Cultural Adaptation

Over the course of my college career I feel that I’ve grown into a fairly culturally competent person. I have played basketball and gone to school with many people from different cultures. These experiences have helped me gain knowledge and come to appreciate the different backgrounds and customs of people from other cultures. After reviewing the continuum, I would say that I land at the “cultural precompetence” level. I have a desire but no clear plan to achieve cultural competence. I always am very open and interested to learn about people from other cultures, I just don’t have a plan or ever work to carry out a plan in order to do so. I wouldn’t say that any of my activities or behaviors are culturally destructive. The closest I would come to making that statement is just by admitting that I tend to only hang out with others that share close to the same social identity. Therefore, I may not be the most approachable to others of different cultures because they would automatically realize they would be the minority in my group of friends.
I think that Fort Hays State as an academic program does well on the continuum, and fits in the “cultural competence” category. I feel that they are always promoting assemblies, meetings, and get-togethers that encourage students to get to know other students from differing cultures. In all of my graduate classes I am actually the minority due to all the Chinese students. However, when talking specifically about the sports programs I think the school could do a little better on the continuum. In order for both myself and the school to move up the cultural competence I could take action by visiting the website of the national Center for Cultural Competence at http://www.georgetown.edu/research/gucdc/nccc/ in order to learn more and develop a plan of action for increasing my knowledge and appreciation for other cultures. After visiting the website and developing a plan, I could create an awareness group within the sports programs at Fort Hays to promote an attitude of appreciation and awareness toward those of other cultures. Within this group differing people would interact with each other and share things such as background, beliefs, customs, traditions, foods, etc. Maybe once a week the group could try different foods and carry out different traditions from other cultures.