You sit with your friends as you relax, listening to Spanish salsa music. Your taste buds are tingling from the flavor of freshly made egg rolls, and you smell kettle corn not too far away. As you explore more with your friends, you come across this world map with pins scattered across its surface. You pick up a pin and think to yourself… “Who am I”?

Portage County Cultural Festival 

The Portage County Cultural Festival is an event held at Stevens Point Area Senior High School yearly and has been running for more than 25 years. The event is free to the public and features food from all over the world throughout the building, usually run by fundraising groups. You can find dance and live music performances in the Field House, Auditorium, the Tents, and occasionally in North Commons. In North Commons, there are crafts and performances for kids to see, such as storytelling or puppet shows. There are scheduled language lessons where you can learn the basics of many common languages within 30-45 minutes. Overall, it’s a great event for the entire family and lots of fun. 

Why is This Important and Relevant?

 The Portage County Cultural Festival brings people from a multitude of cultures together and gives people the chance to share their own cultures with others in our community. Over time, our society has become more and more accepting of diversity, leading to the behaviors that we see in newer generations. But there are still conflicts in the way that cultures are communicated or and taken in.

“Cross-cultural communication is the process of recognizing both differences and similarities among cultural groups to effectively engage within a given context,” as said by Berkeley University. It is crucial to be able to have good relationships between people in a community as diverse as Portage County. Paul Cibaric, a Diversity Studies teacher at SPASH, says,” We have to think about how we are sharing ideas or sharing information with other people that don’t necessarily communicate in the same fashion as I do or you do. So it’s more of being aware of how you’re connecting with the other person, regardless of what ethnicity they are.” He gives the example of health care, but we see it in offices and the service industry as well, where you may not be from the same place as another person, and you need to be aware of the signals that a person can give when communicating.  According to Berkeley University, “The ideal dynamic involves a seamless exchange of ideas, where diversity is leveraged as a strength rather than a hurdle, enabling teams to collaborate efficiently and harmoniously toward their common goals.” This is their description of how a workplace should feel in their article “Cross-Cultural Communication in the Workplace”.You want to look out for nonverbal cues or consider any other alternate meaning that could go into a conversation. Cibaric talks about the idea of just practicing being aware of the fact that some things we do with one group of people isn’t exactly the best way to communicate with another. Just putting another layer on the way that we communicate.

But, the failure to add that extra layer to the way you listen in a conversation can lead to cross-cultural miscommunication.

 In a community or world that is very diverse, miscommunications can happen when it comes to talking about culture or just in day-to-day conversations where people may be of different ethnicities or cultures. Cibaric gives the example of volume in a conversation, saying,

“If a person is communicating in a very loud or a very gesture-filled way, that may put another person kind of not off, but it may send them into the idea of, okay, I don’t understand what he’s doing with his hands or how he’s communicating so loudly to me. I don’t need to be shouted at.” 

He talks about how many variables go into cross-cultural communication that can be hard to understand. And there are many situations where people just get lost in communication because they don’t take into consideration the fact that someone may be from a different ethnicity and may not communicate the same way that you do. Berkeley says,  “Adopting a hands-off approach to cross-cultural communication in teams often falls short because it overlooks the necessity of deliberate efforts to recognize and respect cultural differences.” A person’s culture is an important part of a person, and pushing aside one’s culture can be seen as disrespectful and can be unhealthy within relationships and group settings. Many variables go into cross-cultural communication, but if we spread awareness on how we can become more understanding, we can create even more healthy relationships between people and make Portage County even more culturally accepting than it already is. 

What can WE do?

We’ve talked about what cross-cultural communication is and the conflicts that can occur but what can we as students, teachers, and community members  do to get out there and experience the diversity of Portage County?

Paul Cibaric says, “I think many, many SPASH students are just curious about other cultures and how other cultures function. I think the cultural festival is a great avenue for people to explore those curiosities, for people not to um not be afraid to step into a situation and say, I don’t understand this. What is this? Whether it’s something, a food that they’re selling and needing an explanation of, what is this? What is this little dumpling-like thing? What is this? What’s inside this? How do you make this? Um, you know, it’s the perfect opportunity for people to realize that we’re not all one culture.” 

Not only should we try new things and be curious about these new things in our community but we should also be open-minded.  There are so many experiences here in Portage County and the Cultural Festival is a great way to see the cultures that people represent. Where people come from, the ideas that people have, and who these people are.

“I think that it’s really important to realize that we’re in this together. And, like, we’re in Portage County altogether. And if we just retreat to our corners of Portage County and we don’t recognize the variety of humanity that we have here, then we’re not engaging fully in all the benefits that we could have in this community. If we’re retreating into only hanging out with the people that we know, and we’re not letting our curiosity lead us to understand fully who our neighbors are, then that’s a problem. And I hope that everybody will be brave and step up and come to the cultural festival and healthily explore our community.” 

So, I wish you luck on your exploring and hope that you see just how amazing Portage County, and the people in it, can be.