Tornado Project

Items

• Bridging Community & Culture: Mosaic Cultural Identity
  Syarifah Nur Fathima is a Japanese International student of Malaysian descent who was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She came to Canada 2 years ago (September 2017) and has since been volunteering at the London Japanese School and acting as a TA for Professor Mitsume Fukui here at Western. In Japan, she studied Japanese Literature and Culture at Musashino University. For her graduate at Western, she completed an English Teaching program for International students in order to further develop her English-speaking skills. She just recently graduated and hopes to find work in London before returning to Malaysia. There she hopes to secure a career teaching Japanese while utilizing her polylingual skills.
• Maintaining & Sharing your Cultural Identity: Through Education, Exposure, & Experience
  The video explores the cultural identity of Jose. A. Casanova, with a particular focus on how food serves as reminder of where he has come from. We not only talk about how food has shaped who he is today, but also the people who have influenced him significantly, including his mother. Over time, his core values have not diminished despite a change in location. Through passing on values from his Venezuelan culture and his wife’s Colombian culture to his children, he actively encourages them to be culturally humble and to embrace their diverse cultural identity. He does this by emphasizing that they are not just from one community, but they are from three: Canadian, Venezuelan and Colombian. He provides advice on the best way to preserve one’s cultural identity, so that one can maintain one’s roots and not forget where one has come from. He also stresses on the importance of helping others because having gone through the challenges that come with being a new immigrant in Canada himself, he realizes a little help can go a long way.