Keywords - Chapter 5: Learning Personalities

Affinity and persona – a person’s associations and the way they envision themself, including religion, politics, affinity groups and personality types.

Age – a determinant of bodily and mental capacities, and the relevant and appropriate forms of social interaction and learning at each age level.

Assimilation – maintaining a group’s sameness by establishing a condition that, to be accepted, people who are different must become ‘normal’ or like the dominant group.

Body form – physical and mental attributes that may affect a person’s way of life and identity, such as tall or short, ‘fat’ or ‘thin’, or ‘disability’ or ability.

Corporeal attributes – bodily realities, such as age, race, sex and sexuality, and physical and mental abilities.

Culture – defined narrowly as ethnicity, nationality or ancestry, or broadly as human social- symbolic activity.

Exclusion – maintaining a group’s sameness by keeping out those who are different.

Family – relationships of cohabitation and childrearing, such as nuclear, extended and blended families.

Gendre – symbolic or cultural attributes ascribed to and associated with sex and sexuality, such as feminine and masculine roles and identities.

Inclusion – a process of making people feel they belong in their difference, and making those differences an integral and productive part of the social activity.

Language – the human symbol-making systems of speaking and writing.

Lifeworld – everyday life experience; the things that go without saying and do not need to be taught; the stuff of identity and subjectivity.

Locale – geographical location and the resources and opportunities offered by locations; for instance, different neighbourhoods in a city, a rural or remote versus urban location, different regions in a country, or a developed versus a developing country.

Material conditions – differences in access to wealth and social resources, which may be the result of social class, geographical locale or family context.

Race – differences in physical appearance, between one human population and another: skin colour, facial features, hair colour and texture, height and physique.

Recognition – when differences are named, people are classified and at least minimal measures are taken to deal with these differences.

Sex and sexuality – sex is the biologically inherited aspect of male/female difference, and sexuality is constituted of forms of attraction and liaison, such as heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Social class – a material or economic measure of wealth, power and status in an unequal and hierarchically ordered social structure.

Symbolic differences – socially constructed realities of culture, language, gender, family, affinity and persona, based on the human propensity to make meaning and sense of their encounters with the world in creatively varied ways.