School Difficulties and Immigrant Background: conclusions about intercultural education

This article, based on my doctoral thesis, presents a study with respect to teachers' thinking regarding school difficulties and their attitudes toward students' immigrant backgrounds. The intention of my doctoral thesis was to study the factors surrounding immigrant students' schooling. In the prevailing thinking in Sweden, students with immigrant backgrounds are often associated with problems and difficulties, not only in administrative circles but also in practical pedagogical discussions taking place in the schools. These problems are the starting point for an analysis of the reasoning and present thinking regarding immigrant students and their school situations.     

Moral education as intercultural moral education

In a diverse country such as Peru, moral education should reflect social, cultural, political and spiritual dilemmas of both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and their communities. To promote understanding and respect amongst people from different sociocultural backgrounds, moral education should encourage a dialogue between indigenous values and mainstream hegemonic values. In this article, we argue for the need to conceptualise moral education as intercultural. Against a common view that portraits indigenous people as incommensurable, that is, as trapped in their own radically different moral perspective, our own research in Shipibo-Konibo and Asháninka communities show that indigenous people display a moral point of view when analysing cultural traditions and practices. This moral point of view appears intertwined with their cultural values and ethnic identities and allows intercultural dialogue. In this vein, we argue for the need to incorporate intercultural moral conflicts and dilemmas into moral education to promote understanding and respect for others.     

The relationship between religious education and intercultural education

ABSTRACT

Religious education and intercultural education are seen by some to be in tension with each other, and by others as two sides of the same coin. The explanations for this unsettled relationship may be found in the different histories of the two fields. Intercultural education has become a cross curricular priority, resulting from rather recent developments marked by cultural complexity, following globalisation and migration processes of the last 50 years or so. Religious education has a long history of being a distinct school subject, much influenced by differing national and religious cultural heritages and which, during the last half century, has begun to address the issues of religious and world view diversity. In several countries today, religious education in the publicly funded school is conceived as non-confessional and deals with a diversity of religions and world views. Religious education may be the subject where socio-cultural differences are most visible and where the challenges of diversity are put to the test. This raises a series of challenges to curriculum designers and teachers in classrooms; the article will address some of them and suggest ways forward for teacher education and school practice.     

Pierre Bourdieu and intercultural education: it is not just about lack of knowledge about others

In response to the current intersection of pluralism, globalization, the histories and persistence of inequality in society and schools, and in response to well intended but potentially dangerous tendency toward the romantic versions of everyone’s points of views are valid and let us respect each other’s viewpoints in intercultural education, some intercultural educators are adamantly arguing that the goal of intercultural education must be to work against inequality and inhumanity linked to the system of domination and to foreground social justice. Joining the commitment of such intercultural educators within the framework of anti oppressive intercultural education, this essay shows how Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theoretical framework can help to problematize the psychologically based intercultural education that mainly focuses on benign differences. Using Bourdieu’s framework, the author demonstrates that the barrier to intercultural education is not just lack of knowledge about others, illuminates the process of intercultural exchange by at least partially unpacking the processes involved in representations and interpretations of differences in intercultural education, and suggests implications for anti oppressive intercultural education.     

Cooperative learning in intercultural education

Implementation of intercultural education implies that teachers command the strategies to use the skills and knowledge that children bring into the classroom, to create opportunities to communicate and cooperate in heterogeneous groups, and to provide equal opportunities to participate in the learning processes which are organised in the classroom. The use of small groups in which students learn together and benefit from each others skills and knowledge is a logical option, but conditions have to be fulfilled on the levels of teachers’ communication and management skills, curriculum and pedagogical climate in order to achieve the aims of ‘doing justice to diversity’ and the provision of equal opportunities to participate.     

Religion,human rights and intercultural education

Religions in the contemporary world are Janus-faced institutions. They have the potential of being positive forces but also the capacity of being negative forces. Educators can use the positive aspects and dimensions of religion to foster interfaith and intercultural understandings. In this respect, educators can use the human rights instruments that most nations have approved to ensure that the legal and secular basis of the state provides safety and security to all faiths. This paper discusses these issues and the role of intercultural education in facilitating interfaith education and understanding.     

Research note: Promoting intercultural education through art education

Taking UNESCO’s proposal ‘learning how to live together’ as a starting point, we examined to what extent visual education can be used as a tool to promote the aims of intercultural education. We analyzed the power of using artistic images from different cultures to change students’ perception of cultural differences, thereby facilitating the development of attitudes of respect towards different ethnic/cultural groups. We also investigated to what extent this strategy could contribute to the integration of minority peers into a majority group. Students were assigned to either an experimental or a control group. The experimental treatment consisted of exposing students to several art object images associated with different cultures. Our measurement instrument was based on an adapted version of the ‘Draw‐A‐Person‐Test’, which we have called the ‘Draw‐Two‐Persons‐Test’. We also used a questionnaire to examine attitudes among subjects     

Some issues for cooperative learning and intercultural education

This article connects the two fields of cooperative learning and intercultural education. We argue that cooperative learning strategies need to be equipped with intercultural understandings. Two key points that are raised here are: (1) that issues of competitiveness amongst learners and students must be dealt with head on rather than treating it from the sidelines or by brushing them aside; and (2) for learning to take place in a truly cooperative manner, there must be an emphasis on an intercultural focus within the curriculum; the content of knowledge within the curriculum needs to be non-centric. This article emphasizes that cooperative learning strategies are effective when the curricular knowledge taught in the school is drawn from all groups (dominant, subordinate or minority groups).     

An argument for love in intercultural education for teacher education

This paper proposes rethinking intercultural education in teacher education, arguing that any discussion of student teachers’ intercultural education should be connected more explicitly to a theoretical conceptualisation of love. The first part of the paper focuses on identifying discursive boundaries in engaging with intercultural education in teacher education. It is argued that if we are to develop intercultural education, we need to consciously move away from some discourses in teacher education, namely instrumentalism, performance orientation, emotionlessness and seeing the relationship between teacher and learner as static. The second half of the paper develops a theoretical alternative by engaging with the concept of love as a basis for intercultural education in pursuing an alternative to the instrumentalist, performance-based, non-emotional fixed-relationship ethos of intercultural education in teacher education.     

Facilitating intercultural education in majority student groups in higher education

ABSTRACT

The present article critically analyses the pedagogical efforts of two teachers to promote values education and intercultural reflection in their own educational practice. They teach in higher education in Norway and most of their students have majority backgrounds. Based on their teaching experiences with VaKE (Values and Knowledge education), the article discusses opportunities and challenges when working with values education in majority student groups. It concludes that discussing values is difficult but can be eye opening. It also raises the question of which dilemmas can prevent stereotyping and foster more complex intercultural thinking and shows that intercultural education requires a discussion of one’s own cultural position. The article highlights the teacher’s crucial role in the VaKE-process regarding the aims of intercultural values education.     

Issues in the integration of religious education and worldviews education in an intercultural context

ABSTRACT

The Council of Europe’s 2008 ‘Recommendation’ advocates the study of ‘non-religious convictions’ in schools in addition to religions. In 2018, there is evidence of growing academic interest in the inclusion of non-religious worldviews in the school curriculum, but few European countries include such a study within religious education. The guidance document, Signposts, recognises that the integration of religions and non-religious worldviews is problematic for policy makers, teacher trainers and schools and that there is a need for further research. Norway and England are at significant but different stages in the process of integration. This article presents a comparative study which draws on the findings of research in both countries which has investigated the process at classroom and policy levels, and issues raised by this. Four issues are explored: practical challenges; differing understandings of the concept of worldviews; the inclusion of non-religious worldviews as a political issue and influences on the selection of worldviews. The article concludes with a discussion of issues and findings within a supranational context and makes recommendations which highlight the value of integration and the need for both contextual studies and further comparative research.     

Argumentation integrity in intercultural education: a teaching project about a religious-ideological dialogue as challenge for school

In this article, we describe the multiple phases of a teaching project that was constructed around an actual request by a Muslim community in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to establish an Islamic cultural centre. The request provoked a sometimes heated discussion among politicians and citizens that was published in daily newspapers. A large number of the arguments that appeared in the newspapers failed to meet fair argumentation standards and strategies. The teaching project described here therefore aimed to sensitize future teachers to issues of argumentation integrity in dialogues, especially between persons with different religious and ideological convictions. The project was subdivided into three main phases, which treated the topic from different perspectives and with different methods: a simulation game dealing with the request by the Muslim community, a theory-based phase in which participants became acquainted with a construct of argumentation integrity and from this deduced standards and strategies relating to unfair argumentation, and an application phase in which the participants had to examine published arguments by politicians relating to the request by the Muslim community in order to identify rule violations in argumentations. The empirical results suggest that the project promoted insight into unfair argumentation. Such insight can improve interreligious and intercultural communication processes at school.     

Child language brokering: challenges in Spanish intercultural education

Globalisation has resulted in multicultural and multilingual societies where individuals, who often do not speak the official language, need to communicate with different services offered by public institutions in the host country. School plays a vital role as an education and training institution, and must guarantee that every student receives equal opportunities, and, in accordance with the principles of intercultural education, facilitate the integration of foreign students both into society and the educational context. However, linguistic and cultural barriers may sometimes prevent communication between foreign students, their families and the education centre.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse survey responses and interview talk about communication between teachers and immigrant users who do not speak or barely know the host country language, especially the methods employed and the resources available to Spanish education centres to communicate with students and families who lack the necessary host language skills. A case study will be used as example of the situation in which both educators and families very frequently have to turn to child language brokering, using methodology based on qualitative analysis of surveys and interviews carried out in two primary schools in the Madrid area.     

An analysis of internationalisation and intercultural outlook in Swedish teacher education

Foucault's discourse concept provides an instrument for the critical examination of internationalisation and, respectively, inter‐cultural education in Swedish teacher education. Three different discourses concerning internationalisation are treated in the article: solidarity with developing countries, immigrant knowledge, and integration within the EU. Attention is focused on the analysis of intercultural teaching upon those visions that governed implementation of the concept in teacher education, and on reality as it appears in evaluations of teacher education. The question is whether a dilemma exists for teacher education in realising the goals of intercultural education, or whether these goals merely act as teacher education's false banners? The article concludes with perspectives on the future of the development from immigrant knowledge to intercultural learning.     

Qur’anic education and non-confessional RE: an intercultural perspective

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the reported experiences of Muslim students that regularly shift between Muslim ‘supplementary education’ (including its traditional confessional focus on learning to read Arabic and then memorise and recite the Qur’an) and mainstream school education (including its ‘inclusive’ form of religious education’). The aim has been to better comprehend how these students make sense of this dual educational experience while negotiating the knowledge, skills, and values that are taught to them by two often seemingly disparate institutions. A further aim is to place our findings within the growing field of intercultural education. Though both types of education are often thought to be distinct and oppositional – the former as non-confessional and ‘modern’, the latter as confessional and ‘outmoded’ – both English and Swedish students were able to identify a degree of symbiosis between the two, particularly in relation to the process of memorisation. Thus, it became increasingly clear to the researchers that Muslim student reflection on their participation in both traditions of education had an intercultural dimension in the sense of encouraging dialogue and discussion across educational cultures prompting new knowledge and understanding. This article lays out some of the evidence for this conclusion.     

From Theory to Implementation: intercultural education in Italian schools

This article examines the gap existing between the de jure and the de facto situation of im/migrant children in Italian schools. Basing our comments on the specific pedagogical expertise and activities of CD/LEI (Centro di Documentazione/Laboratorio per una Educazione Interculturale — Research/Documentation Centre on Intercultural Education), an inter‐institutional organization operative in Bologna, we will discuss ways of creating a multicultural learning environment, in order to address more effectively the educational needs of im/migrant pupils in Italy.

The major findings of a book, recently published by the founder of CD/LEI and two colleagues are also presented. The book, entitled Dall'accoglienza alia Convivenza (From the Reception of Im/migrants to an Intercultural Society), is intended as a working tool for heads, teachers and school staff in primary and secondary schools in Italy.     

Establishing a framework for blending intercultural education with differentiated instruction

Despite the fact that both intercultural education and differentiated instruction are based on the premises of inclusion, equality, and equity, most research and publications have focused on one in isolation of the other. Scholars from each tradition often use the same argumentation, propose similar strategies and reach similar conclusions. Nevertheless, the emphasis is different: while intercultural education celebrates students’ cultural backgrounds and draws upon culture for the development of effective classroom instruction and school environments, differentiated instruction focuses on academic aptitude, therefore, requiring a systematically planned curriculum and instruction that meets the needs of academically diverse learners. Differentiation of instruction focuses on the individual and its prerogative for success and happiness; intercultural education is focused on the community and therefore, it is mostly concerned about the preservation of collective identities. The aforementioned distinction helps us realise that the challenge for educators in contemporary multicultural classrooms is twofold: to sustain collective identities and to facilitate individual academic success. Visiting both approaches and utilising an eclectic approach, this paper discusses the rationale for the development of a comprehensive framework that can be useful for theory deliberation as well as a guide for instructional practice.