Intercultural education to encounter cultural and linguistic diversity in classrooms: analyzing the tension between policy and bottom-up implementation practices.ISER External Seminars

Along the years, cultural and linguistic diversity in schools has significantly increased, in all European countries. In light of that, the Council of Europe (2008) has started promoting ‘intercultural education’ as the main educational strategy to accommodate diversity and to promote interactions among pupils with different cultural/linguistic affiliations. In the wake of this, several European countries have developed intercultural policies and school curricula. The academic debate about intercultural education (Zapata-Barrero, 2016; Zilliacus and Holm 2009; Joppke 2018) usually stresses the contrast with the notion of ‘multicultural education’. While most scholarly research has focused on the theoretical contraposition between these two approaches, we still miss a more specific and detailed attention to the level of intercultural education practices. Namely, how intercultural education is empirically implemented and translated into everyday practices by teachers in classrooms, including types of practices/specific configurations, shapes it takes

The present article addresses this research gap by providing an in-depth empirical investigation of the implementation of intercultural practices by teachers in primary and middle schools, in the city of Trento, in the north-east of Italy. Specifically, the analysis shifts the focus from existing theoretical debates around the meaning of intercultural education to the implementation process. That is, the practices and mechanisms through which intercultural education is empirically put in action. Moreover, the article aims at improving the current scholarly understanding of whether and to what extent teachers comply to formal intercultural education goals or rather depart from them, leading to a policy-practice tension. In investigating these questions, this research combines elements from different bodies of literatures that are usually not studied through a common lens, i.e., the strand of research about intercultural education and the bottom studies about policy implementation (Lipsky, 1985). In the conclusions, generalization potentials are outlined.

Presented by:

Irene Landini (University of Antwerp).

Date & time:

June 19, 2024 12:30 pm - June 19, 2024 1:30 pm

Venue:

2N2.4.16 (to join us online, please contact the seminar series organisers at iserseminars@essex.ac.uk)


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