Cultural reflections

One of the challenges I have had in some of my classroom during this semester is finding ways to work in lessons for ICC. The material we have covered in class has been interesting as a way to better understand classrooms and potential issues we might have with understanding students, especially in a multicultural classroom. I really wish I could have taken this course before I taught my refugee classes in the states a few years back, but now I find myself in a place where I am the only foreigner, out often own country and culture and surrounded by students of common nationality, race, age, culture and quite often thought processes. This has been the challenge of trying to stimulate some useful reflective though for my students, and see some acknowledgement of unbiased opinions. To what effect this has happened, I cannot really be sure, but I think I haven't made a dent.
This particular lesson was built around a common theme for my classes over the last 2 years. Teaching in a beauty arts department has given me a lot of insight on how Koreans view outward appearance, beauty and acceptance based on looks as well as expectations for family and marriage relationships. As well, this lesson provides a mix of cultural practices that have spread or are spreading to other parts of the world that are synonymous with my own culture, unfortunately ones that I particularly loathe. In any case, I set the lesson up to trigger student responses on culture, in particular I wanted them to think about how behaviors in their home country might resemble or differ from the ones in the article. I wasn't sure how the would respond initially, or how the writing production might allow them to reflect on a given perspective.
This lesson had to take place over two classes, but I think that worked better because students only got half of the information to solve which country this might be, so they were at least interested to learn the source. They were very quick to decide that the images were Japanese and the story was either from America or England. The latter was set up because the article was printed originally in England then for online in America, so had currency values for both. This threw them off just a bit however they were quick to decide the woman in the picture was from Japan because she was ugly and for her eye shape. The second picture was a bit surprising as a lot if students said she wasn't attractive because of plastic surgery. That surprised me because of the massive amount of money that is spent in this country on cosmetic enhancements and how it should reflect a social view of appearance. I should say that a lot of students wouldn't admit to surgery in the first place donut is no surprise that they would lie about their expectations of beauty. A lot of their answers in the writing production were varied. Some took an overly harsh tone accusing the guilty party of wrongdoing.
I think the discussion stages of these lessons are the most difficult to achieve. Typically the students either don't share their honest opinion, or they sit back and just agree with the one or two people that tend to dominate the discussion. They only instances where good discussion has occurred is when I have had high level students that have spent time abroad. They tend to have a broader perspective and might disagree or at least question korean cultural norms. When none of them are in a class, it tends to be really weak participation and no strong opinions are given. I'm not sure how to go about directing lower level students in more productive cultural discussion, but I suppose if I did, I wouldn't be taking this course.