Week One

It's the Sunday before Week 3 but I will do seperate posts for Week 1 and Week 2 today and do Week 3 next week sometime!

We have a motto: "Let us kick arse!" "(LUKA).

We had our first class on Saturday with Vivien after a morning of shopping at Vejle, a town about 25 minutes from Castberggaard! The topic was Culture and how did we define culture? We learnt about the history of culture and various definitions.

How do YOU define culture?

We then started talking about Deaf Culture and whether it was a minority group or a subculture as well as why it was important for deaf people to define ourselves as members of a deaf culture as well as who can 'take part' in Deaf Culture?!

The discussions went for a long time!!!!!!

Monday started a new week of classes but Week One was mainly media. There was so much photo-taking, filming and brainstorming things for the website such as content and design! We DID have one class on identity.

Your identity adapts to the environment you're in. You could be one identity in one place and another in another place. It's impossible to have the one and only identity because everyone views you differently!

Ole's lecture made me think about one question.."Is your identity totally based on what people expect + accept from you?" Society does have standards that everyone has to live by but everything around a person influences how one behaves and goes by their daily activities so is any part of our identity completely ours? Or is it all based on what you see?

We also talked about Deafness and the differences between medically deaf and social culturally deaf. And the never-ending question..Where's the line between Deaf and Not Deaf? Who decides whether you're deaf enough to be part of the deaf community?

The last thing we talked about in Ole's class was High and Low power distance. For this part of the blog- I will copy and paste from our hand-out...

Power distance is a cultural index derived by sociologist Geert Hofstede. It measures how much a culture has respect for authority.


The Arabic-speaking nations, Latin America, Russia, and nearly all of Asia (especially India and China) are high power distance. Most of Europe, Canada, Australia and Israel are low power distance. Japan and Mediterranean-Europe fall in the middle range.


In a high power distance culture:
· it's acceptable for a supervisor to display his authority
· superiors rarely give their subordinates important work
· if something goes wrong, the subordinates are usually blamed for not doing their proper job/role
· managers rarely interact or socialize with workers
· teachers are expected to teach patriotism
· economic politics (corporation-labor relations, corporation-consumer relations, etc.) are prone to totalitarianism, generally overriding governmental politics
· revolutions are, or were, common if the indocrination fails, but uncommon if it succeeds


In a low power distance culture:
· supervisors are expected to treat employees respectfully
· subordinates may do important work, thus having the opportunity to get promoted quickly
· if something goes wrong, the superior/authority figure is usually blamed by giving unrealistic expectations or being too strict
· managers socialize and interact with workers more often
· teachers are simply employees
· totalitarianism and revolutions are rare

We talked about the WFD Board and Ole sent Asger Bergmann an email. You can find a part of the email below...

we talked about the WFD Board:

In WFD Board there is a mix of deaf from different countries. Some of them from countries with high power distance. Some with low power distance.
Which power distance is dominating in WFD Board? Do culture conflicts exists in WFD Board?

Our conclusion:

It depends on who the President is. Correct?
(Now we have Markku. Before we had Liisa Kauppinen. Before her Yerker Andersson was the President. Those who support low power distance more than high power distance.)

If the WFD President is from Japan, Libya or Colombia, the structure of WFD will change a little from low to high power distance. Do you think that?

Would people from countries with high power distance be elected? Is that why we have and had all those Presidents (Markku, Liisa and Yerker)?

Interesting to think about...
Be back soon with my Week Two update!