned so far (you can do this by incorporating content from scholarly sources) to what you write.

Tasks:

Write a 2-page paper outlining how you define yourself culturally. This can be an expansion of the discussion that you posted in Module 1 with content added from what you have learned in the course so far.

Indicate your ethnicity, race, gender, religion, language, and age and discuss how each of these has contributed to who you are today.

You may discuss these in terms of where you are at present (e.g., what religion you currently follow), and, if you wish, you can include information from when you were younger (e.g., what religion you were raised with).

Explain which of these factors is the most important and which is the least important to you and share why you believe this to be the case.