COLUMBAN COLLEGE COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

An understanding of culture will provide individuals with a better appreciation of the different cultures of people with whom they may relate now and in the future. WHAT IS CULTURE?

SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF EDUCATION REPORT TITLE : FACILITATOR : PROFESSOR : NATURE & MEANING OF CULTURE Rina C. Constantino Roderick A. Tadeo, Ph.D.

Ember, 1999
Culture is the set of learned behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, values, and ideals that are characteristics of a particular society or population.

CULTURE As our nation continues to change, we will interact with others from quite different backgrounds from our own, especially in the classroom. The manner in which we respond to others who seem different can have a serious impact on success in school, work, and harmonious relationship with others. People from different countries, Americans, Japanese, Filipino, can use standards from their own cultural background to form opinions about those from other cultures. If people can understand why those from other groups behave and talk as they do, there is less of an inclination to include that different is deficient. For example, when meeting people from another culture, we are initially struck by differences in behavior, speech, clothing, food, etc.

Calhoun, et al., 1994

Culture is the learned norms, values, knowledge, artifacts, language, and symbols that are constantly communicated among people who share a common way of life.

Allan Joshua, 1996

Culture is the sum total of symbols, ideas, forms of expressions, and material products associated with a system. It is a dynamic medium through which societies create a collective way of life reflected in such things as beliefs, values, music, literature, art, dance, science, religious ritual and technology.

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Culture refers to the attitudes, values, customs, and behavior patterns that characterize a social group.

Hofstede(1997)
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts. It also refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and materials objects and possessions acquired by a group of the people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.

E.B. Taylor
an eminent English scholar Culture is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. (Panopio, 1992)

Leslie A. White
Culture as an organization of phenomena that is dependent upon symbols, phenomena which include acts (patterns of behavior); and sentiments (attitudes, values). In this sense, culture means the entire way of life of people and everything learned and shared by people in society (Hunt et al, 1998).

Every society has a culture, no matter how simple the culture may be, and every human being is cultured in the sense of participating in some culture or other.

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