CUC107 Assessment 2: Critical Reflection on Readings

Value: 40%

Length: 1000-1200 words

Due: Weekly from week 2 until Monday, 11:59pm (CST), Week 8

Submission: The Assignment 2 submission point has 5 attempts; one for each weekly question.

Complete your reflections each week through the Assessment 2 ‘Critical Reflection’ link
in the ‘Assessment Completion’ area of Learnline by the due date. This assignment can be completed each week once you have done the readings and engaged with the online tutorial and materials. This will save you a lot of work in week 7 after semester break.

Task:

Write answers each week to critically reflect on how and why cultural self-awareness is important to develop cultural intelligence. The weekly questions will help structure this overall theme with prompts and reference to readings.

Task details: Answer each question each week in about 200 words. Draw on your experiences and use references to help illustrate key points made in five of the readings (weeks 2, 3, 5, 6 & 7). This reflection series gets you to demonstrate the relationship between ‘cultural self-awareness’ and ‘cultural intelligence’ based on the readings from weeks 1-8.

1. What experience or observations can you relate to in Russell’s (2011) article and her framing of the Third Culture Kid? What ways does this idea present in the combination of cultures you may have observed at time of change? (200 words) Week 2 reading.
2. What changes in your knowledge infrastructure (Taipale, 2012; Edwards, et al., 2013) have you experienced and what changes in your social, academic or professional experience led to this? (200 words). Week 3 reading.
3. Considering the previous two reflections, what stages of Cultural awareness (Quappe and Cantatore, 2005) have you experienced or observed in instances where you needed to demonstrate cultural self-awareness? What in your social, academic or professional life has required you or others to adjust your level of awareness?  (200 words) Week 5 reading.
4. Discussing and referencing Brislin, Worthley and Macnab’s (2006) definitions of Cultural intelligence, how are your situations reflected on so far requiring and / or demonstrating cultural intelligence? What aspects of Cultural self-awareness and intelligence were required? Use the language from weeks 1-6 to discuss. (200 words) Week 6 reading.
5. What example or stage of culture shock (Flanja, 2006) have you observed or experienced and how did you use your CSA and CI to navigate it? (200 words) Week 7 reading.

As a reflection, we expect you to write in the first person when recounting examples from your experience. Therefore, you will be moving between third person (e.g. this paper showed that…) when you discuss the readings and first person (e.g. I recall that…) when you describe your experiences that illustrate the points being made in the readings.

Your reflections will require Referencing:

Ensure that all sources of ideas from the readings are correctly referenced in the text. See the referencing style guide and sample essay for APA6th available on the Charles Darwin University Library website.

Before you complete each question:

• Read over your work for grammar and spelling errors; do a ‘spell check’ (write the answers on a separate document and then upload the final answer in a word doc into Learn line).
• Checked your work against the assessment criteria.

Paragraph Examples:

The following is an example of a paragraph taken from the Kate Russell paper that was covered in Week 2 (Russell, 2011, pp. 31-32). Notice the description (right-hand side) of each section of the paragraph. This is the TEEL structure we cover in tutorials.

I have come to realize the hyper-sensitivity to my surroundings that I experience is due, in large part, to the defining and redefining of the self I have experienced moving from place to place. According to Fail et al. (2004), an ever-changing environment can alter third culture kids’ perceptions of belonging and identity. While I would, perhaps, like to think that I have a strong sense of self that remains consistent no matter my surrounding, it is simply not the case. I am, as Goffman’s theory of symbolic interactionism posits, a product of social interaction in which, through an internal conversation, I interpret others’ responses to me and respond accordingly. The classic example of this that I have often experienced is the assumption that I am shy. People have often interpreted my initially taciturn nature as shyness and have reacted to me in ways that make me feel like a fragile creature. My quietness is often a result of assessing my new surrounding and, in turn, assigning meaning to the objects that I take in. …….However, now, as I integrate micro-sociological theories into my perspective, and with the benefit of hindsight, I can see how my quiet uncertainty was less of a personality trait and more of a reaction to the need to define the new situation and establish my identity in my new surroundings.

Topic sentence Theoretical support Reflection and explanation of how she defines and redefines herself Example Re-stating the topic sentence with more information based on the example

Another example based on this topic

Cultural self-awareness (or the lack of) can be seen when people travel. For example,I was in my early twenties when I first travelled overseas to Indonesia. Like many young Australians, my first destination was Bali. At the Denpasar airport I overheard many Australian tourists complaining about an issue they considered very serious. “Why don’t they speak English here? You’d think in this day and age, everyone would.” One woman said loudly. Her friends wholeheartedly agreed as they tried to negotiate their way through the airport with signs in Bahasa Indonesia. There was no recognition that they were in a foreign country and shouldn’t just expect everyone to speak English wherever they went. Quappe and Cantatore (2005) would describe this as people in a ‘parochial stage’, where they think that their way is the only possible way. There was no evidence that they had made any effort to learn enough Bahasa Indonesia to get by in these situations. It seemed that they had no recognition that they should adjust themselves in some way Instead they expected everyone else to fit in with them. In this sense, they didn’t seem to have any cultural awareness or self-awareness and so were completing misreading the context and judging others unfairly because of that.

Topic sentence Example Reflection and explanation of how the author saw the situation Theoretical support Re-stating the topic sentence with more information based on the example