Education and intercultural narratives in multicultural classrooms

The volume provides a collection of papers dealing with intercultural education from a variety of perspectives. It focuses on two main aspects of intercultural communication. On the one hand, it discusses issues related to planning intercultural education as a way of integrating children in schools. On the other it highlights the intercultural and interlinguistic features of those communicative practices which characterise interaction in multicultural classrooms . Teaching language and culture, as well as creating the conditions for expressing different cultural identities and linguistic abilities, can be considered complementary and integrated tasks: their common ground is the interaction between teachers and students in which language is used as a medium for culture and culture shapes language. In communication processes inside schools, students’ participation can be considered very important for learning and creating identities. Consequently, teachers’ active contributions are not only relevant for teaching language and culture, but above all to create the conditions for students’ participation. In this perspective, this book provides three main contributions: (1) it shows some basic theoretical principles to study intercultural education (dialogic action, children’s active participation, effectiveness of intercultural adaptation), (2) it highlights some basic ethnocentric attitudes which seem to be consolidated in European schools and which constitute a relevant cultural problem for intercultural education, and (3) it provides some suggestions for effective intercultural education based on communication and mediation.The volume looks at intercultural education from an interdisciplinary perspective and the essays show approaches based on sociology, social pedagogy and linguistics. Interdisciplinary work here is intended as a joint effort to work together starting from different perspectives. In this sense the papers collected in this volume do not simply share a common theme (“intercultural education”), but they also involve a conscientious openness to confrontation and negotiation between the different theoretical approaches that are represented.