Cultural Differences

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

STARR-METHOD

Situation

The teacher handed out an assignment about cultural differences within your project group. We have three kinds of nationalities in our group, which are Pakistani, Bulgarian and Dutch.

Task

Find interesting cultural differences within the project group and visualize them.

Action

At first, I sat around with my Dutch project members and wrote down some typical Dutch habits. Then, we made them from words to simple drawings. We showed this to our foreign project members and asked them if these situations were way different in their culture. They compared them to their culture and told us if it was different or not. Of course, this went the other way around too.

Result

We filtered out the most interesting differences in cultures. The first picture always represents the Dutch and the second Pakistani.

Dating – on the left a couple and on the right the parents.

Friendship – how close are we?

Queueing – privileged women.

Reflection

Some interesting things came out, like queueing at a random store. In the Netherlands, it’s normal that everyone stands in line and nobody has a privilege. In Pakistan this is way different, because women can just easily skip the line. We had a great discussion about cultures and we found some similarities, but also the differences. It was interesting to talk about this subject.