I am:

-Caucasian
-female
-Midwestern
-college student
-middle class

These are all important parts of my identity, but they are also the things that are easiest to identify about myself. I believe it is my experiences that have mostly shaped who i am, the parts of yourself that are hard to put into bullet points. It's hard to capture experiences in words, so I will use pictures to help describe how experiences have influenced my cultural identity.

In this picture, my mom is reading to my buddy and me (I'm the one with the red-and-white striped hat). And as can be seen by my mom holding me and reading to me, my family was always supportive of me and my dreams, and saw my education as one of the most important things for me to focus on. My family was my biggest influence in my early life and a great influence even now as I am on my own. My dad was the one who always cooked in my family, and my mom was the one who worked more; gender roles were very fluid. My mom never wore makeup, didn't care about shopping, and was very athletic, while my dad was more emotional and artistic. Seeing these gender roles "swapped" in what is seen as normal in our society, led me, in my primary socialization and gender socialization, to not see characteristics as solely for males or females (Jackson, 2014). This led me to being sensitive to LGBTQ issues and to becoming the feminist tomboy that I am today. Both my parents too are very proud of their heritage, so celebrate Scandinavian or Dutch holidays and make their foods. Growing up, my mom always said the phrase, "If you ain't Dutch, you ain't much!" to my brother and I. In our primary socialization, we were taught to be proud of where we come from and associate ourselves strongly with our heritage. In the Midwest, I fit into a majority identity as many people have Germanic or Scandinavian backgrounds (Jackson, 2014). This made me not even consider myself as having a racial identity (Jackson, 2014). I was so used to blending in to my almost purely white hometown and not even consider my race as a part of my identity. This of course changed as I came in to contact with different people and traveled.

Because of my parent's stress on the importance of school at a young age, I was sent to a private school as the public schools in our town were not considered very good. The school was a private Christian that was quite strict. I am second to the left on the bottom; this is a picture that shows the uniforms we had to wear which symbolizes the strictness I encountered in education at a young age. After going through so many years of strict schooling, and looking back, I have found that it doesn't always get the best results. My schooling has impacted the way I want my future classroom to be- laid-back and fun. My parents too were very strict about my education; anything below an A was considered bad. Even to this day, I still feel guilt if I don't get an A but I have also learned to highly value education. I come from a very liberal and relaxed Methodist family, but the kids that I went to school with were very strong, right-wing Christians. Especially during the presidential elections in elementary school, I had high identity salience because my "mommy and daddy" believed things that were different from the majority of students at my school. As I got older, this led me to be sensitive about other's beliefs because I didn't want people to be uncomfortable just because their beliefs differ.

This is a picture of a Buddhist temple in Korea. This picture symbolizes for me the encountering of different ideas, beliefs, and practices than what I'm used to being surrounded by. My parents have always been big travelers, and when I was growing up and hearing their stories, I knew I was going to be a traveler too. I went to Costa Rica with my family in 9th grade. I had taken a few years of Spanish by that time, so I thought it would be very comfortable for me on our trip there. I knew nothing about the country and just assumed it was just like other Latin American countries I had learned about. I was very wrong. I was comfortable with Big C culture, with learning about the country from museums, etc. but knew nothing about Little c culture in a country such as Costa Rica. I was so uncomfortable interacting with the people, being so crowded in the city, the machismo culture and how much I stood out there, and really just the everyday life of Costa Rica. This was my first experience out of the country, but I learned from it and used this knowledge on my other travels.

https://www.facebook.com/josie.swanson.3/videos/10206506126235066/?l=881052...

I tried to link the video from Facebook but because it wasn't an mp4 file it didn't work. So if you follow the link, it will bring you to a video I took while riding a tuktuk in the Philippines. It was a totally new kind of transportation and I was able to see things from a completely new perspective. This picture of scuba diving in the Philippines was another example of a new experience that gave me a completely new perspective of the world. After graduating high school, I spent three weeks in Japan with my high school Japanese class. I had three host families and in my time living with them, I got to see how families live and interacted. By being so close to the Little c culture, I was able to get a preview into the everyday life of my Japanese families. After this experience, I became swept up in my interest in East Asia and Asian languages. I decided to major in Asian Language and Literature and Global Studies because of the intense curiosity I had of learning more about what I saw and experienced in Japan. I started getting interested in Korean, and ended up studying there for a year. It is amazing, looking back, what led to my interest in Asian culture. It was because Because I got to see an inside view of Japanese culture, I am studying and am constantly fascinated in other's way of life.

This was taken when I was in Japan after graduating high school; we assisted in teaching an English class. As can be seen in this picture, there is not much distance between student and teacher. I want my teaching to be that same way. It is important to me to get to know students, build strong rapport, and for students to be comfortable around me. I want my classroom to be laid-back and not a place of stress for them but purely a place of learning and discovery. Contrary to the norm in East Asian cultures, I want there to be little power distance between my students and me; because at least for me, when learning a second language, it is informality and a relaxed and comfortable setting for making mistakes in the classroom that has allowed me to push my language boundaries. Going to a school that was so strict when I was young makes me want to stray from that kind of an environment for my own students. In all, my experiences have led me to gain an empathy that I will extend to my students as well as a fun-filled and relaxed environment conducive to learning.

Jackson, J. (2014). Introducing language and intercultural communication. New York, NY: Routledge.

Kramsch, C. (2013). Culture in foreign language teaching. Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research, 1(1). Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw29oIkZsa23RTI3clIxSnpGNzQ/view