I completely agreed with Kuma when he argued that people have a cultural lens and becoming aware of others' cultural lenses will help us eradicate stereotyping. I liked that he said it would enhance cultural awareness and not necessarily change the way you view the world. No matter how culturally aware you are, you will most likely still see through your own cultures lenses, simply because that is what you were raised to see.
Kuma, in his article, portrays stereotyping as an easy way to blame someone's culture for expectations and failures. This seems to be an almost ridiculous excuse from a teacher's point of view. I'm sure we all read this thinking well I'm never going to blame someone's culture for their behavior. But part of me thinks it's slightly unavoidable at certain points. Think about it. If we, as TESOL professionals are enhancing our knowledge on not only English pedagogies for ELLs, but also on incorporating and learning as much as possible about our students' backgrounds, it would be easy to mistake being culturally aware with being slightly stereotypical. For example, past articles we've read in this class have talked about Confucius and the learning and teaching expectations coinciding with his work. Say a student in your class is Asian (I now know all of the issues that are homogenized into this term...) and is less interactive than other non-Asian students. Yes, we as TESOLers would be able to point out several other factors that might attribute to this. But maybe the school (s)he came from was oriented around Confucius's methodology. Knowing that we would never think "oh, well (s)he's just Asian, that's how they are," it is hard to determine where the line between being culturally-sensitive and respectful and being stereotypical and negative. Sometimes the dichotomies here are much smaller and more subtle than we think.
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