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- INTERCULTURAL TEACHING IN PLURI-ETHNIC CLASSES
- The growing number of immigrant students in Italian schools has stimulated the need for reflection on the questions which may arise when people from various cultural backgrounds live together.
- Global demographic movements caused by complex economic, social and political reasons, rapidly change the ethnic "maps" of cities and regions. More and more people have to confront themselves with differences in habits, values, religions, languages, etc.
- Italian society will be multicultural, and there is a fundamental role for schools in preparing new generations to live in this society.
- COSPE bases its activities in the field of education (such as developing teaching units and materials) on the following principles:
- -to prevent prejudice and racial intolerance
- -to favour the integration of ethnic minority students in mainstream education
- -to create an anti-racist culture that is more than "tolerance", both in schools and outside schools
- -to promote initiatives that link schools with the local area
- -to promote intercultural didactics and intercultural learning
- -to equip. teachers and other school staff with materials that reveal the real competence and potential of ethnic minority students
- -to avoid students from minority ethnic backgrounds leaving school in an early stage
- -to promote equal opportunities to school success, developing materials for curricular teaching in home languages
- -to promote the study of other cultures
- -to teach in order to decentralise one’s point of view
- -to get used to contestualising knowledge, values and codes
- -to promote first and second language learning (European and non European languages)
- These aims are quite obvious and in some cases very general. More well defined are the methodological strategies that COSPE applies in intercultural education. First of all there are a couple of "no’s".
- Avoid a folkloristic representation of different cultures
- Avoid considering particular aspects of a different culture as "strange" and "unbelievable", etc.
- Avoid any form of moralism
- Avoid reducing the difference between cultures to a difference between two persons, especially for children from minority ethnic groups it can be very embarrassing to be considered "belonging to the other group"
- The best items to use for your intercultural teaching are those that express non-subjective cultural difference such as social events, games, jobs, housing, the individual and common use of space, calendars, fairy tales, arts, literature, etc.
- The best choice is to work on items of cultural difference that raise interest, are contextualisable and put into question your own point of view. Activities on different communication codes are extremely interesting vehicles for intercultural education. They offer equal opportunities for all students, as all students can participate and reach a satisfying level in creative and artistic skills and in home language use in the classroom
- Diana De Lorenzi, 1998
