Running head: CULTURE BAG

Culture Bag: Personal Experience with Diversity, Interconnectedness, and Change

Maggie Stewart
University of Saint Mary

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Abstract
As I prepare to be a teacher in the near future, I realize it is very important for me to
reflect back on my own experiences. People bring their biases, talents, and struggles from past
experiences into all new ones, and in the classroom this can be especially relevant. Students
come from many diverse backgorund and home experiences; no two students are exactly alike,
and I believe there are no learners who perfectly fit a mold or stereotype. Through being aware
of our own experiences and reflecting on what we have learnd from them, teacher candidates like
me can become better educators to diverse learners, ready to adapt to their many needs.

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Personal Experiences with Diversity, Interconnectedness, and Change
Throughout my life and education, I have had many experiences which make me unique.
The places I was born and raised, my parents beliefs and ideals, family struggles with mental
illness, experiences with people from diverse cultures and with diverse needs have all helped me
to become a more well-rounded future educator. However, I am not nearly done learning, and
there is much I still have to experience.
I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. My parents came from fairly opposite parts of
North America, my mom from Tennessee and my dad from Canada; my moms ancestry is
mainly English and German, while my dads heritage is Irish, Scottish, and Icelandic. Their
unique cultures and family views influenced the way I was raised, which I will talk a bit more
about later. Charlottesville is a college town, home to the University of Virginia and also Thomas
Jeffersons historical home, Monticello, and is a fairly diverse place. However, I do not
remember living in Virginia, as my family moved to Annapolis, Maryland when I was two years
old. Annapolis is the capital city of Maryland, and it is situated along the Chesapeake Bay.
Annapolis is the most diverse city I have lived in, at least based on demographic statistics; 63%
of the population in 2000, around the time I lived there, was white, and the next most populous
race was African American. I have early childhood memories in Annapolis, and I went to pre-K
and over half of kindergarten there, but we moved to Norman, Oklahoma in March, 2000 to be
closer to family. I consider Norman to be my hometown; its population is at over 100,000 now,
and it is both a college town, home to the University of Oklahoma, and part of the Oklahoma
City metropolitan area. Norman is not as diverse as the cities I lived in on the East Coast, but
especially because of the University, a nearby Air Force base, and other opportunities in the

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Oklahoma City area, I was able to grow up and go to school around people from many diverse
cultures and have a variety of diverse experiences.
My family experiences were very rooted in our Catholic faith. My parents raised my
sister and me to center our lives on God, and then to serve other people above ourselves.
Catholic social teaching affected the political views I grew up around, and my parents taught us
the motto Pay it forward. Even though our family shared the same faith, my parents differed
greatly from each other in how they came to that faith; my dad was raised Catholic as well and
had actually spent three years in formation as a Benedictine monk after college before feeling
that God was calling him to another vocation, while my mother, in contrast, was raised primarily
without religion and did not have any interest in Catholicism until after marrying my dad. I was
fortunate to be raised in a home with not only a great emphasis on religious education, but on
education in general, especially in the arts. My parents nurtured and encouraged my love for art,
music, creative writing and reading literature from a very young age, and provided experiences
for me, such as visiting museums and listening to authors who came to speak at the University of
Oklahoma. Also, our home was generally a place where we could talk about anything. I did not
realize until later in life what a gift my parents gave me by being open to conversations about the
world: history, other cultures, politics, art, and anything else I wanted to know. I am also very
grateful that I was not raised around racial stereotypes or derogatory language in our home.
While our views are very important to us, we were happy to have friends from different cultures
and with different views. Among our closest family friends are an African American, Southern
Baptist family, a Jewish family, and Muslim families from Persia, Syria, and Palestine. Through
all these experiences, I was able to appreciate and learn from other cultures, and see the influence
diverse cultures have had on each other. My parents instilled in me recognition for the

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connectedness of diverse people and the ways in which nations and cultures depend on each
other on the global scale. This is very important in teaching a generation of children who are
becoming more and more diverse in the cultures and religions in which they were raised
(Kirmani and Laster, 1999). It is very important for teachers to leave biases and personally
beliefs at the door, while still communicating the love and respect that is ultimately at the heart
of most religions.
The most significant diverse problem my family faces is that my mother is mentally ill;
she has bipolar disorder, also often called manic depression. She did accept treatment and begin
taking medication until I was six years old, and thus my early memories of her involve anger,
violent fights, and mood swings. After beginning medication, she began to be more in a haze and
be absent from family activities because she would not feel up to going. She suffered several
major, traumatic breakdowns during my adolescent years, and while I was in high school, she
was hospitalized for her mental illness six times, each time for either severe mania or severe
depression which culminated in suicidal thoughts. Her depression, which kept her in bed very
often, also kept her from keeping a job. For years, I felt ashamed of having a mom with mental
illness, and my mom felt very ashamed as well; she felt that she needed to appear busy and
functional to other parents so they would think she was a good parent. I found an Australian
study which revealed the stigma mentally ill parents feel. While they love parenting, mentally ill
parents tend to feel that they do not have support from other parents, teachers, community
resources, or even their doctors to be accepted as parents (Boursnell, 2007). Due to my life
experiences as the child of a mentally ill mother, I feel I can relate at least on some level to
students who have mentally ill parents, students whose parents make choices they cannot
understand based on any factor, students whose parents are often away in the hospital for any

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reason, and students who personally suffer from mental illness; I want to help all of these
students feel that they are not alone. Mental illness, and even physical illness, can make it very
hard for a child or family to want to ask for help, but when the members of a community is
interconnected and open with each other, families can receive the support they need.
In my educational experiences, I mostly attended public schools. When I was in
elementary school, I was identified as gifted and I was able to take part in extracurricular art,
drama, and critical thinking activities which I found to be both enjoyable and challenging. The
middle school I attended for all of sixth grade, the second semester of seventh grade, and all of
eighth grade had a wonderful gifted and talented program. I was able to attend workshops in
writing, art, drama, science, and math, as well as take part in Model United Nations and other
activities through that program. However, I did feel quite a bit of pressure to be gifted, especially
around standardized testing time, when the gifted and talented counselor made it very clear that I
would help the school greatly by continuing to make stellar scores on reading tests. A survey of
gifted art students showed that many spatial and visual learners who are gifted can be challenged
in math or other subject areas even though they are gifted in the arts, and that they tend to
struggle because they give up and do not try (Carroll, 2008). This perfectly captures my middle
school experience, as I was engaged in gifted programs when I was pulled out of class, but rarely
did homework for my actual classes, even those in which I could have done well. I struggled
with being motivated while I was bored in half my classes and overwhelmed in the others. I do
not think I am particularly gifted or talented in the arts, but I have a natural inclination towards
those fields, while math and science give me anxiety. Therefore, I can relate to students diverse
needs in differing subject areas, to be challenged and to receive extra help.

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One thing I have not experienced much is working with people with physical or mental
exceptionalities, other than mental illness. That is one area in which I need to change and grow. I
have experienced teaching students in religious education who are on the Autism spectrum, and
also students who have ADD. These students require changes, or differentiation, to the lesson
plans in order to help them learn best. I hope to have more experiences with these students so I
can change what I might naturally do to help them learn.
All these experiences have helped me to better relate to diverse groups of students, but
my goal is to constantly grow and change to better accommodate those different from me. More
than that, I hope to open myself up to learning from people of different cultures and needs.

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References
Boursnell, M. (2007). The Silent Parent: Developing Knowledge about the Experiences of
Parents with Mental Illness. Child Care In Practice, 13(3), 251-260.
Carroll, K. L. (2008). In Their Own Voices: Helping Artistically Gifted and Talented Students
Succeed Academically. Gifted Child Today, 31(4), 36-43.
Kirmani, M. H., & Laster, B. P. (1999). Responding to Religious Diversity in
Classrooms. Educational Leadership, 56(7), 61.