Reflection: Learning about Cultural Differences

Last year, in a class called Health Systems Orientation, we learned a variety of things. These things were all things I could have used in this project, had there not been requirements of using other classes as well. There was just so much that we learned, that I still remember to this day. Mr. Allen taught us a lot about tech-savy type of things, like websites, such as Delicious.com, which I still use, by the way! This one in particular was amazing to learn about: becoming culturally competent. This means being aware of what goes on around you, making sure you are considerate of all cultures, and being able to understand why certain people act in certain ways. This is going to take us very far in the medical field, because there may be a lot of patients that actually are from different cultural settings that are different from a typical U.S.A home. There are two 21st century skills that will go hand in hand with this unit of H.S.O., and those are "Knowledgeable individuals understand content necessary to be successful in a variety of endeavors.", and "Self-directed learners take the initiative to actively and independently inquire and apply learning to new and different situations." The first one relates to this unit because this unit definitely gave us all content that was necessary to be successful in a variety of Medical endeavors, which is always a plus for any of us. Second, we were taught in this class to become independent, and learn basically on our own. We were able to apply this learning to when we went on our clinicals at the nursing home at the end of the year. The cultures of some of the residents were different than our own. This unit definitely taught us great things, and I will continue to use those great things in my life. I've attached an artifact to my links list, called "Culture Reflection", which is an exploitation of exactly what we did in this unit.