This assignment consists of at least TWO parts (but hopefully THREE): summary of your interview with insights gained, AND connections to your own experience with your culture. Optional (but please try to include): photo(s) of your interviewee.
For this assignment you are going to interview someone from another culture to find out about how that person's culture has influenced them. You will write a narrative summarizing what you learned about your interviewee's cultural influences, and then compare your interviewee's cultural influences to your own, analyzing at least one or two aspects of how your culture has influenced your identity. This process should help you to think more deeply about your own culture and how your own culture has influenced you.
Set up your interview with your interviewee.
Prepare an interview protocol with 4-5 interview questions to ask your interviewee about their culture and how it has influenced them. Try to make these questions more about values, beliefs and social behavior, rather than questions about what kinds of food they eat or what holidays they celebrate. Remember, we are trying to find out about how that person's culture has influenced their identity in terms of who they are. See my sample interview protocol that I used with my interviewee. You can also look at example questions created in class on our class slides.
Ask if you can record, and then interview your interviewee, asking follow-up questions where you feel you would like more information. Take notes and write up a narrative about your interviewee. Include a brief description of who the person is that you interviewed, and a description of what they told you about their cultural identity, focusing on what seems most interesting, insightful and relevant to you. Add in your own analysis or interpretations of what they said, trying to dig a little deeper to really understand some of the ways in which that person's culture has influenced them.
Below this narrative, you are going to add another narrative, focusing on some ways in which you feel your own culture has influenced you, and drawing some connections to how your interviewee's culture has influenced them. Include a brief description in which you identify your own culture, and describe some features of your culture that have influenced you -- features you would like to explore further -- and try to dig deeply to find a few important insights. You may choose here to write about one area of your culture that has strongly influenced you and another aspect of your culture that causes you tension (for example an aspect that you disagree with or feel does not represent you). End with how you feel this reflective work can inform who you want to become and how you want to be the change.
NOTE: If you would prefer to do this as a video reflection, you can! Just do the same as steps 3 and 4 but present it orally in a short video that you can share with me by Whatsapp OR a link in email. If you do this, you should submit a blank document to Turnitin and on the document just write that you sent me a video response.
The length of the descriptions and analyses is not important, but probably you would want to write at least a couple of paragraphs about your partner and a couple about yourself. What is important is that you are really trying to dig more deeply into how culture influences people, and particularly, how your own culture has influenced you. You should be coming away from this assignment having gained some important insights into how culture has shaped who you are and who you want to become.
You can look at my example to help you. Please bear in mind that this is only one way to do this assignment. You may choose to focus on entirely different aspects of culture. What is important is that you complete your assignment in a way that is meaningful to you.