Choose two societies or civilizations that you would like to examine in your final project, including the time periods you will consider.
Choose one theme for your analysis of the societies or civilizations.
Final Project Preparation
[WLO: 3] [CLOs: 1, 2, 3, 4]
Prior to beginning work on this assignment, review the instructions for the Week 5 Comparative Human Experience final project. In addition, keep in mind the LIB101 research guide: Library resources and primary sources as a resource that help you in researching your topic and finding primary and secondary sources.
The purpose of this assignment is to prepare you for your final project by guiding you through the research and writing process. To complete this activity, download the required Final Project Preparation Template and fill out each section.
To complete the Final Project Preparation Template successfully, use the Week 3 Assignment Help Sheet with Worked Examples.
To complete the template, you will
Choose two societies or civilizations that you would like to examine in your final project, including the time periods you will consider.
Choose one theme for your analysis of the societies or civilizations.
Choose a format to present your analysis.
Choose two works from each society (four total) that express your chosen theme (works of history, literature, philosophy, theology, art, architecture, or music) and list them using APA-formatted references. These works are considered primary sources.
Choose two scholarly secondary sources, one for each society or civilization, relevant to your chosen theme and list them using APA-formatted references.
Provide brief annotations for each source (six total) including a description of its content and relevance to your Final Project.
Develop a preliminary introduction for your final project.
Develop a preliminary thesis statement for your final project.
Outline three topic sentences for each society or civilization to shape the main points of your analysis.
Cite at least one source from your reference list to support each topic sentence.
List your sources in an APA-formatted references list (two scholarly sources and four primary source works).
Relationships are powerful. Our one-to-one connections with each other are the foundation for change. And building relationships with people from different cultures, often many different cultures, is key in building diverse communities that are powerful enough to achieve significant goals.
Whether you want to make sure your children get a good education, bring quality health care into your communities, or promote economic development, there is a good chance you will need to work with people from several different racial, language, ethnic, or economic groups. And in order to work with people from different cultural groups effectively, you will need to build sturdy and caring relationships based on trust, understanding, and shared goals.
Why? Because trusting relationships are the glue that hold people together as they work on a common problem. As people work on challenging problems, they will have to hang in there together when things get hard. They will have to support each other to stay with an effort, even when it feels discouraging. People will have to resist the efforts of those who use divide-and-conquer techniques–pitting one cultural group against another.
Regardless of your racial, ethnic, religious, or socioeconomic group, you will probably need to establish relationships with people whose group you may know very little about.
Each one of us is like a hub of a wheel. Each one of us can build relationships and friendships around ourselves that provide us with the necessary strength to achieve community goals. If each person builds a network of diverse and strong relationships, we can come together and solve problems that we have in common.
In this section, we are going to talk about:
But first let’s talk about what culture is. Culture is a complex concept, with many different definitions. But, simply put, “culture” refers to a group or community with which we share common experiences that shape the way we understand the world. It includes groups that we are born into, such as race, national origin, class, or religion. It can also include groups we join or become part of. For example, we can acquire a new culture by moving to a new region, by a change in our economic status, or by becoming disabled. When we think of culture this broadly we realize we all belong to many cultures at once. Do you agree? How might this apply to you?
It may seem odd that in order to learn about people in other cultures, we start by becoming more aware of our own culture. But we believe this is true. Why?
If you haven’t had a chance to understand how your culture has affected you first hand, it’s more difficult to understand how it could affect anyone else or why it might be important to them. If you are comfortable talking about your own culture, then you will become better at listening to others talk about theirs. Or, if you understand how discrimination has affected you, then you may be more aware of how it has affected others.
Here are some tips on how to becoming more aware of your own culture:
Do you have a culture? Do you have more than one? What is your cultural background?
Even if you don’t know who your ancestors are, you have a culture. Even if you are a mix of many cultures, you have one. Culture evolves and changes all the time. It came from your ancestors from many generations ago, and it comes from your family and community today.
In addition to the cultural groups we belong to, we also each have groups we identify with, such as being a parent, an athlete, an immigrant, a small business owner, or a wage worker. These kinds of groups, although not exactly the same as a culture, have similarities to cultural groups. For example, being a parent or and an immigrant may be an identity that influences how you view the world and how the world views you. Becoming aware of your different identities can help you understand what it might be like to belong to a cultural group.