Education  Tags: education educ teaching teach curriculum  

To search for customs, add the words social life to the name of the country or culture.

The Education Library has books that provide a good introduction to the customs of many cultures. Click on the links to find where the books are shelved. Try these suggestions first and ask a librarian if you need more help.

LIBRARIANS' TIP: Start your assignment with the Māori culture- check that you can find information on this before researching your own and another culture.

General Māori Culture

The first two books cover a general range of topics on Maori topics:

Tangata whenua: the world of the Maori

Ki te whaiao: an introduction to Maori culture and society

Family/Attitutes towards elders

This book looks at many aspects of the Maori whanau/family:

New growth from old: the whanau in the modern world

This one has a chapter on older Māori and whānau: Launching Māori futures

Death

This book contains a chapter on a view of death: Te ao hurihuri

Beauty and sexuality

A usefull book could be Bitter sweet : indigenous women in the Pacific. It contains chapters on beauty, sexuality, reflections, cultural identity of not only Maori woman but woman from the Pacific Islands as well.

Another relevant book is State of the Māori nation : twenty-first century issues in Aotearoa, which contains the chapter 'Māori literature : the power and the beauty'. It also contains an article on Maori sexuality as well as an article on the Maori war dance the Kapa Haka, which might provide you with information on facial expressions.

A good source of information on aspects of cultures are general works on the social life and customs of a country. To find these books, type in the name of the country and the words social life into the keyword box on the catalogue in the left hand column, e.g.:

Fiji social life

You can also type in the name of a country and the name of your cultural topic but this may mean you miss useful information from more general books.

Parenting

This book is about parenting in different cultures: Research on sociocultural influence on motivation and learning. volume 1 / edited by Dennis M McInerney and Shawn van Etten.

Journals

If you can't find any books about your specific topic, you could try other sources such as articles in journals.

The Journal of Cultural Diversity has lots of articles on Parenting, Death, Nursing etc. in different cultures. Click here to search for articles in this Journal. Type in the name of your country as keyword.

You can also use ProQuest to search for articles in other journals by typing in keywords here. Select the second option 'Look up Topics A-Z' type in 'Cultural Diversity'. 

E-cast

Another source of information can be the media. There are several TV programmes on cultural diversity. You can view and download these using e-cast education, an on-line teaching and learning tool that provides real-time and real-life teaching resources through recorded programmes and videos. Access to the database can be found from the library list of databases, click on the letter E then scroll down to e-cast and access with your user login. If you select the red button 'Ready to watch' and type in Maori as keyword, you'll see a list of viewable TV-programmes, e.g. the documentary Skin to Skin, which looks at the cultural divide within families.