Intercultural Education and Competences : Challenges and Answers for the Global World [1 ed.] 9781443862660, 9781443821315

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Intercultural Education and Competences

Intercultural Education and Competences: Challenges and Answers for the Global World Edited by

Agostino Portera and Carl A. Grant

Intercultural Education and Competences: Challenges and Answers for the Global World Edited by Agostino Portera and Carl A. Grant This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Agostino Portera, Carl A. Grant and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2131-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2131-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Agostino Portera, Carl A. Grant Part 1 – Intercultural Education and Competences for a Global World Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 Liquid Modern Challenges to Education Zygmunt Bauman Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 Intercultural Competences in Education Agostino Portera Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 47 Competences for Democratic Culture and Intercultural Dialogue Martyn Barrett Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 65 Intercultural Mediators as Relational Facilitators in a Plural Society Marco Catarci Part 2 – Neoliberalism and Multicultural and Intercultural Education Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 85 Education in Urban Spaces: Neoliberal Rhetoric and Social Justices Responses Carl A. Grant

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Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 115 Responsibility towards Diversity: An Educational Proposal for the Enhancement of Democracy Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 129 Curriculum Internationalisation and Intercultural Learning from the Perspective of Recognition: A Critical Pedagogic Review and Discussion of the Literature Victoria Perselli and Diana Moehrke-Rasul Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 145 Who Talks to Whom in Schools and Cafes? Adult Student Inquiry for Intercultural Competence Gretchen Wilbur Part 3 – Intercultural Competences in Education and Practices Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 159 Learning History as Views Sharing: Examples of Collaborative Practices Alessio Surian, Chiara Greco, Marwa Mahmud and Giuseppe Mantovani Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 173 What Cooperative Learning Contributes to the Intercultural Classroom Yael Sharan Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 187 A Sense of Belonging in Multicultural Schools: Opinions of Future Italian and Canadian Primary Teachers Paola Dusi and Marilyn Steinbach Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 197 From Biases to Socio-Cognitive Flexibility: A Training Program for Teaching in Intercultural School Settings Margarita Sanchez-Mazas and Aneta Mechi Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 209 School Experiences of Canadian Adolescents with Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Parents Kenneth D. McNeilly and Michel Ferrari

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Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 221 Ensuring Quality and Equity in an Italian Multicultural Primary School Giovanna Malusà and Massimiliano Tarozzi Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 239 Student Perspectives on Learning in Faculty-Led International Multicultural Courses Dorota Celinska and Roberto Swazo Contributors ............................................................................................. 251 Index ........................................................................................................ 257

INTRODUCTION AGOSTINO PORTERA AND CARL A. GRANT

The world in which we are living has radically changed. Globalisation and interdependence affect the human being in its entirety and are giving rise to ever more multiethnic and multicultural societies all over the world. While we still live locally, decisions are made globally. Citizens of all nations have become ever more dependent on people whom they have never met. Meanwhile, especially in Western societies, the culture of postmodernism is currently promoting an inward-looking human being, a person imbued with an individualistic and narcissistic attitude, one that is self-centred and goods-oriented; and the ideology of neoliberalism is influencing school culture, curricula, and teaching methodologies, where the priority seems to be the competitive market logic of profit, individualism, and efficiency (Bauman, 1977; Soros, 1988; Kincheloe, 1999). Such changes seem to have led to profound economic, environmental, political, social, and cultural crises, where the most notable influences can be seen in the field of education. How is education possible without clear content (values, rules, and norms) and, especially, univocal goals? Which competences are most appropriate in a time of increasing interconnectedness between people, in which migration is no longer a prerequisite for coming into contact with other ethnic groups with different languages, norms, and religions, and in which a person’s life is directly or indirectly influenced by contemporaneous events in other parts of the world? The Council of Europe has a long history of involvement with such questions. Since the 1970s a great amount of official statements and declarations have been produced. One of most significant recent publications is the White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue: “Living Together as Equals in Dignity” (Council of Europe, 2008). The document was the result of a broad consultation with stakeholders (including the governments of the member states and numerous religious communities, migrant communities, cultural organisations, and other non-governmental organisations across Europe). Based on the semantic and conceptual development in Europe (Grant and Portera, 2011), the White Paper draws

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a clear conceptual distinction and proposes going beyond the term of “multiculturalism”, by adopting the “intercultural approach”. On behalf of the governments of the 47 member states, the Council of Europe (2008), considers it to be a priority to manage in a democratic manner the increasing cultural diversity caused by globalisation. The document argues that it is urgent and necessary to overcome a society of segregated communities, marked by the coexistence of majorities and minorities, and to work toward establishing a “vibrant and open society”, without discrimination and characterised by the inclusion of all residents and full respect of their human rights. In this context, solidarity, respect for every person (regardless of ethnic, religious, or cultural origin), and the promotion of cultural diversity are “essential conditions” for the development of inclusive democratic societies. The White Paper argues that a common future depends on the promotion of mutual understanding by means of the “ability to safeguard and develop human rights”, and “democracy and the rule of law”. In order to effectively manage cultural diversity, the “intercultural approach” is considered the most appropriate model of education. Intercultural dialogue has an important role to play, because it allows societies to avoid ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural division and enables them to deal with different identities “constructively and democratically on the basis of shared universal values”. Further, the White Paper argues that, today, the democratic governance of ethnic and cultural diversity requires the creation and extension of spaces for intercultural dialogue at the international level as well as the acquisition of “intercultural competences”. The authors of the present book are strongly convinced that, in the age of globalisation, pluralism, and social complexity, in order to overcome the crises of values, governability, and decision-making processes, it is necessary to increase investment in education. All contributors agree with the Council of Europe (2008) that education is fundamental and paramount for promoting a free, respectful, just, open, and inclusive society characterised by social cohesion, mutual understanding, and gender equality. All over the world, education (formal, non-formal, and informal) should play a central role. Today, there is an urgent need to go beyond the neoliberal principle of the neutrality of the state, and to replace it with the goals of care and social responsibility. There is a need to overcome individualism, to build stronger communities, and to reduce unequal access to the best schools and universities, which risk being redefined only to meet business needs and therefore often benefit only a minority of students, a privileged elite (Nussbaum, 2010).

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Intercultural Education and Competences for the Global World, is the scholarly product of the international conference held in Verona Italy in 2013. The Conference was organized by the Centre for Intercultural Studies at the University of Verona in collaboration with the Centres for Leadership and Diversity andDiversity in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Toronto; IAIE (Interantional Association for Intercultural Education); EERA (European Educational Research Association); and NAME (National American Association for Multicultural Education) - in response to issues addressed by the White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue, Nussbaum’s (2010) thesis on “goals of care and social responsibility”, and the respective authors’ observations of their country’s efforts to meet the challenges of globalization and interdependence. The contributors bring to the discourse on “living together as equals in dignity”, illuminations that will help address care and social responsibility across countries, and within countries. Living locally, with decisions made globally, requires responsible and aspirational local living, within a context of a democratic governance that respects intercultural education, while at the same time, taking into account that the central thesis of democracy is the equal treatment of all parties, with the understanding that all parties have equal rights. The White Paper, which solicited the perspectives of a broad range of stakeholders, underscores the importance of the 23 contributors’ analysis and discussion of intercultural education in local contexts that differ by site (e.g., school, international), location (e.g., Canada, Italy, urban) demographic (e.g., young, older, gay), practice (e.g., cooperative learning, inquiry, social justice, and philosophical/methodological), and frame (e.g., grounded theory, socio-cognitive flexibility, “belonging”). The conference held in Verona and its product, Intercultural Education and Competences for the Global World, have responded in spirit and action to the charge of the Council of Europe, to promote intercultural dialogue for the purpose of “living together as equals in dignity.” The editors and the authors request that their contribution to the efforts to bring about the goal of “living together as equals in dignity” be read, and critiqued, in order to stimulate necessary democratic debate. The themes discussed in this book include: liquid modern challenges to education (Zygmunt Bauman), intercultural competences in education (Agostino Portera and Martyn Barrett), neoliberalism and education (Carl Grant), as well as many examples of the role of intercultural competences in educational practices (e.g., Yael Sharan and Margarita Sanchez). These issues divided across the subsequent chapters in the following manner:

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In chapter 1, Zygmunt Bauman initiates the discussion by analysing the liquid modern challenges to education by defining the liquid-modern society (“nowist culture” and “hurried culture”) characterised by the renegotiation of the meaning of time. Time in the liquid-modern era is neither cyclical nor linear, as it was in past known societies of modern or pre-modern history. It is pointillist instead – broken up into a multitude of separate morsels or points that contain an infinite potential. Each point can be experienced as a new beginning and can be abandoned as soon as it is no longer expected. Bauman introduces the concept of the “tyranny of the moment” coined by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2001) to describe how both the past and the future as mental categories are threatened by this new meaning of time: a pointillist is able to pre-empt the future and disempower the past. All these changes in the social setting are challenges to education and they therefore involve teachers and learners. Bauman proposes the images of missiles to describe the way education has changed with the transition to liquid-modern times, moving from ballistic missiles, with fixed direction and a pre-designed course, to smart missiles, able to change their direction and to learn and forget fast. Due to these social changes, education and learning, to be of any use, must be continuous and indeed life-long. In chapter 2, Agostino Portera introduces the concept of intercultural competences in education and underlines the necessity and urgency of intercultural education and competence in order to face globalisation and interdependence, which seem to have led to profound crises concerning all aspects of human life, especially education. Investing in education by using intercultural approaches seems to be the best response to these modern challenges. Portera summarizes the results of a research project carried out at the Centre for Intercultural Studies in Verona in order to develop a theoretical model of intercultural competence (IC) based on the existing literature and empirical data, with implications at the practicaloperative, methodological, and vocational levels. A subsequent study with the title The Success of Professional Development Projects in Developing Intercultural Competences by Means of Innovative Teaching Strategies, ICTs, and E-Learning, which was conducted at the Centre for Intercultural Studies from 2012 to 2015, attempted to validate the aforementioned model by testing it within the context of a master’s degree program in ICs for the fields of education, law, healthcare, and business. The model of ICs was preliminarily subjected to the critical evaluation of a panel of 68 national and international experts according to the Delphi method (Adler

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& Ziglio, 1996) and then validated by using it as the foundation of the content and teaching methods applied in the master’s degree program. In Chapter 3, Martyn Barrett introduces a new project that is currently being conducted by the Council of Europe (CoE). The project is called Competences for Democratic Culture (CDC) and its aim is to develop a new European framework of reference of the competences which young people need to acquire to become effective democratic citizens. The CDC project, which includes four phases, treats intercultural dialogue as vital for democratic culture in culturally diverse societies. The materials that are being developed by the CDC project are aimed at national education ministries, schools and universities, teachers, teacher educators, and curriculum developers. For the purposes of the project, “competence” is defined as “the ability to mobilise and deploy relevant values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and/or understanding in order to respond appropriately and effectively to the demands, challenges, and opportunities that are presented by a given type of context.” The CDC model includes 20 competences falling into four broad categories: values, attitudes, skills and knowledge, and critical understanding. Although this project aims to empower young people as autonomous social agents who are capable of choosing and pursuing their own goals in life, democratic culture and intercultural dialogue depend not only on citizens’ competences but also on the nature of the institutional structures which are available within any given society, that is on external factors. In chapter 4, Marco Catarci introduces the concept of multicultural society: a context in which subjects from different cultural backgrounds live in the same environment. This type of society necessitates an intercultural perspective that is a political and educational response to the challenges of multicultural society. In particular, an intercultural approach in education aims to change the traditional perceptions and cognitive schemes generally used to understand others and the world, by means of an effective effort to promote dialogue and understanding, and mediate cultural differences. Marco Catarci stresses the key role of intercultural mediation as a prominent intercultural strategy in multicultural society for managing cultural conflicts and facilitating relationships between people of different cultures. He also stresses the importance of intercultural mediators: operators in charge of facilitating communication between individuals, families, and the community, as essential to measures to promote the removal of cultural and language barriers. Finally, he presents

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the results of a quantitative study carried out by the NGO CIES (the Centre for Information and Development Education) and the Institutional Working Party on Intercultural Mediation (IWIM). The main objective of the project was to draft useful guidelines for the establishment of a national statement on the competence of the profession of intercultural mediators. In chapter 5, Carl A. Grant reflects on education in urban spaces starting from the crisis of schools that have failed to prepare students for 21st century employment, especially students in urban areas. According to many studies, this not only depends on poverty but also on race and racism. Grant introduces theories of social justice as the frame for his discussion of education in the Black Belt, the predominately African American community on Chicago's South Side. The theories he discusses focus on the need for equality and civic engagement. However, real life in the Black Belt is characterized by exploitation and material deprivation and by the omission and misrepresentation of black identity and culture: a clear example of the influence of “race on an urban spatial structure”. Grant further argues that neoliberalism operates in opposition to the social justice frames as well, increasing the gap between people receiving benefits from this economic model and those who are excluded and punished. This context frames his reflection on the failure of schools in the Black Belt and the issue of inadequate public expenditure on education. Grant’s central argument is that money matters in education, especially for closing the achievement gap between students of colour and middle-class White students, while cutting investment in education negatively affects both high and low poverty school districts. Nonetheless, politicians and the media fail to recognize the systematic relationship that exists between funding and school quality. In chapter 6, Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo undertakes an interdisciplinary inquiry into diversity within educational contexts, in order to highlight innovative and effective ways of enhancing intercultural competences. The aim is to successfully deal with the plurality of existing diversities, which are to be considered not as threats, but as opportunities for the development of individual and social self-awareness, maturity, and education. Franzini Tibaldeo believes that such an analysis can reap great benefit from the mare magnum of existing projects, experiences, and best practices. The author refers to recent research projects, such as Accept Pluralism at the European University Institute at the Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies and other national and regional laws or

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statements of best practice, such as the Region of Tuscany’s decree D.R. 530/2008, Per una scuola antirazzista e dell’inclusione (For a Non-Racist and Inclusive School). He also describes Matthew Lipman’s philosophy for children/community (P4C), which emphasizes two interesting aspects: on one hand, the multidimensionality of creative, critical, and caring thinking; and, on the other hand, the importance of thinking-with-others, that is of a community of inquiry. He concludes that the combination of mutual respect and philosophical inquiry can enhance intercultural competences, reinforce individual and social sensitivity to otherness and diversity, and give strength to any attempt to support differences. In chapter 7, Victoria Perselli and Diana Moehrke-Rasul present a critical pedagogical review and discussion of various approaches to the internationalisation of education at the tertiary level, problematized through a critical pedagogic lens. There are two main issues within the existing literature and current trends: 1) the move from deficit and assimilationist thinking towards a “pedagogy of recognition”, and 2) the function of recognition in positively repositioning international students and their learning. Perselli and Moehrke-Rasul argue that whilst new perspectives are emerging against this background which acknowledge international students as “resourceful peers” in their own right, the practical implications for learning and teaching in culturally diverse settings represented by this ideology require further explication. They believe the time for fully embracing intercultural learning has therefore come, as well as the need to grapple with the question of how this might be realised in internationalised educational contexts. In chapter 8, Gretchen Wilbur outlines the role of reflective inquiry for the development of intercultural competence amongst adults by using Janet Bennett’s intercultural positioning system. This system is based on the use of cultural mapping to identify and bridge intercultural positions. Through mapping, students can notice different ways of interacting, locate themselves according to contextual characteristics, and then clarify a perspective and compare it with others. Reflective inquiry promotes critical examination of observational patterns across different cultural contexts. In making such comparisons, students identify their own location, that is, they gradually become aware of their positionality and its impact on actions. To illustrate this model, Wilbur presents a travel course for adult students from a U.S. context. The course Who Talks to Whom in Schools and Cafes? was designed to develop intercultural competence through an inquiry approach. The course fostered intercultural competence

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by engaging students while in public spaces in Italy and Estonia, with resident scholars who probed their assumptions and opened their eyes to different perspectives, an essential element of intercultural competence. Students applied theories of intercultural communication throughout the course and then began to reflect in action and to see opportunities for change that could lead to greater intercultural competence within their personal and professional lives. In chapter 9, Alessio Surian, Chiara Greco, Marwa Mahmud, and Giuseppe Mantovani present the key results of Reggio Emilia’s (Italy) secondary school intercultural education workshops run by the Mondinsieme Intercultural Centre. The workshops focused on historical periods that are instrumental for comparing European perspectives with South American and Indian perspectives. During the workshops, these epochs were discussed on the basis of texts that deconstructed a supposed superiority of the European world. The workshops were intended to encourage a reflection upon preferable and desired futures as well as dialogue, by taking into account the decolonial and transmodern epistemic turn as outlined by authors such as Quijano and Mignolo, which entails “delinking” from and a necessarily disobedient approach to hegemonic and prevailing historical canons. The authors focus on a specific workshop that was conducted with 16 year-old students from a liceo classico, as well as with 18 year-old pupils from a vocational school. Liceo classico students focused upon identifying and conveying the “voice of the other” and deconstructing the dominant stereotyped image of the other, while vocational school students had to approve their ideas and proposals with the workshop facilitator. In chapter 10, Yael Sharan explores how cooperative learning (CL) responds to the linguistic and cultural challenges teachers face every day in the intercultural classroom. She also underlines the contribution of CL to the development of methods, models, and short term procedures, all of which promote learning together in small groups toward a common goal or outcome. The author explores the more common ways culture affects learning and stresses the importance of creating an intercultural setting where children of various religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are “no longer regarded as a ‘problem’ or ‘risk,’ but as ‘resources’”. Sharan argues that teachers can help students in developing interpersonal communication skills, finding meaningful connections between the curriculum and their personal worlds, and redressing the loss of a sense of community by using CL models, methods, and procedures such as the

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group investigation model. They can also guide small discussion groups that encourage students to relate concepts and texts to their personal experience, and compare and discuss how they understand them through instructional conversations. Sharan concludes her reflection on the effectiveness of CL in dealing with modern challenges by stating that a balance between a judicious, gradual implementation of cooperative learning procedures, and a sensitivity to the multiple manifestations of diversity is essential to providing a safe environment in which all students can create meaningful connections between their worlds and school. In chapter 11, Paola Dusi and Marilyn Steinbach focus on the concepts of community and the sense of belonging in multicultural schools. The other and our relationship with the other is at the heart of learning, and of knowing and becoming ourselves. Therefore it is essential for the teacher to know how to build a network of relationships in which each student feels involved and engaged. In multicultural schools, the process of constructing a community of living and learning becomes more difficult because of the high degree of heterogeneity that characterizes the group of children: a group of people who do not have a common language, history, culture, or membership. This is why teachers play a key role and can have a positive influence on the family’s involvement in the child’s education, on the attitudes classmates assume towards each other, and on the classroom environment. The authors then introduce their study on sense of belonging, which involved future primary school teachers in Italy and in Canada. In Italy the study was conducted at two universities, Verona and Brescia, with students in primary teacher education programs following a course in intercultural education. In Canada, the study was conducted at the university of Sherbrooke. In chapter 12, Margarita Sanchez-Mazas and Aneta Mechi analyse the current context of globalization and professional mobility and the need to develop new approaches to provide teachers with useful tools in order to deal with various problematic educational situations. The authors then present a social psychological approach to understanding the biases and shortcomings that are likely to affect teachers’ perceptions of, interpretations of, and responses to the problematic situations they have to deal with in multicultural school settings. They also introduce the concept of social cognitive flexibility (SCF), which is related to social objects (individuals, situations, behaviours, and opinions) and emphasizes the

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fluidity of passing through multiple possible categorizations, thus preventing the crystallization of a single and readily accessible mental category. SCF, according to the authors, is the central tool that may allow teachers to overcome biases such as the risk of reintroducing stereotyping modes of thinking while teaching, and to develop a professional competence through an appropriate training program. This program aims to guide the professional in the development of his/her teaching approach on the basis of two fundamental requirements: doubt (reflecting before accepting) and a plurality of viewpoints. In chapter 13, Kenneth D. McNeilly and Michel Ferrari introduce McNeilly’s investigation of school experiences of Canadian adolescents with lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents carried out by using semistructured interviews. Children’s responses are then analysed by using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), an inductive approach for investigating how individuals make sense of their experiences. The interview shows that children of LGB-led parents are accustomed to avoiding people perceived as homophobic and disclosing their parents’ sexual identity to others. They also believe strongly in the potential of education to reduce ignorant peer responses, promote accepting attitudes, and debunk heteronormative stereotypes. The authors stress the importance of including non-heterosexual narratives via literature, history, law, and media in school curricula in order to make the children of LGBled parents feel safer at school and more secure in articulating their personal identity, without fear of reprisal. They also underline the key role of teachers in the development of students’ personal identity narratives. In chapter 14, Giovanna Malusà and Massimiliano Tarozzi introduce the modern political challenge of combining educational quality and social equality by stating that E.U. and Italian policies consider the “quality” of school systems to be more concerned with efficiency, competitiveness, and the provision of human capital for the labor market rather than reducing inequalities and social asymmetries. The result is the increase in cultural diversity amongst students, especially those coming from an immigrant background as demonstrated by a report by the Italian Ministry of Education in 2013. The chapter then summarises selected results of a longitudinal study of a multicultural class from the first grade of primary school to the first grade of middle school in the Province of Trento in Italy, with the purpose of identifying current directions in quality education in multicultural contexts. This study sought to identify which process might enable quality learning in difficult contexts and aimed to

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construct a social justice education model that addresses, in particular, the inclusion of students of foreign origin. After presenting the research setting, the authors describe the methodological approach adopted for the study and detail the data collection and analysis procedures. They then briefly sketch the categories that emerged in the constructed model by defining their essential features as steps toward an effective way to promote quality schooling for all, and conclude by highlighting possible elements that may be theoretically transferable to other school contexts. The authors stress the need to invest in education to train teachers and create a school environment that is open to intercultural dialogue, in which cultural diversity is recognized and respected. In chapter 15, Dorota Celinska and Roberto Swazo reflect on the effectiveness of the traditional on-campus course in increasing multicultural competencies in trainees and propose valuable alternatives to this format: the community service learning (CSL) approach, the international service learning (ISL) approach and especially the faculty-led international course (FLIC) approach. The authors suggest that FLIC design may be a valid approach as it is based on the principle of extensive and intentional culture immersion; moreover, it creates unique opportunities for experiential multicultural learning in novel cultural contexts that are not accessible within the on-campus course format. A study of student perceptions of their multicultural learning in the context of the faculty-led international courses is then presented in this chapter. The participants consisted of 21 graduate students of a private university located in a Midwest metropolitan area of the USA enrolled in faculty-led international courses. They were asked to respond individually to the Post-Trip Reflection and Evaluation Questionnaire, a written semi-structured response instrument. The study attempted to identify the multicultural concepts and skills associated with the most self-reported growth, along with the mechanisms associated with the learning of these concepts and skills. Further, the study aimed at exploring the ways in which particular curricular and instructional components of the course contributed to student multicultural learning outcomes. The underlying premise for all contributors to this volume is that in multi-ethnic and multicultural contexts there is an urgent need to rethink educational content, methods, and goals. The challenge is to overcome all past forms of dogmatism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism without falling into the trap of moral relativism (anything goes), spontaneism (carpe

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diem), and standardization (one-size-fits-all). In this sense, the best response to our changing world is an intercultural approach.

PART 1 – INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION AND COMPETENCES FOR A GLOBAL WORLD

CHAPTER ONE LIQUID MODERN CHALLENGES TO EDUCATION ZYGMUNT BAUMAN

Stephen Bertman (1998) coined the terms “nowist culture” and “hurried culture” to denote the way we live in our kind of society. Apt terms indeed – and such has come particularly handy whenever we try to grasp the nature of the liquid-modern human condition. We may say that more than for anything else, this condition stands out for its (thus far unique) re-negotiation of the meaning of time.

From Linear to Pointillist Time Time in the liquid-modern “society of consumers” era is neither cyclical nor linear, as it used to be in other known societies of modern or pre-modern history. It is pointillist instead – broken up into a multitude of separate morsels, each morsel reduced to a point ever more closely approximating its geometrical idealization of non-dimensionality. As we surely remember from school lessons in geometry, points have no length, width, or depth: they exist, one is tempted to say, before the space and time; both space and time are yet to begin. But like that unique point which, as the state-of-the-art cosmogony postulates, preceded the “big bang” that started the universe, each point is presumed to contain an infinite potential to expand and the infinity of possibilities waiting to explode if properly ignited… Each time-point is believed to be pregnant with a chance of another “big bang,” though this time on a much more modest, “individual universe” scale, and the successive points continue to be believed to be so pregnant – regardless of what might have happened to the previous ones and despite the accumulating experience showing that most chances tend to be wrongly prejudged, overlooked, or missed – that most points prove

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to be barren, and most stirrings are still-born. A map of pointillist life, had it been charted, would have looked like a graveyard of imaginary or unfulfilled possibilities. Or, depending on the point-of-view, like a cemetery of wasted chances: in a pointillist universe, the rates of infant mortality and miscarriages of hopes are very high. Precisely for that reason a “nowist” life tends to be a “hurried” life. The chance which each point might contain will follow it to its grave; for that particular, unique chance, there will be no “second chance.” Each point might have been lived through as a new beginning, but more often than not the finish would have come right after the start, with pretty little happening in between. Only an unstoppably expanding multitude of new beginnings may – just may – compensate for the profusion of false starts. The vast expanses of new beginnings believed to be waiting ahead – the points whose “big bang potential” has not yet been tried and so remains thus far un-discredited – allows one to salvage hope from the debris of premature endings or, rather, stillborn gambits. In the ‘nowist’ life of the avid consumer of new Erlebnisse (experiences), the reason to hurry is not the urge to acquire and collect, but to discard and replace. There is a latent message behind every commercial, promising a new and unexplored opportunity for bliss: no point in crying over spilt milk. Either the “big bang” happens right now, at this very moment and at the first try, or loitering in that particular point makes sense no longer; it is time to move to another point. In a society of producers now receding into the past (at least in our part of the globe), the advice in such a case would have once been “try harder”; but not in the society of consumers. Here, the failed tools are to be abandoned rather than sharpened and tried again with greater skill, more dedication, and better effect. And so should the appliances that stopped short of delivering the promised “full satisfaction” be abandoned, as well as the human relationships that delivered a “bang” not exactly as “big” as expected. The hurry ought to be at its most intense when one is running from one point (failed, failing, or about to start failing) to another (yet untried). One should be wary of Faust’s bitter lesson: of being condemned to hell while wishing the moment – just because it was a pleasing one – to last forever… What, given the infinity of promised and assumed opportunities, makes the flow of time, which has been pulverized into an aggregate of “points,” a most attractive novelty, one that could surely be learned gladly and practiced with zeal, is the double promise of pre-empting the future, and of disempowering the past. Such a double act is, after all, the ideal of liberty.

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The promise of emancipating actors from the choice-limiting constraints – which are particularly resented for their nasty habit of growing in volume and stiffening over time as the “past” expands and devours ever greater chunks of life – coupled with the promise to deny the future its similarly discomforting propensity to dash the hopes and devalue the successes lived in the present, augur between themselves a complete, unrestrained, well-nigh absolute freedom. Liquid-modern society offers such liberty to a degree unheard of, and downright inconceivable, in any other society on record. Let us consider first the uncanny feat of disabling the past. It boils down to just one, but truly miraculous change in human condition: the facility to be “born again.” From now on, it is not just the cats who live nine lives. In one abominably short visit on earth, bewailed not that long ago for its loathsome brevity and not radically lengthened since, humans – just like the proverbial cats – are now offered the chance to squeeze many lives, an endless series of “new beginnings.” Being “born again” means that previous birth(s), together with their aftermath, have been annulled; it feels like the arrival of the always dreamt of, though never before experienced, divine-style omnipotence. (Leon Shestov, the eminent Russian-French existentialist philosopher, thought the potency to annul the past – to prevent, for instance, the crime of forcing Socrates to drink hemlock – to be the ultimate sign of God’s omnipotence). The power of causal determination can be disarmed, and the power of the past to cut down the options of the present can be radically limited, perhaps even abolished altogether. What one was yesterday can no longer bar the possibility of becoming someone totally different today. Since each point in time is, let us recall, full of potential, and each potential is different and unique, the number of ways in which one can be different is genuinely uncountable: indeed, it dwarfs even the astonishing multitude of permutations and the mind-boggling variety of forms and likenesses which the haphazard meetings of genes have managed thus far and are likely to produce in the future in the human species. It comes close to the awe-inspiring capacity of eternity, in which, given its infinite duration, everything may/must sooner or later happen and everything can/will sooner or later be done. Now, that wondrous potency of eternity has been packed into the not-at-all-eternal span of a single human life. Consequently, the feat of defusing and neutralizing the power of the past to reduce the subsequent choices, and so to severely limit the chances of “new births” robs eternity of its most seductive attraction. In the “pointillist” time of liquid-modern society, eternity no longer is a value and an object of desire; or rather what was its value and what made it an

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object of desire has been excised and grafted onto the moment. Accordingly, the late-modern “tyranny of the moment” with its precept of carpe diem, has replaced the pre-modern tyranny of eternity with its motto of memento mori.

Chasing Elusive Identity That transformation stands behind the new centrality accorded to preoccupations with “identity” in present-day society. Though remaining an important issue and absorbing task since the early-modern passage from the “ascription” to the “achievement” society, “identity” now shares the fate of other life-pursuits and has undergone the “pointillization” process. Once a “whole-life” project coterminous with one’s life-span, “identity” has turned into an attribute of the moment. It is no longer “once designed and forever built,” but is intermittently, and ever anew, assembled and dissembled – with each of the two apparently contradictory operations carrying equal importance and being equally absorbing. Instead of demanding an advance payment and a life-long subscription with no cancellation clause, the manipulation of identity is now an activity akin to “pay as you watch” (or “as you phone”). It is still a constant preoccupation, but is now split into a multitude of exceedingly short (and with recent innovations in marketing techniques, ever shorter) acts which are constrained by an ever more fleeting attention span: a series of sudden and frenetic spurts which are not pre-designed and occur in unpredictable succession, but which have immediate effects that closely and quickly follow the act. The skills required to meet the challenge of the liquid-modern manipulation of identity are akin to those of a juggler, or – more to the point – the artfulness and dexterity of a prestidigitator. Practicing such skills has been brought within reach of the ordinary, run-of-the-mill consumer by means of the expedient of simulacrum – a phenomenon, which, in Jean Baudrillard’s (1981) memorable description, is similar to those psychosomatic ailments which are known to cancel the distinction between “things as they are” and “things as they pretend to be,” or “reality” and “illusion,” or the true state of affairs and its simulation. What once was viewed and suffered as an interminable drudgery that called for mobilization and an onerous straining of any and all of one’s “inner” resources, can now be accomplished with the help of purchasable, readyto-use contraptions and gadgets, with a modicum expenditure of money and time (though of course the attractiveness of an identity composed of bought trappings rises in proportion to the amount of money spent and,

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most recently, with the wait time, as the most prestigious and exclusive designer shops have introduced waiting lists, clearly with no other purpose except to enhance the distinction with which the waited-for tokens of identity endow their buyer. As Georg Simmel (1969) pointed out long ago that values are measured with the sacrifice of the other values required to obtain them, and delay is arguably the most excruciating of sacrifices members of the society of consumers may be required to accept). Annulling the past, “being born again,” acquiring a different self, reincarnating as “someone completely different”… These proposals are difficult to refuse. Why work on self-improvement with all the strenuous effort and painful self-sacrifice such toil requires? Why send good money after bad? Is it not cheaper, and quicker, and more thorough, and more convenient, and easier to cut one’s losses and start again - to shed one’s old skin, spots, warts and all, and buy a new one? There is nothing new in seeking escape when things get really hot; people have always tried to do that. What is new is the dream of escaping oneself – and the conviction that making such a dream a reality is within reach; not just an option within reach, but the easiest option, the one that is most likely to work in case of trouble; a short-cut that is less cumbersome, less time-and-energy consuming, and thus all-in-all a cheaper option. Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-American philosopher-poet, vividly described the kind of life guided by a trust invested in this kind of escape. For those perceived to be the losers, like the “flawed consumers” (the poor eliminated from the consumerist game), the liquid-modern variety of social outcasts – the sole form of escape from oneself (from being tired of oneself, or as Brodsky prefers, from being bored) is alcohol or drug addiction: “In general, a man shooting heroin into his vein does so largely for the same reason you buy a video,” Brodsky (1995, p. 107) told the students of Dartmouth College in July 1989; this is as far as flawed consumers, the social rejects barred entry to the more refined and ostensibly more effective (but also more expensive) escape routes, can go. As to the potential haves, which Dartmouth College students aspire to become, they need not stop at buying a new video… They may try to live out their dream. [Y]ou’ll be bored with your work, your spouses, your lovers, the view from your window, the furniture or wallpaper in your room, your thoughts, yourselves. Accordingly, you’ll try to devise ways of escape. Apart from the self-gratifying gadgets mentioned before, you may take up changing jobs, residence, company, country, climate, you may take up promiscuity, alcohol, travel, cooking lessons, drugs, psychoanalysis.… (Brodsky, 1995, pp. 107-108)

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The haves may indeed pick and choose their ways of escape from the uncountable number on offer. And they are likely to be tempted to try as many as they can afford, one by one or all together, since what is much less likely is that any of them will indeed deliver that freedom from “boredom with oneself” which they promise to bring: In fact, you may lump all these together, and for a while that may work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amid a new family and a different wallpaper, in a different state and climate, with a heap of bills from your travel agent and your shrink, yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring through your window.… (Brodsky, 1995, p. 108)

Andrzej Stasiuk, an outstanding Polish novelist and insightful analyst of the contemporary human condition, suggests that “the possibility of becoming someone else” is the present-day substitute for salvation or redemption, which are now largely discarded and perceived as being unimportant. It is highly probable, he suggests that, the quantity of digital, celluloid, and analogue beings that meet in the course of a bodily life comes close to the volume which eternal life and resurrection in flesh could offer (2002, p. 59). Applying various techniques, we may change our bodies and re-shape them according to different patterns. When browsing through glossy magazines, one gets the impression that they tell mostly one story – about the ways in which one can re-make one’s personality, starting from diets, surroundings, homes, and up to rebuilding of psychical structure, often code-named: “be yourself”. Sáawomir MroĪek, a Polish writer of world-wide fame and a man with a first-hand experience of many lands and cultures, compares the world we inhabit to a market stand filled with fancy dresses and surrounded by crowds seeking their “selves” (MroĪek, 2000, p. 122). One can change dresses without end, so that the wondrous liberty the seekers enjoy can go on forever… Let’s go on searching for our real selves, it’s smashing fun – on condition that the real self will be never found. Because if it were, the fun would end… If happiness is permanently within reach and if reaching it takes but the few minutes needed to browse through the yellow pages and to pull the credit card out of the wallet, then obviously a self that stops short of reaching happiness cannot be “real” – not really the one that spurred the self-seeker to embark on the voyage of self-discovery. Such a fraudulent self needs to be discarded on the ground of its “non-authenticity,” while the search for the real one should go on. And there is little reason to stop

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searching if one can be sure that in a moment another moment will duly arrive, carrying new promises and bursting with new potential.

Smarting Under the Tyranny of the Moment In a book with a tell-all title, Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2001) identifies the “tyranny of the moment” as the most conspicuous feature of contemporary society and arguably its most seminal novelty: The consequences of extreme hurriedness are overwhelming: both the past and the future as mental categories are threatened by the tyranny of the moment… (E)ven the ‘here and now’ is threatened since the next moment comes so quickly that it becomes difficult to live in the present. (pp. 2-3)

This is a paradox, indeed, and an inexhaustible source of tension: the more voluminous and capacious the moment becomes, the smaller (briefer) it is; as its potential contents swell, its dimensions shrink. “There are strong indications that we are about to create a kind of society where it becomes nearly impossible to think a thought that is more than a couple of inches long” (Eriksen, 2001, p. VII). But contrary to the popular hopes beefed up by the promises of the consumer market, changing one’s identity, were it at all plausible, would require much more than that. While undergoing the “pointillization” treatment, the moment is thereby cut off on both sides. Its interfaces with both the past and the future turn into gaps – hopefully unbridgeable. Ironically, in the age of instant and effortless connection and the promise of being constantly “in touch,” communication between the experience of the moment and whatever may precede or follow it needs to be permanently, and hopefully irreparably, broken. The gap behind us should see to it that the past is never allowed to catch up with the running self. The gap ahead of us is a condition of living the moment to the fullest, of totally and unreservedly abandoning oneself to its (admittedly fleeting) charm and seductive powers – something that would not be feasible were the currently livedthrough moment contaminated with worry about mortgaging the future. Ideally, each moment would be modelled after the pattern of credit card use, a radically de-personalized act: in the absence of face-to-face intercourse, it is easier to forget, or rather never to think in the first place, of the unpleasantness of repayment. No wonder the banks, eager to get cash moving and thereby earn yet more money than they would if it were laying idle, prefer their clients fingering their credit cards instead of visiting branch managers.

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Following Bertman’s terminology, ElĪbieta Tarkowska, a most prominent chronosociologist in her own right, develops the concept of “synchronic humans,” who live solely in the present and who pay no attention to past experience or future consequences of their actions, a strategy which translates into absence of bonds with the others. The “presentist culture” puts a premium on speed and effectiveness, while favouring neither patience nor perseverance (Tarkowska, 2005). We may add that it is this frailty and this apparently easy disposability of individual identities and inter-human bonds that are re-presented in contemporary culture as the substance of individual freedom. One choice that such freedom would neither recognize, grant, nor allow is the resolve (or indeed the ability) to persevere in holding to the once constructed identity, that is in the kind of activity which also presumes, and necessarily entails, the preservation and security of the social network on which that identity rests while actively reproducing it.

Drown in the Information Deluge The speed that creates the prospect of taming and assimilating innovations beyond the ordinary human’s capacity must overshoot any target made to meet existing demand. New products appear, as a rule, first and only then do they seek out their applications; many of them travel to the landfill without finding any. But even the lucky few products, which manage to find or conjure up a need, a desire, or a wish for which they might demonstrate to be, or eventually become, relevant, soon tend to succumb to the pressure of “new and improved” products (that is, products that promise to do all their predecessors could do, only quicker and better with the extra bonus of doing a few things which no consumer has yet thought they needed or intended to buy) well before their working capacity meets its preordained end. Like most aspects of life, the production of lifeservicing gadgets grows, as Eriksen (2001) points out, at an exponential rate – whereas in all cases of exponential growth a point must be reached at which the supply exceeds the capacity of the genuine or contrived demand; more often than not, that point arrives before another yet more dramatic point is reached: the natural limit to supply. Such pathological (and eminently wasteful) tendencies of all and any exponential growth in the production of goods and services could be conceivably spotted in time, recognized for what they are and they can perhaps even manage to inspire remedial or preventive measures – if not for another, and in many ways special, exponential process which results in an excess of information. As Ignazio Ramonet calculates, during the last

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30 years more information has been produced in the world than during the previous 5000 years, while a single copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times contains more information than a cultivated person in the eighteenth century would consume during a lifetime (Ramonet, 1999, p. 184). Just how difficult, nay impossible to absorb and assimilate, and so endemically wasteful, such a volume of information is – one can glean for instance from Eriksen’s observation that “more than a half of all published journal articles in the social sciences are never quoted,” That many articles are never read by anyone except the “anonymous peer reviewers” and copy editors (Eriksen, 2001, p. 92). It is anybody’s guess how small the fraction of the articles’ contents is that ever manages to find its way to social-science discourses. Eriksen concludes, “There is far too much information around,” and “[a] crucial skill in information society consists in protecting oneself against the 99.99 per cent of the information offered that one does not want” (2001, p. 17). We may say that the line separating a meaningful message, the ostensible object of communication, from background noise, its acknowledged adversary and obstacle, has all but disappeared. In a cutthroat competition for the scarcest of scarce resources – i.e., the attention of would be consumers – the suppliers of would-be consumer goods desperately search for the scraps in consumers’ time still lying fallow, for the tiniest gaps between moments of consumption that could still hopefully be stuffed with more information, hoping that some section of those at the receiving end of the communication channel might in the course of their desperate searches for bits of information by chance come across those bits which they do not need, yet which the suppliers wish them to absorb, and that they then might be sufficiently impressed to pause or slow down just enough to absorb these bits rather than the bits they had originally sought. Picking up fragments of the noise and converting them into a meaningful message is by and large a random process. “Hypes,” those products of the PR industry meant to separate “desirable objects of attention” from the non-productive (read: unprofitable) noise (like the fullpage commercials announcing a premiere of a new film, the launch of a new book, the next broadcast of TV show that is heavily subscribed by the advertisers, or an opening of a new exhibition), serve to divert one’s attention for a moment, to channel and condense in one direction the continuous and desperate, yet scattered search for “filters,” by focusing one’s attention, for a few minutes or a few days, on a selected object of consumptive desire. The number of moments are few, yet, by comparison with the number of contenders, they are in all probability multiplying at an exponential rate,

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hence the phenomenon of “vertical stacking” – a notion coined by Bill Martin (1997, p. 292) to describe the stock-piling of styles of music as gaps and fallow plots filled to the brim and over-flowing with the everrising tide of supply, while the promoters feverishly struggle to stretch the gaps and plots beyond their capacities. The images of “linear time” and “progress” were among the most prominent victims of the information flood. In the case of popular music, all imaginable retro styles found themselves competing for music-fans’ limited span of attention against all conceivable forms of recycled and plagiarized music who were likewise counting on the short span of public memory in order to masquerade as the latest novelties; but the case of popular music is just one manifestation of a virtually universal tendency that affects in equal measure all areas of life serviced by the consumer industry. To quote Eriksen once more: Instead of ordering knowledge in tidy rows, information society offers cascades of decontextualized signs more or less randomly connected to each other… Put differently: when growing amounts of information are distributed at growing speed, it becomes increasingly difficult to create narratives, orders, developmental sequences. The fragments threaten to become hegemonic. This has consequences for the ways we relate to knowledge, work and lifestyle in a wide sense. (2001, pp. 109-110)

The tendency toward a “blasé attitude” toward “knowledge, work, and lifestyle” (indeed, towards life as such and everything it contains) was also noted by Georg Simmel, with astonishing foresight, already at the start of the last century, as surfacing first among the residents of the “metropolis” – the big and crowded modern city: The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and grey tone; no one object deserves preference over any other… All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. (1969, p. 52)

Something like a fully-fledged version of the tendency that Simmel (1969) spotted and described, so to speak, avant la lettre – an ever more salient phenomenon strikingly similar to that discovered and dissected by Simmel under the name of “blasé attitude” - is currently being discussed under a different name: “melancholy.” Writers who use that term tend to

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bypass Simmel’s augury and foreboding to go even further back to the idea of melancholy of ancient philosophers, like Aristotle, and Renaissance thinkers, like Ficino or Milton, who rediscovered and reexamined that idea. In Rolland Munro’s rendering the concept of “melancholy” in its current use “represents not so much a state of indecision, a wavering between the choice of going one way or another, so much as it represents a backing off from the very divisions”; it stands for a “disentanglement” from “being attached to anything specific” (Munro, 2005). To be “melancholic” is “to sense the infinity of connection, but be hooked up to nothing.” In short, “melancholy” refers to “a form without content, a refusal from knowing just this or just that” (Munro, 2005). I would suggest that in the idea of “melancholy” as described in the last account resides the generic affliction of the consumer (homo eligens at the behest of consumer society) which results from the fatal coincidence of the compulsion (or addiction) to choose with the inability to choose. To borrow from Simmel, “melancholy” is the in-built transitoriness and the contrived insubstantiality of all things that surf with the same specific gravity over the tide of stimulations, the insubstantiality that rebounds in the behavioural code of consumers as indiscriminate, omnivorous gluttony – that most radical, ultimate form of hedging the bets and one’s last-resort life strategy – and that, considering the “pointillization” of time and the non-availability of the criteria, allows one to separate the relevant from the irrelevant and the message from the noise.

From Ballistic to Smart Missiles It took more than two millennia, since the ancient Greek sages invented the notion of paidea, for the idea of “life-long education” to turn from an oxymoron into a pleonasm (akin to “buttery butter” or “metallic iron”). Though that remarkable transformation has occurred quite recently – in the last few decades, under the impact of the radically accelerated pace of change in the social setting in which both the principal actors in education, the teachers and the learners alike, needed to act. The moment they start moving, the direction of ballistic missiles and the distance of their travel have already been decided by the shape and the position of the gun barrel and the amount of gunpowder in the shell; one can calculate with little or no error the spot on which the missile will land, and one can choose that spot by shifting the barrel or changing the gunpowder dose. Such qualities of ballistic missiles made them ideal weapons to use in positional warfare, when the targets remained dug into

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their trenches or bunkers and the missiles were the sole bodies on the move. The same qualities make them however useless once the targets start to move out of sight of the gunner – particularly if they move faster than missiles can fly, and even more so if they move erratically, in an unpredictable fashion that wreaks havoc on all the preliminary calculations of the required trajectory. In this case, a smart, intelligent missile is needed – a missile that can change its direction in full flight depending on changing circumstances, one that can immediately spot the target’s movements, learn from those movements whatever can be learned about the target’s current direction and speed, and extrapolate from the gathered information the spot in which their trajectories may cross. Such smart missiles cannot suspend, let alone finish, the gathering and processing of information as it travels – as its target never stops moving and changing its direction and speed; the plotting of the point of intersection needs to be constantly updated and corrected. We may say that smart missiles follow the strategy of “instrumental rationality” though so to speak in its liquidized, fluid version; that is, dropping the assumption that the end is given, steady, and immovable for the duration of the activity and so only the means are to be calculated and manipulated. The even smarter missiles of the future will not be confined to a pre-selected target at all but will choose the targets as they go. They will be guided in consideration of the most they can achieve given their technical capacities and in consideration of which potential targets in the proximity they are best equipped to hit. This would be, we may say, the case of “instrumental rationality” in reverse: targets are selected as the missile travels, and it is the available means that decide which “end” are eventually selected. In such a case the “smartness” of the flying missile and its effectiveness will benefit from its equipment being of a rather “generalistic” or “uncommitted” nature that is not focused on any specific category of ends and not overly calibrated to striking a particular kind of target. Smart missiles, unlike their ballistic elder cousins, learn as they go. So what they initially need to be supplied with is the ability to learn, and learn fast. This is obvious. What is less visible, though no less crucial than the skill of quick learning, is however the ability to instantly forget what has been learned before. Smart missiles would not be smart were they not able to “change their mind” or revoke their previous “decisions” without a second thought and without regret… They should not overly cherish the information they have acquired and on no account should they develop a habit of behaving in the way that the information seems to have suggested.

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All the information they acquire ages rapidly and, instead of providing reliable guidance, may lead them astray, if not promptly dismissed. What the “brains” of smart missiles must never forget is that the knowledge they acquire is eminently disposable, good only until further notice and of only temporary usefulness, and that the warrant of success is not to overlook the moment when acquired knowledge is of no more use and needs to be thrown away, forgotten, and replaced. Philosophers of education of the solid-modern era saw teachers as launchers of ballistic missiles and instructed them how to ensure that their products would stay strictly on the pre-designed course as determined by the initially triggered momentum. And no wonder that ballistic missiles were at the early stages of the modern era the topmost achievement of human technical invention. They served flawlessly whomever might have wished to conquer and master the world as it then was; as Hilaire Belloc confidently declared referring to the African natives, “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim Gun, and they have not” (1848, p. 37). (The Maxim gun, let us recall, was a machine that could fire a great number of ballistic bullets in a short time, but was effective only if there were very many such bullets at hand.) As a matter of fact, this vision of the teacher’s task and the pupil’s destiny is much older than the idea of the “ballistic missile” and the modern era that invented it – as an ancient Chinese proverb, which preceded the advent of modernity by two millennia yet is still quoted by the Commission of the European Communities at the beginning of its report calling for “Lifelong Learning” at the threshold of the 21st Century, testifies: “When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people” (2001). It is only with the transition to liquid-modern times that this ancient wisdom has lost its pragmatic value as people have become more concerned with learning and the promotion of learning known under the name of “education” and have had to shift their attention from the ballistic to the smart missiles. Harvard Business School professor, John Kotter advises his readers to avoid being entangled in long-term employment of the “tenure track” sort; indeed, developing institutional loyalty and becoming too deeply engrossed and emotionally engaged in any given job, swearing a long term, not to mention a life-long commitment, is ill advised when “business concepts, product designs, competitor intelligence, capital equipment and all kinds of knowledge [italics added] have shorter credible life spans” (Kotter, 1995, p. 159). If pre-modern life was a daily rehearsal of the infinite duration of everything except mortal life, then liquid-modern life is a daily rehearsal

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of universal transience. What the denizens of the liquid-modern world find out quickly is that nothing in their world is bound to last, let alone last forever. Objects recommended today as useful and indispensable tend to “become history” well before settling for long enough to turn into a need and a habit. Nothing is believed to stay here forever; nothing seems to be irreplaceable. Everything is born with a brand of imminent death and emerges from the production line with a “use-by date” label printed or presumed. Construction of new buildings does not start unless permissions have been issued to demolish them when the time to do so comes, as it surely will, and contracts are not signed unless their duration is fixed or their termination on demand is made easy. Few if any commitments last long enough to reach the point of no return, and it is only by accidents that decisions, all of which deemed to be binding “for the time being,” stay in force. All things, born or made, human or not, are until-further-notice and dispensable. A spectre hovers over the denizens of the liquid-modern world and all their labours and creations: the spectre of superfluity. Liquid modernity is a civilization of excess, redundancy, waste, and wastedisposal. In a succinct and pithy formulation of Ricardo Petrella, the current global trends direct “economies towards the production of the ephemeral and volatile – through the massive reduction of the life-span of products and services – and of the precarious (temporary, flexible and part-time jobs)” (1996, p. 17). The great Italian sociologist, Alberto Melucci, used to say that “we are plagued by the fragility of the presentness which calls for a firm foundation where none exists”; and so, “when contemplating change, we are always torn between desire and fear, between anticipation and uncertainty” (1996, pp. 43 ff.). Uncertainty means risk: the un-detachable companion of all action and a sinister spectre haunting the compulsive decision-makers and choosers-by-necessity that we have been ever since, as Melucci pithily put it, “choice became a destiny” (1996, pp. 43 ff.). As a matter of fact, to say “became” is not entirely correct, as humans have been choosers as long as they have been humans. But it can be said that at no other time has the necessity to make choices been so deeply felt or has choosing been so poignantly self-conscious due to it being conducted under conditions of painful yet incurable uncertainty, under the constant threat of “being left behind” and of being excluded from the game and barred re-entry for failing to meet the new demands. What separates the present-day agony of choice from the discomforts that tormented homo eligens (the “man choosing” at all times) in the past is the discovery or suspicion that there are no preordained rules or universally approved objectives that may be followed in order to absolve the choosers of the

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adverse consequences of their choices. Any such reference points and guidelines that seem trustworthy today are likely to be debunked tomorrow as misleading or corrupt. The allegedly rock-solid companies are unmasked as the figments of accountants’ imagination. Whatever is “good for you” today may be reclassified tomorrow as your poison. Apparently firm commitments and solemnly signed agreements may be overturned overnight. And promises, or most of them, seem to be made solely so that they may be broken. There seems to be no stable, secure island among the tides. To quote Melucci once more, “we no longer possess a home; we are repeatedly called upon to build and then rebuild one, like the three little pigs of the fairy tale, or we have to carry it along with us on our backs like snails” (1996, pp. 43ff.). In such a world, one is compelled therefore to take life bit by bit, as the bits come, expecting each bit to be different from the preceding ones and therefore requiring different knowledge and skills. A friend of mine living in one of the EU countries, a highly intelligent, superbly educated, uniquely creative person with full command of several languages, a person who would pass most tests and job interviews with flying colours, complained in a private letter of the “labour market being frail like gossamer and brittle like china.” For two years she worked as a freelance translator and legal advisor, exposed to a full measure of the usual ups and down of market fortunes. A single mother, she yearned however for a more regular income and so opted for steady employment with a monthly salary. For one and a half years she worked for a company briefing budding entrepreneurs on the intricacies of EU law, but as new adventurous businesses were slow in coming, the company went promptly bankrupt. Another year and a half she worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, running a section dedicated to the development of contacts with the newly independent Baltic countries. Come the next election, and the new government coalition chose to “subsidiarize” that worry to private initiative and thus decided to disband the department. The next job lasted only half a year: the State Board of Ethnic Equality has followed the pattern of the governmental hands-washing exercise and was declared redundant… Never before has Robert Louis Stevenson’s memorable verdict – “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive” (1881, p. 190) – sounded truer than it does now in our liquidized and fluid modern world. When destinations move places and those that do not lose their charm faster than legs can walk, cars drive, or planes fly, then keeping on the move matters more than the destination. Not to make a habit of anything practiced at the moment, not to be tied up by the legacy of one’s own past, wearing one’s

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current identity as one wears shirts that may be promptly replaced once they fall out of fashion, scorning past lessons and disdaining past skills with no inhibition or regret, are all becoming the hallmarks of the presentday, liquid-modern life politics and the attributes of liquid-modern rationality. Liquid-modern culture no longer feels like a culture of learning and accumulating like the cultures recorded in the historians’ and ethnographers’ reports. It looks instead like a culture of disengagement, discontinuity, and forgetting. In what George Steiner (2004) called “casino culture,” every cultural product is calculated for maximal impact (that is, for breaking up, pushing out, and disposing of the cultural products of yesterday) and instant obsolescence (that is, shortening the distance between the novelty and the rubbish bin and thereby growing wary of things outstaying their welcome and therefore quickly vacating the stage to clear the site for the cultural products of tomorrow). Artists, who once identified the value of their work with their eternal appeal and thus strived for the type of perfection that would render all further change all but impossible, now put together installations meant to be pulled apart once the exhibition closes, while performances end the moment the actors decide to turn the other way, bridges are wrapped up until traffic resumes, buildings remain unfinished until construction resumes, and erected or carved “space sculptures” invite nature to take its toll and to supply another proof, if another proof is needed, of the ludicrous brevity of all human deeds and the shallowness of their traces. No one except TV quiz competitors is expected, let alone encouraged, to remember yesterday’s talk-of-the-town, though no one is expected, let alone allowed, to opt out of the talk-of-the-town of today. The consumer market is well adapted to the liquid-modern “casino culture,” which in turn is adapted to that market’s pressures and seductions. The two chime well with each other and feed on each other. Not to waste their clients’ time nor pre-empt their future and yet unpredictable joys, consumer markets offer products meant for immediate consumption, preferably a one-off use, with rapid disposal and replacement, so that the living space does not get cluttered once the currently admired and coveted objects fall out of fashion. The customers, confused by the mind-boggling variety of offers and the vertiginous pace of their change, can no longer rely on the facility to learn and memorize, and so they must (and do so, gratefully) accept the reassurances that the product currently on offer is “the thing,” the “hot thing,” the “must have,” and the “must be seen (in or with) thing.” The over one-hundred-year-old Lewis Carroll fantasy has now become reality: “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at

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least twice as fast as that!” (1871). So where does this leave learners and their teachers?

From One-Off to Life-Long Education More to the point, in the liquid-modern setting education and learning, to be of any use, must be continuous and indeed life-long. No other kind of education and/or learning is conceivable; the “formation” of selves or personalities is unthinkable in any other fashion but that of an on-going and perpetually unfinished “re-formation.” Given the continuing convergence of two overwhelming trends that shape power relations and the strategy of domination in liquid-modern times, the prospects of the twisted and erratic itinerary of market developments being straightened up and “human resource” calculations being made more realistic are poor at best, and most probably nil. In a liquid-modern setting “manufactured uncertainty” is the paramount instrument of domination, whereas the policy of precarisation, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s (1998) term (a concept that refers to ploys resulting in a situation in which the subjects become more insecure and vulnerable and therefore even less predictable and controllable), fast becomes the hard core of the domination strategy. The market and “planning for life” are at loggerheads, and once state politics surrenders to the forces of the “economy”, or the free play of market forces, the balance of power between market forces and education decisively shifts to the advantage of the first.

Empowered, Disabled? This does not augur well for the “empowering of citizens,” identified by the European Commission as the primary objective of lifelong learning. By widespread consent, “empowerment” (a term used in current debates interchangeably with that of “enablement”) is achieved when people acquire the ability to control, or at least significantly influence, the personal, political, economic, and social forces by which their life trajectory would be otherwise buffeted; in other words, to be “empowered” means to be able to make choices and act effectively on the choices made, and that in turn signifies the capacity to influence the range of available choices and the social settings in which choices are made and pursued. To put it bluntly, genuine “empowerment” requires not only the acquisition of skills that would allow one to play the game designed by others well, but also the acquisition of such powers as would allow one to influence the game’s

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objectives, stakes, and rules, and that implies not only personal, but also the social skills. “Empowerment” requires the building and rebuilding of inter-human bonds, the will and the ability to engage with others in the continuous effort to make human cohabitation into a hospitable and friendly setting for mutually enriching cooperation between men and women struggling to develop self-esteem and their potential and the proper use of their abilities. In short, one of the decisive goals of life-long education aimed at “empowering” is the rebuilding of the now increasingly deserted public space where men and women may engage in a continuous translation between individual and common, and private and communal interests, rights, and duties. “In light of fragmentation and segmentation processes and increasing individual and social diversity” writes Dominique Simon Rychen, “strengthening social cohesion and developing a sense of social awareness and responsibility have become important societal and political goals” (2004, pp. 29). In the workplace, in the immediate neighbourhood and in the street we mix daily with others who, as Rychen points out, “do not necessarily speak the same language (literally or metaphorically) or share the same memory or history” (2004, pp. 29). Under such circumstances, the skills we need more than any other in order to offer the public sphere a reasonable chance of resuscitation, are the skills of interaction with others – of engaging in dialogue, of negotiation, of gaining mutual understanding, and of managing or resolving the conflicts inevitable in every instance of shared life. Let me re-state what has been stated at the beginning: in the liquidmodern setting, education and learning, to be of any use, must be continuous and indeed life-long. I hope we can see now that one, though perhaps the most decisive, reason for which it must be continuous and lifelong is the nature of the task we with which we are faced on the shared road to “empowerment” – a task which is exactly like education should be: continuous, never ending, life long. Consumerism is an enemy of the citizen… Throughout the “developed” and affluent part of the planet signs abound of people turning their backs on politics, of growing political apathy, and of a loss of interest in the political process. But democratic politics cannot survive for long if the citizens’ passivity arises from political ignorance and indifference. The freedoms granted to citizens are not properties acquired once and for all; such properties cannot be secured by locking them in private safes. They are planted and rooted in the socio-political soil which needs to be fertilized daily and which would dry up and crumble were it not attended

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day in and day out by the informed actions of a knowledgeable and committed public. Not only need the technical skills be continually refreshed, not only need the job-focused education be life-long, but the same is required, and with a yet greater urgency, in education for citizenship. Most people would agree today without much prompting that they need to refresh their professional knowledge and digest new technical information if they wish to avoid “being left behind” and do not wish to be thrown over the board by ever accelerating “technological progress.” And yet a similar feeling of urgency is conspicuously missing when it comes to the catching up with the impetuous stream of political developments and the fast-changing rules of the political game. In a landscape of ignorance, it is easy to feel lost and hapless – and easier yet to be lost and hapless without feeling. As Pierre Bourdieu (1998) memorably remarked – he who has no grip on the present would not dream of controlling the future. Ignorance leads to the paralysis of will. One does not know what is in store, has no way to count the risks. For the authorities impatient with the constraints imposed on the power-holders by a buoyant and resilient democracy, the ignorance-incurred impotence of the electorate and the widespread disbelief in the efficacy of dissent and the unwillingness to get involved politically are much needed and welcomed sources of political capital: domination through deliberately cultivated ignorance and uncertainty is more reliable and comes cheaper than rule grounded in a thorough debate of the facts and a protracted effort to agree on the truth of the matter and on the least risky ways to proceed. Political ignorance is self-perpetuating, and the rope plaited with ignorance and inaction comes handy whenever the voice of democracy is to be stifled or its hands are to be tied. We need life-long education to give us choice. But we need it even more in order to salvage the conditions that make choice available and within our power.

References Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée. Belloc, H. (1898). The modern traveller. London: Edward Arnold. Bertman, S. (1998). Hyperculture: The human cost of speed. Westport, CT: Praeger. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Contre-feux. Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l'invasion Néo-libérale. Paris: Liber.

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Brodsky, J. (1995). In praise of boredom. In J. Brodsky, On grief and reason: Essays (pp. 104-113). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carroll, L. (1896). Through the looking-glass. Available here: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/carroll/lewis/looking/contents.html Commission of the European Communities. (2001). Communication from the commission: Making a European area of lifelong learning a reality. Available here: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/ ?uri=CELEX:52001DC0678 Eriksen, T. H. (2001). Tyranny of the moment: Fast and slow time in the Information Age. London: Pluto Press. Kotter, J. (1995). The new rules. New York: Dutton. Martin, B. (1997). Listening to the future: The tim of progressive rock 1968-1978. Chicago: Open Court. Melucci, A. (1996). The playing self: Person and meaning in the planetary society. Cambridge: CUP. MroĪek, M. (2000). Male listy. Warsaw: Noir sur blanc. Munro, R. (2005). Outside paradise: Melancholy and the follies of modernization. Culture and Organization, 2005(4), 275-89. Petrella, R. (1997, June 17). Un machine infernale. Le Monde diplomatique. Ramonet, I. (1999). La Tyrannie de la communication. Paris: Galilée Rychen, D. S. (2004). Lifelong learning – But learning for what? LLinE, 2004(1), 26-33. Simmel, G. (1969). The metropolis and mental life (K. Wolff, Trans.). In R. Sennett (Ed.), Classic essays on the culture of cities (pp. 47-60). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Stasiuk, A. (2002). Tekturowy Samolot. Sekowa, Poland: Czarne. Steiner, G. (2004). The idea of Europe. Amsterdam: Nexus Institute. Stevenson, R. L. (1881). El Dorado. In R. L. Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers. London: C. Kegan Paul. Tarkowska, E. (2005). Zygmunt Bauman o czasie i procesach temporalizacji. Kultura i SpoáeczeĔstwo, 2005(3), 45-65.

CHAPTER TWO INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCES IN EDUCATION AGOSTINO PORTERA

Necessity and Urgency of Intercultural Education and Intercultural Competences Globalisation and interdependence have brought about great challenges which affect the human being in its entirety, as local communities now depend on people they have never met before. The spread of mass media, internet communication technologies, the profound geo-political changes affecting nation states, and the establishment of new markets seem to bear out McLuhan’s prophecy of the ‘global village’. These extensive changes imply a reduction in distances between people, stronger ties between different geographical areas, greater mobility, more interdependence, and new and diversified migration flows. (Bauman, 1977; Soros, 1988). Such changes seem to have led to profound economic, environmental, political, social, and cultural crises, not only within nations, but in the relations between states and persons of different cultural origin. In post modernity, such crises concern all aspects of human life (family, school, work, politics, environment, mass media, etc.), but, in particular, result in an educational crisis, due to the fact that education is not possible without knowing its content and, especially, its goals. In order to overcome the crises of values, governability, and decisionmaking processes in the age of globalization, pluralism and social complexity, it is necessary to invest in education. There is an urgent need to go beyond the neoliberal principle of the neutrality of the state, and to replace it with the goals of care and social responsibility; to reduce the unequal access to universities and school systems, which are being redefined to meet business needs and therefore treat students as objects and benefit only a minority of students, a privileged elite (Nussbaum,

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2010). It should also be known that stressing the importance of education in the postmodern world implies rethinking educational content, methods and goals. The challenge is to overcome all past forms of dogmatism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism without falling into the trap of moral relativism (anything goes), spontaneism (carpe diem), and standardization (one-size-fits-all). In this sense, the best response to the new situation seems to be found in intercultural approaches, which in pedagogical1 theory can be considered an authentic Copernican revolution. Nowadays many scholars consider Intercultural Education, as developed and applied in Europe since the 1980s, as the most appropriate approach for recognizing, respecting, and coping with all forms of cultural diversity (Gundara, 2000; Portera, 2011; Barrett, 2013).2 Intercultural education is a process that leads to a complete and thorough understanding of the concepts of democracy and pluralism, as well as a deeper understanding of different customs, traditions, faiths and values. It constitutes a Copernican revolution in education, because: a) it does not define identity and culture rigidly, but views them as being dynamic and in constant evolution; and b) it regards diversity, otherness, emigration and life in a complex and multicultural society not only as risk factors, but also as opportunities for enrichment and growth. A person from a different ethnic3 or cultural background poses a positive challenge, a chance for discussion and the study of values, norms, and behavioural patterns. The intercultural approach is situated between universalism (a transcultural perspective which emphasizes cultural similarities like universal human rights) and relativism (a multicultural view which stresses cultural difference), as it takes into consideration both opportunities and limitations, yet transcends and synthesizes them to permit improved chances for dialogue, exchange, and interaction. Whereas multiculturalism aims to discover and tolerate people from different cultures, who live peacefully side by side, the prefix inter implies relationships, interaction, and exchange. Intercultural education rejects immobility and hierarchy; it aims to encourage dialog and relationships on equal terms, so that one does not feel forced to sacrifice important aspects of one’s cultural identity. It is based on a direct 1

The term pedagogy is utilized here in the European sense of a theoretical reflection on educational approaches (Portera, 2006, 2011). 2 For more details about the many studies and the development of intercultural education both in the USA and in Europe and for a semantic clarification of multicultural and intercultural education, see Grant & Portera (2011). 3 The term ethnic is used to underline somatic differences. In awareness of the common origin of all human beings, I avoid using the term “race”: the only race on earth is the human race (Lewontin, 1984).

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exchange of ideas, principles, and behaviours, a comparison of concepts and mutual discovery. In the glocal world (we live our lives locally but are influenced by global decisions, Derrida, 1995) there is an urgent necessity for the acquisition of competencies not only in the family or in schools, but in all areas of human existence (Suarez-Orozco & Qin-Hilliard 2004, p. 6). In addition to specific disciplinary knowledge, there is a need for competences at the cognitive, emotional, and relational levels which endow citizens with the ability to operate in linguistically and culturally complex contexts: Intercultural Competences (ICs) which allow one to manage diversity in a positive manner. However, both the concept of Intercultural Education – first coined in the USA in the 1930s (McGee Banks, 2011) and then ‘reinvented’ in Europe in the 1980s – and the term Intercultural Competence (IC) – used since the 1940s mainly in the military and in business – are often popularly misunderstood and require more precise definition. Especially regarding the concept of IC, despite the vast international literature (mostly in English), there still remain many gaps and limitations: misunderstandings; different conceptions at the terminological, semantic and operative level; erroneous applications in education and vocational training; and the imprecise, reductive, and often incorrect use of established measures of IC.

Need for Intercultural Competences in Education There are nowadays so many writings and publications regarding the concepts of intercultural communication and intercultural competence that a sufficient summary would exceed the limitations of the present chapter (Cf. Giaccardi, 2005; Deardorff, 2009; Portera, 2013). A. Fantini (2007) conducted an extensive literature review in order to develop a comprehensive model of intercultural competence and its assessment, which he complemented with his own empirical research. In his definition intercultural competence is considered a complex of abilities which enable a person to effectively and appropriately manage interaction with people who are culturally and linguistically different. The concept of IC is largely attributed to the United States. After the Second World War the United States’ State Department, in its new role as the leading global power, founded the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in order to train its diplomats, who rarely knew the language or culture of the countries to which they were assigned. Within the context of the Cold War between the USA and the USSR, the United States adopted a policy of

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providing economic support for and forming strategic alliances with nations in South America, Asia, and Africa, which envisaged foreign direct investment, technological advancement, the training of adult literacy experts, an improvement in health conditions, an increase in agricultural productivity, and the construction of hydroelectric power plants and steel mills. Many of these programs for economic development between the 1950s and the 1960s failed, but the success of certain projects for development, or rather their ability to remain effective autonomously beyond the initial transfer of foreign aid, suggested that it was in deed possible to foster economic development by taking the cultural dimension into consideration. In response to these failures and criticisms, intercultural communication and intercultural competence became ever more important in FSI training programs. Thus the FSI played a decisive role in developing the cultural literacy of American officials to be sent to foreign countries. The training staff mostly consisted of linguists and anthropologists. Even today the concepts of intercultural communication and intercultural competence fit their Anglo-Saxon (American) mould of the 1950s and retain their primarily instrumental objectives. The historical and cultural context in which they were developed – Occidental, aimed at persuading, selling to, or convincing (and sometimes manipulating) the Other – is not only “reductive, but in many respects also dangerous” (Giaccardi, 2005, p. 31). The Centre for Intercultural Studies in Verona carried out its own research project (Portera, 2014) in order to develop a theoretical model of IC based on the existing literature and empirical data and with implications at the practical-operative, methodological and vocational levels.4 The first phase consisted of a critical analysis of the literature regarding IC. The conclusions drawn from the literature review were then used to develop a grid of indicators to define IC. In the second phase, ‘privileged operator’ (practitioners with intercultural work experience) in specific fields – education, business, law, healthcare, and cultural mediation – were consulted within the framework of a qualitative study, using focus groups (of about two hours and divided by sector) and semistructured interviews about ‘critical incidents’ they had encountered and the ‘successes’ they had had (about 10-15 interviews per sector). In certain cases the method of participant observation was employed to study the operators on the job and the findings were then analyzed and discussed in the focus groups. 4

I prefer to use the Italian term formazione (or education), rather than training, the latter of which is often associated with the military or athletics.

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The analysis of the literature revealed that the personal, social and cultural dimensions of IC are still open to debate. Many models have been developed to define IC (see Fantini, 2007; Deardorff, 2009): Milhouse (1993); Martin, Hammer, & Bradford (1994); Bradford, Allen, & Beisser (2000); Nichols & Stevens (2001); Byram (2003); Hajek & Giles (2003); Byram et al. (2003); Deardoff (2006, 2008); Prechtl & Lund (2007), Fantini (2007); Arasaratnam (2008). However most are Anglo-Saxon perspectives oriented toward individualism and a Western point-of-view. Furthermore, most of the models are related to multicultural education (the goals of which are knowledge and peaceful coexistence) and some are related to transcultural approaches (in their focus on the promotion of human rights and universal values), while very few are actual ‘intercultural’ models that emphasize the opportunities derived from encounter, dialogue, and interaction. Based on the results of the literature review, the empirical study and the focus groups, a working model of ICs was developed to fill these gaps.5 Against this background, ICs were defined as a set of knowledge, attitudes and skills, that allows one to appropriately and effectively manage relations with persons of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Based on evidence from the professional sectors investigated in the empirical study (education, business, law, healthcare, and cultural mediation) the following model of ICs was developed. A basic assumption is that it is not possible to clearly distinguish between competences in general and ICs in particular (see Fig. 1.). Therefore, the base of the model consists of the personal competences that arise in various Theories of the Person, including, for instance, Pascal’s Tetragram (1669), which implies that competences simultaneously stand in opposition and complement one another: doubt (uncertainty, contradiction, criticism), reason (scientific and experimental thinking), faith (a belief in things for which there is no evidence), and religion (a bond with transcendental ideas); the theory of Multiple Intelligences (Gardner, 1993), which expands upon the Piagetian model and includes, in addition to linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence, also musical, bodilykinaesthetic, spatial, intrapersonal, and interpersonal intelligences; the Quality of Life theory (Albertini, 2000), which views certain skills to be fundamental to personal well-being: physical and mental health, motor skills, language, adaptive abilities (procedural learning, like walking, biking, swimming), and behavioural abilities; and, finally, the theory of 5

Based on our findings, we adopt the plural ‘intercultural competences’, because the singular ‘intercultural competence’ does not capture the multi-faceted nature of the concept, as it is a very complex set of knowledge, attitudes, and skills.

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Fundamental Human Needs, whereby, according to one study that expands upon Maslow’s theory (Portera, 1998, 2008), the satisfaction of these needs is a requisite for a healthy personality development and the creation of intra and interpersonal relationships, the most important of these needs being: physical well-being, social relationships, separation, positive emotional esteem, deep understanding, congruence, trust, structure, active participation (influence in the external world), and continuity (not denying part of oneself in order to be accepted). In addition, following the models of A. Fantini (2005, 2007) and D. K. Deardoff (2006), as well as the reflections of J. Delors et al. (2005), the competences were divided into Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes. Under the category ‘sapere – knowledge’ appear all codified knowledge, notions, and information of both a general and specialist nature that a person has learnt through formal study, as well as all the informal knowledge internalized during one’s lifetime. The ‘Saper fare - skills’ category includes all competences related to the ability to apply and utilize knowledge by means of physical and/or mental abilities for the execution of a task, such as skills for problem solving or the management of conflicts. With ‘saper essere - attitudes’ are understood all personal, psychological and sociocultural dispositions which facilitate (or permit) effective performance.

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Attitudes allow one to understand the context of all human activity and facilitate interpersonal relations. It should be stressed, however, that the division between Attitudes and Skills was made only for the sake of simplicity, as the model understands all competences as being interdependent parts of a dynamic whole. For this reason, Figure 2 highlights the interactive aspects of ICs. In the centre is positioned the Area of the Self which contains the Fundamental Human Needs (Portera, 1995, 1998, 2008), the theory of Quality of Life (Albertini, 2000), Pascal’s Tetragram, and the theory of Multiple Intelligences (Gardner, 1993). Based on the research results, this area also includes the competences of saper-essere (attitudes): openness, sensitivity, decentralization, curiosity, humility, flexibility (management of emotions and new situations), respect, responsibility, critical thinking, acceptance, empathy, and congruence. Around the Area of the Self, in an interactive manner – represented with arrows that should in fact link all areas (see also Figure 3) – are positioned the categories of Knowledge: awareness of the cultural self, knowledge of one’s own culture and the culture of others (including context, social roles, impressions, point-ofview, peculiarities), verbal-linguistic, nonverbal, and paraverbal knowledge (best if in multiple languages), disciplinary knowledge (especially Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, and Pedagogy), and multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge. The category of the saper-fare (commonly known as skills), includes linguistic (multiple languages) and communicative (critical thinking, listening, speaking) skills. Also important are the abilities of observation, analyzing and interpreting subjective and empirical reality, and establishing positive social relationships, which implies the ability to evaluate new situations, to build stable and trustful relationships, to cooperate, and to participate in open and inclusive groups, especially in professional contexts (e.g., education, counselling, and therapy).

Intercultural Competences in Educational Practice A subsequent study with the title “The success of professional development projects in developing intercultural competences by means of innovative teaching strategies, ICTs, and e-learning,” which was conducted at the Centre for Intercultural Studies from 2012 to 2015, attempted to validate the aforementioned model by testing it within the context of a master’s degree program in ICs for the fields of education,

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law, healthcare, and business.6 The model of ICs was preliminarily validated by means of the Delphi method (Adler and Ziglio, 1996), according to which the model was subjected to the critical evaluation of a panel of 68 national and international experts.7 The model was further validated by using it as the foundation of the content and teaching methods applied in the master’s degree program. During the empirical study both qualitative and quantitative research methods were employed. As pertains to the qualitative methods, the researchers maintained student portfolios which consisted of a ‘balance sheet’ of the competencies described in the model of ICs developed by the research group at the University of Verona. The first part of the balance sheet of competences consisted of a list of the ‘previous competences’ (i.e., the competences acquired prior to enrolment: previous professional development courses; past and present professional experiences; and hobbies, interests, and other competences) as well as ‘current competencies’ (i.e., relational and communicative skills; critical thinking and divergentcreative skills; conflict management and problem-solving skills; foreign language skills; and experience planning and designing intercultural training courses). In addition, the researchers conducted participant observations during lectures and seminars and conducted semi-structured interviews with the students, instructors, and staff. As regards the quantitative methods, students were given standardized tests: emotional competences were measured using the Trait Emotional Intelligence 6

The study fell under the framework of a nationally funded “PRIN” (Progetto di Ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) research project with the Universities of Rome, Turin, Bologna, Foggia and Palermo. The University of Verona section was coordinated by A. Portera, and included S. Lamberti, G. Tacconi, P. Dusi, S. Claris, M. Milani, D. Racanello. 7 The international experts included: Darla K. Deardorff, Alvino Fantini, James A. Banks, Martin Barrett, Yael Sharan, Margarita Sanchez Mazas, Michael Byram, Teresa Aguado, William B. Gudykunst, Carmel Borg, Robert Cowen, Gunther Diaz, Johanna Lasonen, Nektaria Palaiologou, Martine Pretceille, Micheline Rey, Roy Moodley, Elvi Pirsl, Andrés Escarbajal Frutos, Christine Sleeter, Marcello Suarez-Orozco, Khakimov Eduard, Bartoli Andrea, Zygmunt Bauman, Carolyn Tait, Ted Glynn, John P. Portelli, Fan Yanhong, John Norris, and Yukiko Watanabe. The Italian experts included: Hiang Chu Ausilia, Umberto Margiotta, Sirna Concetta, Alberto Fornasari, Filippo Dettori, Massimiliano Fiorucci, Alessio Surian, Sonia Sigurtà Braibanti, Antonio Nocera, Andrea Rea Milena Santerini, Luisa Santelli, Giorgio Albertini, Mario Castoldi, Graziella Favaro, Michele Borrelli, Claudia Crotti, Sergio Angori, Marco Catarci, Giuseppe Zanniello, Mario Comoglio, Maria Luisa Damini, Mariangela Giusti, Mantovani Giuseppe, Alessandra La Marca, Giuseppe Milan, Roberto Ruffino, and Vanna Iori.

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Questionnaire, or TEIQue (Petrides, 2009), and social competences were measured using the Big Five Inventory, or BFI (John & Srivastava, 1999). The analysis of the results enabled the research group to develop a model of ICs that took into account both the input from the experts consulted during the Delphi study and the practical experience of applying the model to the postgraduate degree program. One of the most significant differences in the resulting model (Fig. 3) is that is seeks to transcend the Eurocentric and North American conceptualization of IC to include competences rooted in Eastern traditions. Thus, the new model does not consider ICs to be distinguishable from other competences tout court, and in addition to the theories of Western thinkers (Pascal, Gardner, Albertini, Portera), the philosophies of Chakra and Tao were also added. The philosophical tradition of Chakra (in Sanskrit chakra means ‘wheel’ or ‘disc’) stems from the religious traditions of India that are associated with yoga and Ayurvedic medicine (Flood, 1996). Chakra is an ancient metaphysical system that illustrates the various aspects of a multidimensional universe with diagrams representing: body; emotions; thoughts; ideas; actions; community and government; technology and history; and the past and present mysteries of the planet, the sky, the spirit, and matter. It originates from the tantric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism which adhere to the notion of a ‘subtle body’ (invisible, nonphysical) and a divine life force, called pranas, where pranas is believed to flow through vessels, called nadis, which connect focal points called chakras. The source texts provide different accounts of the total number of chakras in the physical body. The tantric texts refer to seven chakras, which are represented symbolically by seven coloured lotus flowers with open petals arranged vertically throughout the physical body from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. In addition to the concept of a nervous system, the chakras also correspond to the glands of the endocrine system and the various bodily functions (respiration, digestion, procreation) and they represent seven elementary forces of nature: earth, water, fire, air, sound, light, and thought. The chakras are also connected with numerous other natural and supernatural phenomena: colours, sounds, deities, precious stones, herbs, and astrological forces. On a psychological level, they represent the most important aspects of human existence: survival, sex, power, love, communication, imagination, and spirituality. The Tao is a central concept in traditional Chinese thought (Lao Tzu, 1963). It is a difficult term to translate, because it is conceived as an inexhaustible force that escapes any attempt at definition. The Chinese character 拢 (Dào or Tao, meaning ‘foot’ or ‘root’, and in Japanese dǀ, meaning ‘way’ or ‘path’) alludes to the concepts of motion and flow.

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Thus, the Tao is often defined as an eternal, essential and vital force that flows in constant motion through all matter in the universe. Taoism, or Daoism, refers either to the philosophical and mystical doctrine that dates back to the works of Laozi and ZhuƗngzӿ (between the IV and III Centuries B.C.) or to the Taoist religion (I Century A.D.), which developed both as a complement and opposition to Buddhism. Taoism, which extols spontaneity (everything occurs spontaneously and without reason), a) believes that there exists a self-regulating mechanism which manifests itself only if one remains non-violent; b) is mostly associated with the peasant class (human beings, like nature and agriculture, require care and obey internal and external natural forces and principles); and c) condemns desire (like Buddhism) in that Taoists desire to have no desire. The Taoist creation story describes the universe as a process in which two opposing forces in perpetual motion form an inseparable whole. At the beginning of time there was ‘nothingness’, which was characterized by a state (called wu ji, 㡯㨐) absent of differentiations and polarity, while the world in which we now live is understood as a myriad of opposing forms and phenomena. The fundamental forces of the universe, which are present throughout the natural world, emerged out of limitlessness, formlessness, and timelessness (the absence of motion and change). These forces are represented by two polar symbols: the Yin (which is associated with shadows, coldness, the moon, femininity, and the colour black) and the Yang (which is associated with light, warmth, the sun, masculinity, and the colour white). This state of polarity gives meaning to all that exists and permits constant transformation. The concept of Yin and Yang has several defining features worth noting: they do not represent opposite poles but rather complementary poles (as they are two emblems upon which all manifestations of reality are based and which give order to all existence); they do not express categorical moral values regarding good and evil (good cannot exist without evil); neither can exist in the absence of the other (they coexist as part of the same dynamic whole that is in constant transformation); they are defined in relation and in contrast to one another (they are not absolute and each phenomenon in the world can only be described as Yin or Yang in relation to another phenomenon); their polarity is what permits motion and change (they exist in a dynamic equilibrium characterized by continuous oscillation and cyclical transformation) (Chang, 1985).

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The model of ICs presented above (Fig. 3), expands upon and extends the previous model (Fig. 2) most notably in that it takes into consideration Eastern philosophical perspectives based upon Chakra and Tao, in an attempt to overcome the strict division of human competences in the Western tradition.8 As such, the competences were regrouped as follows. The first area, starting at the base, is called Muladhara, which means ‘root’ or ‘support’, and contains the element of earth and corresponds to the spine (including the tailbone, the pelvic plexus, the legs, and the feet). Associated with this area is the importance of understanding the strengths and limitations of one’s own body and one’s relationship with the surrounding world, which presumes a hospitable demeanour and respect towards both Self and Other. The inadequate development of this area can give rise to existential fear (a threat to one’s own survival), as well as difficulty in saying no, managing conflicts, and exercising perseverance and self-discipline to achieve a given objective. From an intercultural perspective, these competences a) embrace the Area of the Self, which include the fundamental human needs (especially physical wellbeing, attachment, and trust), the satisfaction of which is determinant for a healthy personality development (Portera, 2008, pp. 169-184); b) are connected to the physical and social environment as identified by neuroscience, such as in Quality of Life theory (Albertini, 2000); and c) reflect the theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1993). This also includes the inherent ability to observe, analyze, and interpret adequately both internal and external reality (the willingness of Self and Other to meet and engage in dialog, discussion, and interaction). This implies a robust development of body, culture, and personal identity, as well as the ability to establish relationships with other human beings which are characterized by reliable and stable bonds, all of which is possible only through a sense of trust in both oneself and the world (Erikson, 1968) as well as a planet that can sustain human life. In addition, the ability to realize practical and relevant projects (such as building a house) is fundamental in that it enables one to become aware of the factors and mechanisms of external reality which can either aid or hinder the application of ICs, including: adequate time, space, and place (pulling a plant out by the roots does not help it grow), political and legal structures, the presence of disadvantage or discrimination, and the quality of interpersonal relationships. 8

As is the case with any table, this is an oversimplification. On the one hand it makes the model more comprehensible, but on the other hand it is reductive and arbitrary. Therefore the individual areas are not to be considered as mutually exclusive (e.g., emotions and feelings or attitudes and skills coexist in several areas).

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The second area, Svadhishthana, which means ‘sweetness’, contains the element of water and in human anatomy corresponds to the genitalia. Liquidity is the dominant characteristic. Whereas attachment is the dominant trait in the Muladhara, this area is associated with skills of detachment (the need for separation, Portera 2008, pp. 169-184), and the ability to ‘flow’. Combining the first and the second areas reveals the polarity of Yin and Yang (attachment and separation, solidity and fluidity), which allow the Self to develop the competences necessary to interact dynamically with one another; the attraction of opposites results in motion that could be understood as an urge to expand one’s horizons or as a desire to experiment with new and creative paths (just as a positively charged pole and a negatively charged pole generate electricity). When these instincts and impulses (which correspond to survival, sexuality, and the need for sustenance) are channelled toward the upper chakras, in combination with emotions, they stimulate motion that creates the ability to make decisions, to expand the mind, to change for the better, and to experience joy. The inadequate development of this area can give rise to an existential fear of change (the energy is trapped in the first chakra and remains as hard and as rigid as earth); while its overdevelopment can cause the Self to succumb to impulses, outbursts of anger, and other extreme emotions. As relates to ICs, in this area are found the abilities to manage instincts and impulses (to neither repress them nor to allow them to manifest themselves uncontrollably), sexuality and intimacy; knowing how to deal with change and the new (not being overly attached to patterns and theories from the past); social and relational competences (building relationships based on trust); as well as creativity, joy, and enthusiasm (encountering and confronting the new and Other in a positive way). The third area, Manipura, which means ‘glittering gem’, contains the element of fire and corresponds to the naval region of the body, which is associated with the solar plexus and the metabolic-digestive system (the ‘internal sun’ generated by the consumption of food). In this area are located characteristics and competences that are closely related with the previous area, like the ability to cope with separation and fluidity, which promotes motion and change. Especially the less pleasant emotions, such as fear, sadness, and anger, are born out of the anticipation of pain and are often perceived and activated differently in different contexts. Therefore these emotions necessitate the intercultural ability of understanding and conflict management.9 The inadequate development of this area can give 9

This area would then correspond to Erikson’s (1968) developmental stage of industry.

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rise to a tendency to close oneself off to the world, a lack of energy, reduced tenacity, a sense of inferiority, fatigue, a fear of confrontation and conflict, a lack of willpower, and difficulties with separation, while overdevelopment can lead to impatience, obsessive compulsive behaviour, and outbursts of rage. In terms of ICs, this area is especially associated with the ability a) to recognize and managing the primal human emotions (especially anger and fear), b) to maintain a sense of humility in the exercise of power and authority (becoming neither authoritarian nor submissive), and c) to recognize and face both internal (contradictory aspects of one’s identity) and external (interpersonal) conflicts by using strategies such as humour and willpower. The fourth area, Anahata, which means ‘unstruck sound’ (sound not caused by striking two objects together), contains the element of air and corresponds to the lungs and the heart. The diaphragm functions as a boundary between the lower zone, which is more related to basic human instincts (social interaction, sexuality, and generativity) and the upper zone, where feelings, words, reason, and spirituality reside. The beating of the heart and the air of the lungs (respiration) then give force to words (see the next area), thereby generating awareness, acceptance, equilibrium, and harmony (as opposed to the conflicts present in the Manipura). This area is especially associated with the secondary emotions and feelings, but also with action or doing (the hands, which are centres of energy, are also located in this region). The inadequate development of this area can give rise to a tendency toward sadness (depression), isolation, low self-esteem, difficulties with interpersonal relationships, and xenophobia. An overdevelopment can result in a tendency toward xenophilia (an excessive, uncritical love of otherness, cf. Portera, 2008), exaggerated attachment, the overestimation of others at the expense of oneself, and dependent behaviour. This area is responsible for balance, as represented by the top of the lower realm (the physical world and the root system) and the base of the upper realm (the spirit and the divine). To this description can be added Pascal’s Tetragram (1669), which understands competencies as being both in opposition and complementary to one another: doubt (uncertainty, contradiction, criticism), reason (scientific thought and experimentation), faith (belief in phenomena which cannot be observed empirically), and religion (a connection with the transcendental). Regarding ICs, this area is especially connected with the Area of the Self (attitudes), most notably the ability to deal with emotions and feelings, especially love (care for oneself, others, and the external world) and compassion. The following competencies can also be added: openness and curiosity (respect for the value systems and faiths of others), sensibility, decentralization, flexibility (knowing how to

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cope with new situations), respect (for people of different cultural backgrounds, without necessarily agreeing with their opinions or behaviour), personal responsibility (the civil and moral responsibility of a citizen), esteem (for oneself and for others), the ability to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty (both internal and external), acceptance, empathy, and congruence (internal and external). Finally, to this area could also be added those abilities connected with saper fare – skills: acquiring and interpreting one’s own culture and other cultures, also by means of decentralization; adopting and critically evaluating multiple cultural perspectives; forming positive relationships and participating in cooperative, open, and inclusive groups; valuing new situations as opportunities; and establishing stable and reliable rapport with others. The fifth area, Vishudda, which means ‘purification’, is where the ether, or the element of sound, is located, and this area corresponds with the throat (including the thyroid and vocal cords), meaning that this is the chakra in which breath is transformed into sounds, words, and communication, all of which have a purifying effect (as well as the nourishing effect of air and food). This area is associated with the ability to give order to the world by changing or accepting it, as well as the ability to achieve internal harmony with oneself and external harmony with otherness, thereby achieving higher levels of creativity. If this area is inadequately developed, difficulties with communication can arise (in addition to a sore throat, stiff shoulders, and a monotone voice), as well as low self-esteem. The excessive development of this area can lead to a tendency to talk too much (without communicating effectively), to talk out of place, or to talk out of tempo. The specific ICs of this area are especially associated with language and communication abilities: knowing how to communicate clearly and neither too aggressively nor too submissively, and recognizing multiple modes of communication. In particular there are several abilities related to saper fare - skills as pertain to language and communication (including the ability to understand the language, behaviour, and values of others and the ability to adapt one’s own style of communication thereto), as well as intercultural mediation, which implies knowing how to recognize and derive opportunity from cultural conflicts. More specifically, the capacities found here include the ability to: think critically and autonomously (knowing how to interpret reality, perceive and understand difference, and make judgments); listen actively and empathetically (understanding the thoughts, feelings, and values of others); and engage in dialog (knowing how to speak clearly and assertively; understanding and taking into consideration the modes of communication of others). Likewise important are flexibility, knowing

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how to accept the new and the foreign (also within oneself), empathy and congruence (with oneself and with others), as well as knowing how to “convince” (Latin: win-win); in other words, being able to ‘win together’ (while having respect for others), by finding creative solutions to resolve conflicts. The sixth area, Ajna, which means ‘to know’, contains the element of light and corresponds to the mind (the pituitary gland, the space between the eyes, the ‘third eye’). The chakra of the forehead is associated with visual, psychic, and intuitive perception; the place of memories and future plans, as well as light, colour, and images; and the ability to read and memorize visual and verbal information by recognizing both explicit and covert patterns and orders (internal and external; past, present, and future). The pineal gland is also located in this area, which in antiquity was believed to sense the ‘inner light’. Excesses and deficiencies in this area are difficult to diagnose: a deficient development can lead to insensitivity, the absence of formed attitudes, and a lack of introspection, while excessive development can result in overactive cognition at the expense of intuition. As regards ICs, this area is primarily associated with the competences related to sapere, especially critical knowledge and understanding: being able to consider cultures as dynamic processes which are not defined by national borders, and being able to respect the dignity of all human beings (there is only one race in the world); an awareness of the cultural self (cultural knowledge about Self and Other, including context, social roles and impacts, other points-of-view, and specific knowledge); an understanding of the world (political structures, laws, human rights, history, economics, the environment, and media); communicative awareness (that different people can adopt different styles of communication and assigning meaning); intuition, or the ability to understand phenomena that are not presently visible; professional and subject knowledge; and linguistic and communicative knowledge (verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal), preferably of multiple languages. The seventh area, Sahasrara, which means ‘yarrow’ (millefolium), contains all that is sacred, the element of the divine, and is located at the crown of the head (above the neocortex). This chakra is associated with thought, consciousness, faith, ideas, convictions, and beliefs, competences which are related to transcendental intelligence (Gardner, 1993). Using the metaphor of a computer, it is an operating system that governs all thoughts and interpretations of the world, that governs consciousness by giving order and structure to all information encountered externally and internally. If this area is developed excessively, one may seek to dominate others by imposing one’s own worldview on them, while in the opposite

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case a tendency towards being overly self-critical may manifest itself, which results in an acceptance of what others say and believe as absolute truth or in a rigid religiosity or a rigid mentality. The ICs found in this area are connected with the ability to recognize those factors, forces, and mechanisms which are invisible or rationally unexplainable, yet which have a direct impact on intercultural relations. In particular, this area depends on one’s belief system, and is associated with one’s connection with the transcendental (religion), one’s spirituality, one’s subtle energy, and all other aspects that enable one to interpret all that is invisible and unknown. These competences, in a multicultural context, are related to the ability to recognize and relativize one’s own thoughts, convictions, and beliefs. After having presented the individual areas of the model, it is necessary to also present the fundamental characteristics of the model as a whole (Fig. 4). The most important are: 1. all competences are dynamic and interactive: the schematic representation and the demarcation of the individual areas are only intended to make the model more comprehensible; in reality they are each constantly in flux and, as is the case in the theory of Chakras, interdependent (skills and attitudes are inseparable from one another), and the best way to exercise competences is therefore to allow them to ‘flow’; 2. each area includes both innate personality traits (qualities) and acquired characteristics (e.g., flexibility, openness, empathy, and curiosity) (Cf. Fantini, 2005), and it is not possible to clearly distinguish the ICs from competences tout court: all personal competences interact with one another thereby enable one to cope with multicultural situations and relationships; 3. at times the competencies may appear to contradict one another (e.g., understanding and acceptance versus social congruence and assertiveness) and they may vary based on the peculiarities of the Self, the situation (periods of crisis, stress, political and legal structures, discrimination), the environment (the climate and the location in which intercultural encounter occurs), and the relationship (extent to which rapport has been established): the better the context (strong interpersonal relationships, more time, space, etc.), the better the wellbeing and the development of the Self, and the better the application of the competences.

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In sum, the acquisition and development of the ICs are a long, complex, and dynamic process, which spans one’s entire lifetime. During the development of every human being, as a result of both positive and negative factors, a person can experience periods of advancement as well as periods of stagnation and regression.10

10

Thus I agree with Fantini (2005) that most scales risk measuring performance rather than actual competence.

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Due to their complex and multidimensional nature (it is not enough to possess language skills or simply to come into contact with another culture), the acquisition of ICs and their development resembles a spiral with many facets (Cf. also Deardorff, 2008); it is a continuous process which shifts between the personal and interpersonal realms and has both internal and external consequences (Cf. Deardorff, 2009, p. 480). Despite the fact that the most important phase of their acquisition occurs during infancy, ICs can also be acquired in subsequent years in formal contexts (especially in school), semi-formal contexts (special courses, such as meditation courses, empathy labs, and conflict management courses), and informal contexts (from family members, caregivers, peers, relations with foreigners). The rapport with educators and interlocutors with more advanced ICs is also paramount (due to the importance of models, examples, and the support provided by subjects with similar experiences). Especially in the event of dysfunction or stagnation, basic professional development courses are not enough; in these cases it is necessary to seek the support of counselling or psychotherapy.

Concluding Remarks “Mutual understanding and IC are more important than ever today because through them we can address some of the most virulent problems of contemporary societies” (Barrett, et al., 2014, p. 4). In the book, Developing intercultural competence thorough education, published on demand by the Council of Europe, M. Barrett and other scholars underline the necessity and urgency of intercultural education and competence in order to face socioeconomic and political inequalities, prejudice, discrimination (which in Europe are also advocated by certain politicians) and linguistic and cultural misunderstandings between people from different cultural backgrounds. According to the document, ICs can best be promoted through intercultural education and have the ultimate aim of helping citizens to live together in culturally and ethnically diverse societies by fostering mutual understanding and effective modes of communication. In the face of the increasing mobility of humans (real and virtual) and cultural complexity, not only in Europe, but throughout the world, it is necessary to be prepared to act to rapid and profound changes by being able to recognize opportunities and risks. Thus, the methodologies of the intercultural approach, as developed in Europe, appear to be the best solution in the context of education and professional development. However, considering the immense confusion and inconsistency in terms

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and semantics (today, in all parts of the world, the concepts of multicultural education and intercultural education are confused with one another, and some authors are reintroducing the term cosmopolitan education, cf. Grant and Portera, 2010), there is a necessity and an urgency to clarify the terminology used by different scholars in different disciplines and in different parts of the world. With respect to education and intercultural competences, in our era of globalization and global interdependence, regardless of the adjectives we use, there is a desperate need at a local and global level for specific competences that better enable citizens to manage their ever-changing realities. There remains a need for methodologically appropriate research on ICs, and a necessity for educational theories and practices that help citizens recognize, value and manage any form of diversity and cultural change.

References Adler, M., & Ziglio E. (Eds.). (1996). Gazing into the oracle: The applications of the Delphi Method to public policy. London: Jessica Kingsley Ltd. Albertini, G. (2000). Quality of life of people with developmental disabilities in Italy. In D. Kenneth, K. Schalock & R. L. Schalock (Eds.), Cross-cultural perspectives on quality of life (pp. 311-314). Washington D. C.: American Association on Mental Retardation. Barrett, M. (Ed.). (2013). Interculturalism and multiculturalism: Similarities and differences. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Barrett, M. (Ed.). (2014). Interculturalism and multiculturalism: Similarities and differences. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Bauman, Z. (1977). Postmodernity and its discontents. New York: New York University Press. Bradford, L., Allen, M., & Beisser, K. R. . (2000). Meta-analysis of intercultural communication competence research. World Communication, 29(1), 28-51. Byram, M. (2003). On being ‘bicultural’ and ‘intercultural’. In G. Alred, M. Byram, & M. Fleming (Eds.), Intercultural experience and education, (pp. 123-146). Tonowanda, NY: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M., Nichols, A., & Stevens, D. (2001). Developing intercultural competence in practice. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Chang S. (1985). The great Tao. San Francisco: Tao Longevity. Deardorff, D. K. (2008). Intercultural competence: The key competence in the 21'' century? Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung.

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—. (2009). Synthesizing conceptualizations of intercultural competence. In D. K. Deardorff (Ed.), The sage handbook of intercultural competence (pp. 264 270). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Derrida, J. (1995). Is There a philosophical language? In E. Weber (Ed.), Points… Interviews 1974-1994. (pp. 255-287). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity, youth and crisis, New York: Norton & Company. Fantini, A. (2005). School for international training. Vermont, USA: Brattleboro. —. (2007). Exploring and assessing intercultural competence. Research report, development. St. Louis: Washington University of St. Louis Press. Flood, G. (1996). An introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardner, H. (1993). Multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books. Grant, C. A., & Portera, A. (Eds.). (2011). Intercultural and multicultural education: Enhancing global interconnectedness. New York: Routledge. Gundara, J. S. (2000). Interculturalism, education and inclusion. London: Paul Chapman. Hajek, C., & Giles, H. (2003). New directions in intercultural communication competence. In J. O. Greene & B. R. Burleson (Eds.), Handbook of communication and social interaction skills (pp. 59-70). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big-Five Trait Taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (Vol. 2, pp. 102–138). New York: Guilford Press. Tzu, L. (1963). Tao Te Ching. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books. Martin, J. N., Hammer, M. R., & L. Bradford. (1994). The influence of cultural and situational contexts on Hispanic and non-Hispanic communication competence behaviors. Communication Quarterly, 42(2), 160–179. McGee Banks, C. A. (2011). Becoming American: Intercultural education and European immigrants. In C. A. Grant & A. Portera (Eds.), Intercultural and multicultural education, enhancing global interconnectedness (pp. 124-137). New York: Routledge. Milhouse, V. H. (1993). The applicability of interpersonal communication competence to the intercultural communication context. In R. L.

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Wiseman & J. Koester (Eds.), Intercultural communication competence (pp. 86-94). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Nussbaum, M. (2010). Not for profit. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Pascal, B. (1669). Pensées. In P. Sellier (Ed.), Pensées. Paris: Bords. Petrides, K. V. (2009). Technical manual for the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaires (TEIQue). London: London Psychometric Laboratory. Portera, A. (1995). Interkulturelle Identitäten. Faktoren der Identitätsbildung jugendlicher italienischer Herkunft in Südbaden und Süditalien. Wien: Böhlau. —. (1997). Ansätze eines personenzentrierten Modells der menschlichen Gründbedürfnisse. Gwg Zeitschrift, 97(2), 75-88. —. (1998). Multiculture, identity, educational need and possibilities of (intercultural) intervention. European Journal of Intercultural Studies, 9(2), 209-218. —. (1999). Beitrag zur Ätiologie von psychischen Verhaltensauffälligkeiten und Störungen aus personenzentrierter Sicht. Gesprächspsychotherapie und Personenzentrierte Beratung, 99(1), 37-44. —. (2008). Tesori sommersi. Emigrazione, identità, bisogni educative interculturali. (4th ed.) Milan: Franco Angeli. —. (2010). Personzentrierte interkulturelle Beratung und Therapie. Gesprächspsychotherapie und personzentrierte Beratung, 41(2), 28389. —. (2011). Multicultural and intercultural education in Europe. In C. A. Grant & A. Portera (Eds.), Intercultural and multicultural education: Enhancing global interconnectedness (pp. 12-32). New York: Routledge. —. (2013). Manuale di pedagogia interculturale. Bari: Laterza. Portera, A. (Ed.). (20013a), Competenze interculturali. Milan: Franco Angeli. Portera, A. (2014). Intercultural counselling and education in the global world. Intercultural Education, 25(2), 75-76. Prechtl, E., & Lund, A. D. (2007). Intercultural competence and assessment: Perspectives from the INCA project. In H. Kotthoff & H. Spencer-Oatey (Eds.), Handbook of inter-cultural communication, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Soros, G. (1988). The crisis of global capitalism. New York: Perseus Books.

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Suarez-Orozco, M. M., & Qin-Hilliard, D. B. (2004). Globalization culture and education in the new millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press. UNESCO. (2005). Learning: The treasure within. Report to UNESCO of the international commission on education for the twenty-first century. Paris: UNESCO.

CHAPTER THREE COMPETENCES FOR DEMOCRATIC CULTURE AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE MARTYN BARRETT

This chapter provides an introduction to a new project that is currently being conducted by the Council of Europe (CoE).1 The project is called Competences for Democratic Culture (CDC) and its aim is to develop a new European framework of reference of the competences which young people need to acquire if they are to function in their future lives as effective democratic citizens.2 The term ‘democratic culture’ rather than ‘democracy’ is used in the title of the project in order to emphasise the fact that a properly functioning democracy depends not only on the operation of democratic institutions but also on citizens adhering to a culture of democracy – in other words, citizens adopting democratic values, attitudes, and practices. Among other things, this includes a commitment to the public sphere, a willingness to express opinions, a willingness to listen to the opinions of 1

The CoE is an intergovernmental organisation. It was founded in 1949 in the aftermath of World War II and has its headquarters in Strasbourg, France. The CoE currently has 47 member states, and it is an entirely separate organisation from the European Union. The overriding intention behind the foundation of the CoE was to ensure that, after World War II, totalitarianism could never arise again in Europe, and its aims are to promote and protect human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. The most well-known body of the CoE is the European Court of Human Rights, which is responsible for legal judgements concerning the application of the European Convention on Human Rights. For further information about the CoE, see http://www.coe.int/en 2 The term ‘citizen’ is used throughout this chapter to denote all individuals who are affected by democratic decision-making and who can engage with democratic processes and institutions (rather than to denote only those who hold legal citizenship of a particular state). For a more extended discussion of the concept of citizen, see Barrett & Zani (2015).

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others, a commitment to decisions being made by majorities, a conviction that conflicts must be resolved peacefully, respect for diversity of world views, lifestyles and opinions, respect for the human rights of others, a commitment to the protection of minorities and their rights, and a willingness to engage in dialogue across cultural divides. The CDC project treats intercultural dialogue as vital for democratic culture in culturally diverse societies. This is because intercultural dialogue is essential for respectful democratic deliberation, discussion, and debate between citizens within such societies. Moreover, it is only through such dialogue that citizens with minority cultural affiliations can explain their perspectives, aspirations, concerns, and needs to politicians and policymakers who are likely to have other cultural affiliations. In other words, intercultural dialogue is essential in culturally diverse societies for enabling all citizens to contribute to democratic processes on an equal footing, and for safeguarding the welfare and rights of all its members, including those of cultural minorities.3 The materials that are being developed by the CDC project are aimed at national education ministries, schools and universities, teachers, teacher educators, and curriculum developers. The goal is to assist all of these various actors in the education sector to prepare children and young people to become active democratic citizens. The education ministries of European states form a particularly important audience for the outputs from the project. On completion of the work, the framework will be presented to the education ministries of all 47 member states of the CoE. It will be offered as a set of non-binding recommendations and guidelines, and the member states will then be able to adapt it for use in their own education systems, at all levels of education, as they see fit. The education ministries of the member states have been kept informed about the project at all stages, have been inputting ideas to the project throughout its development, and have expressed strong support for the project at sessions of the CoE’s Steering Committee for Educational Policy and Practice (which consists of policymakers from the education ministries of all the member states). The project is taking place in four phases. Phase one is devoted to developing a new conceptual model of the competences that citizens require to participate effectively in democratic culture and intercultural dialogue. In phase two, the project is developing descriptors for each of the competences specified in the model. These descriptors are being 3 See Council of Europe (2008) and Barrett (2013) for more detailed analyses of the importance of intercultural dialogue in democratic societies.

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formulated using the language of learning outcomes, and they are being assigned to levels of education (i.e., preschool, lower primary, upper primary, lower secondary, upper secondary, and higher education). Thus, the project is allocating the responsibility for fostering and nurturing these competences to the entire range of formal education, in an age-appropriate manner. In phase three, the project will ascertain whether the descriptors can be scaled reliably and assigned to different levels of proficiency (e.g., basic, intermediate, advanced). The final phase of the project will then be devoted to writing supporting documentation to explain how the competence model and the descriptors can be used to assist curriculum design, the development of instructional programmes and methods, and the development of new forms of assessment. At the time of writing, the project has completed phase one of the work, and is midway through phase two. For this reason, the current chapter focuses primarily on the competence model that has been developed.

The Concept of Competence Employed by the Model The term ‘competence’ can be used in many ways, including its casual everyday use as a synonym for ‘ability’, its more technical use in vocational education and training, and its use to denote the ability to meet complex demands within a given context (Barrett et al., 2013). For the purposes of the CDC project, ‘competence’ is defined as “the ability to mobilise and deploy relevant values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and/or understanding in order to respond appropriately and effectively to the demands, challenges, and opportunities that are presented by a given type of context.” Democratic situations are one such type of context. Thus, democratic competence is the ability to mobilise and deploy relevant psychological resources (i.e., values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and/or understanding) in order to respond appropriately and effectively to the demands, challenges, and opportunities presented by democratic situations. Likewise, intercultural competence is the ability to mobilise and deploy relevant psychological resources in order to respond appropriately and effectively to the demands, challenges, and opportunities presented by intercultural situations. Competence is construed by the CDC framework as a dynamic process. It involves the selection, activation, organisation, and coordination of relevant psychological resources, and these resources are then applied through behaviour in such a way that the individual adapts appropriately and effectively to a given situation (cf. Candelier et al., 2012; Jonnaert et

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al., 2006; Rychen & Salganik, 2003). This adaptation involves the constant monitoring of the results of behaviour and of the situation, and the adjustment and modification of behaviour (which may entail the mobilisation of further psychological resources) if this is required to meet the changing needs and demands of the situation. Hence, a competent individual mobilises and deploys psychological resources in a dynamic manner according to situational contingencies. In addition to this global and holistic use of the term ‘competence’, the term ‘competences’ (in the plural) is used in the CDC framework to refer to the specific individual resources (i.e., the specific values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and understanding) that are mobilised and deployed in the production of competent behaviour. Hence, competence consists of the selection, activation, and organisation of competences and the application of these competences in a coordinated, adaptive, and dynamic manner to concrete situations. In real-life situations, competences are rarely mobilised and used individually. Instead, competent behaviour invariably involves the activation and application of an entire cluster of competences. Depending on the situation, and the specific demands, challenges, and opportunities which that situation presents, and the specific needs and goals of the individual within that situation, different subsets of competences will be activated and deployed. A couple of examples will help to make this conceptualisation clearer. In the case of intercultural dialogue, this initially requires an attitude of openness towards another person who is perceived to have cultural affiliations that differ from one’s own. It may also require the ability to overcome anxieties or insecurities about meeting and interacting with someone with whom one feels one has little in common. However, once the dialogue commences, close listening skills and linguistic and communicative skills need to be mobilised and deployed to ensure that miscommunications do not occur. Empathy is also likely to be required, along with analytical thinking skills, to facilitate comprehension of the other person’s point of view. It may emerge during the course of the dialogue that there are irreconcilable differences in points of view between the self and the other. If this is the case, then tolerance of ambiguity will need to be deployed and the lack of a clear-cut resolution accepted. Hence, intercultural dialogue requires the mobilisation, orchestration, and sensitive application of a wide range of competences. A second example is provided by participation in political debate. When debating political ideas, communications need to be adapted to both the medium of expression (e.g., speech, writing, etc.) and the intended

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audience. In addition, in cases where communications involve people who are perceived to have different cultural affiliations from oneself, one needs to have an understanding of cultural appropriateness. Political debate also requires knowledge and understanding of politics, and the ability to critique the views of others and to evaluate the arguments which they deploy during the course of the debate. Political debate therefore requires linguistic and communicative skills, knowledge, and understanding of cultural norms, knowledge and understanding of politics, analytical and critical thinking skills, and the ability to adapt one’s arguments appropriately as the debate proceeds. Hence, once again, several competences need to be mobilised, coordinated, and deployed appropriately and sensitively according to the specific contingencies that arise as the debate proceeds.

The Identification of Specific Competences for Inclusion in the Model An important feature of the CDC model is that it was not designed from scratch; instead, it was grounded in an analysis of existing conceptual schemes of democratic and intercultural competence. There are many competence schemes that have been formulated in the past by, for example, the CoE itself, other international bodies (e.g., UNESCO, OECD, European Parliament, etc.), national governments and ministries of education, and of course academic researchers. This proliferation of diverse models presents a dilemma to educational planners and policymakers who wish to find an authoritative model upon which to base their own work. The CDC project is an attempt to provide an authoritative account which captures, synthesises, and builds upon the optimal features of existing competence schemes. The working method which was used to construct the model began with an audit of existing schemes of democratic competence and intercultural competence. For the purposes of the audit (and consistent with the definition of the term ‘competence’ that was employed), democratic and intercultural competence schemes were defined as being those schemes that identify and describe relevant sets of values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and forms of understanding which need to be mobilised and deployed in order to respond appropriately and effectively to the demands, challenges, and opportunities presented by democratic and intercultural situations, respectively.

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The audit identified and collated a total number of 101 competence schemes that met this definition.4 As had been anticipated, there were widespread mismatches across these various schemes in terms of the number of competences which they contain, the level of generality at which these competences are described, the particular competences which they include, and the ways in which the competences are grouped and classified. In the next step of the analysis, the 101 schemes were decomposed to identify all the individual competences which they contained, and these competences were then grouped into cognate sets. This led to the identification of 55 possible competences related to democratic citizenship and intercultural dialogue across the 101 schemes. Some competences were present across a relatively large number of schemes, whereas other competences were specific to just one or a very small number of schemes. To assist in reducing this list of 55 possible competences to a more manageable and practical length, and to systematise the contents of the list, a set of principled criteria was articulated for including a competence in the model. It was decided that, for inclusion in the model, competences needed to be: (i) conceptually clear; (ii) formulated at a general level rather than at a specific level; (iii) conceptually distinct from other competences; (iv) not idiosyncratic to just one or a very few of the audited competence schemes; (v) not generic competences (such as literacy, numeracy, or digital competence); and (vi) not the behaviours through which competence is exhibited. Applying these criteria to the set of 55 possible competences led to the identification of 20 competences for inclusion in the CDC model.

The Contents of the CDC Model The 20 competences included in the model fall into four broad categories: values, attitudes, skills, and knowledge and critical understanding. Values are general beliefs that individuals hold about the desirable goals that should be striven for in life. They serve as guiding principles for deciding how to act, and have a normative prescriptive quality about what ought to be done or thought across many different situations. Values offer standards or criteria for: evaluating actions, both one’s own and those of other people; justifying opinions, attitudes and behaviours; deciding between alternatives; planning behaviour; and attempting to influence 4

A full list of the 101 competence schemes can be obtained from the CDC project website at www.coe.int/competences

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others (Schwartz, 1992, 2006). Three sets of values were identified as being necessary for democratic citizenship and intercultural dialogue: x Valuing human dignity and human rights; x Valuing cultural diversity; x Valuing democracy, justice, fairness, equality, and the rule of law. By contrast, an attitude may be defined as the overall mental orientation which an individual adopts towards someone or something (e.g., a person, a group, an institution, an issue, an event, a symbol, etc.). Attitudes usually consist of four components, namely a belief or opinion about the object of the attitude, an emotion or feeling towards the object, an evaluation (either positive or negative) of the object, and a tendency to behave in a particular way towards that object (Bohner & Dickel, 2011; Hogg & Vaughan, 2013). Six attitudes were identified as being necessary for democratic citizenship and intercultural dialogue: x Openness to cultural otherness and to other beliefs, world views, and practices; x Respect for other people, beliefs, world views, and practices; x Civic-mindedness; x Responsibility; x Self-efficacy; x Tolerance of ambiguity. A skill can be defined as the capacity for carrying out complex, wellorganised patterns of either thinking or behaviour in an adaptive manner in order to achieve a particular end or goal (Reber, 1985). Eight sets of skills were identified as being necessary for democratic citizenship and intercultural dialogue: x x x x x x x x

Autonomous learning skills; Analytical and critical thinking skills; Skills of listening and observing; Empathy; Flexibility and adaptability; Linguistic, communicative, and plurilingual skills; Cooperation skills; Conflict-resolution skills.

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Finally, knowledge can be defined as the body of information that is possessed by a person, and understanding as the comprehension and appreciation of meanings (Reber, 1985). The CDC project used the term ‘critical understanding’ to emphasise the need for the comprehension and appreciation of meanings in the context of democratic citizenship and intercultural dialogue to involve active reflection on and critical evaluation of that which is being understood and interpreted (as opposed to automatic, habitual, and unreflective interpretation). Three main forms of knowledge and critical understanding were identified as being necessary for democratic citizenship and intercultural dialogue: x Knowledge and critical understanding of the self; x Knowledge and critical understanding of language and communication; x Knowledge and critical understanding of the world (including politics, law, human rights, culture, cultures, religions, history, media, economies, the environment, and sustainability). The contents of the CDC model are described in further detail in Box 1. These descriptions are short summaries of much longer descriptions that are provided in the primary document that describes the CDC model in full. Readers who are interested in obtaining a copy of the full description of the model should visit the CDC project website at www.coe.int/ competences.

Box 1: Brief descriptions of the competences which enable an individual to participate effectively and appropriately in a culture of democracy and in intercultural dialogue ™ Values x Valuing human dignity and human rights This value is based on the general belief that every human being is of equal worth, has equal dignity, is entitled to equal respect, and is entitled to exactly the same set of human rights, and ought to be treated accordingly. x Valuing cultural diversity This value is based on the general belief that other cultural affiliations; cultural variability and diversity; and pluralism of perspectives, views, and practices ought to be positively regarded, appreciated, and cherished. x Valuing democracy, justice, fairness, equality, and the rule of law This set of values is based on the general belief that societies ought to

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operate and be governed through democratic processes which respect the principles of justice, fairness, equality, and the rule of law. ™ Attitudes x Openness to cultural otherness and to other beliefs, world views, and practices Openness is an attitude towards people who are perceived to have different cultural affiliations from oneself or towards beliefs, world views, and practices which differ from one’s own. It involves sensitivity towards, curiosity about, and willingness to engage with other people and other perspectives on the world. x Respect for other people, beliefs, world views, and practices Respect consists of positive regard and esteem for someone or something based on the judgement that they have intrinsic importance, worth, or value. Having respect for other people who are perceived to have different cultural affiliations or different beliefs, opinions, or practices from one’s own is vital for effective intercultural dialogue and a culture of democracy. x Civic-mindedness Civic-mindedness is an attitude towards a social group to which one belongs that is larger than one’s immediate circle of family and friends. It involves a sense of belonging to that larger group, an awareness of other people in the group, an awareness of the effects of one’s actions on those people, solidarity with the other members of the group, and a sense of civic duty towards the group. x Responsibility Responsibility is an attitude towards one’s own actions. It involves being reflective about one’s actions, forming intentions about how to act in a morally appropriate way, conscientiously performing those actions, and holding oneself accountable for the outcomes of those actions. x Self-efficacy Self-efficacy is an attitude towards the self. It involves a positive belief in one’s own ability to undertake the actions that are required to achieve particular goals, and confidence that one can understand issues, select appropriate methods for accomplishing tasks, navigate obstacles successfully, and make a difference in the world. x Tolerance of ambiguity Tolerance of ambiguity is an attitude towards situations which are uncertain and subject to multiple conflicting interpretations. It involves evaluating these kinds of situations positively and dealing with them constructively.

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™ Skills x Autonomous learning skills Autonomous learning skills are the skills required to pursue, organise, and evaluate one’s own learning in accordance with one’s own needs, in a self-directed manner, without being prompted by others. x Analytical and critical thinking skills Analytical and critical thinking skills are the skills required to analyse, evaluate, and make judgements about materials of any kind (e.g., texts, arguments, interpretations, issues, events, experiences, etc.) in a systematic and logical manner. x Skills of listening and observing Skills of listening and observing are the skills required to notice and understand what is being said and how it is being said, and to notice and understand other people’s non-verbal behaviour. x Empathy Empathy is the set of skills required to understand and relate to other people’s thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, and to see the world from other people’s perspectives. x Flexibility and adaptability Flexibility and adaptability are the skills required to adjust and regulate one’s thoughts, feelings or behaviours so that one can respond effectively and appropriately to new contexts and situations. x Linguistic, communicative, and plurilingual skills Linguistic, communicative, and plurilingual skills are the skills required to communicate effectively and appropriately with people who speak the same or another language, and to act as a mediator between speakers of different languages. x Cooperation skills Cooperation skills are the skills required to participate successfully with others in shared activities, tasks, and ventures and to encourage others to cooperate so that group goals may be achieved. x Conflict-resolution skills Conflict-resolution skills are the skills required to address, manage, and resolve conflicts in a peaceful way by guiding conflicting parties towards optimal solutions that are acceptable to all parties. ™ Knowledge and critical understanding x Knowledge and critical understanding of the self This includes knowledge and critical understanding of one’s own thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and motivations, and of one’s own cultural affiliations and perspective on the world.

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x Knowledge and critical understanding of language and communication This includes knowledge and critical understanding of the socially appropriate verbal and non-verbal communicative conventions that operate in the language(s) which one speaks, of the effects that different communication styles can have on other people, and of how every language expresses culturally shared meanings in a unique way. x Knowledge and critical understanding of the world This includes a large and complex body of knowledge and critical understanding in a variety of areas including politics, law, human rights, culture, cultures, religions, history, media, economies, the environment, and sustainability.

The Presence of Values in the Model Readers who are familiar with existing competence schemes may be surprised by the appearance of values as a distinct type of competence in the CDC model. However, it is important to bear in mind that the term ‘competence’ is not being used here in its casual everyday sense as a synonym of ‘ability’, but in a more technical sense to refer to the psychological resources (such as attitudes, skills, and knowledge) which need to be mobilised and deployed to meet the demands and challenges of democratic and intercultural situations. Values are included in the model for two reasons. First, values do in fact appear (although often only implicitly) in many of the previous competence schemes which were audited. Thus, their omission from the current model would have meant that the model was only partially capturing the contents of those previous schemes. Values are not always obvious in previous schemes because they are usually included under the heading of attitudes (rather than under their own distinct heading). By contrast, the current model draws a clear conceptual distinction between values and attitudes, with only the former being characterised by their normative prescriptive quality. Second, values are essential in the context of conceptualising the competences which enable participation in democratic culture. This is because without a specification of the particular values that underpin these competences, they would not be democratic competences but would instead be more general political competences which could be used in the service of many other kinds of political order, including anti-democratic orders. For example, one could be a responsible, self-efficacious, and

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politically well-informed citizen within a totalitarian dictatorship if a different set of values were to be employed as the foundation for one’s judgements, decisions, and actions. Thus, the values which the current model contains lie at the very heart of democratic competence, and are essential for the characterisation of that competence.

A Global Citizenship Perspective The CDC model may be viewed as offering a global citizenship perspective on democratic and intercultural competence. This is due to the values that have been incorporated into the model. There are two sets of values that are especially pertinent here. First, the model places the valuing of human dignity and human rights at the very heart of the competence model. In other words, the model postulates that a truly competent democratic citizen is someone who believes that every individual human being (irrespective of their specific cultural affiliations and their specific location within the world) is of equal worth, has equal dignity, is entitled to equal respect, is entitled to exactly the same set of human rights, and ought to be treated accordingly. Second, the model also places the valuing of cultural diversity right at the heart of the model. In other words, the model postulates that a truly competent democratic citizen is someone who believes that other cultural affiliations; cultural variability and diversity; and pluralism of perspectives, views, and practices ought to be positively regarded, appreciated, and cherished. The claim here is that, in the absence of these two values, an individual cannot be viewed as being a competent democratic citizen. Insofar as a global or cosmopolitan citizenship perspective emphasises the need for human beings to view themselves as citizens of a world community based on common human values and human dignity who respect other people’s cultural affiliations (Appiah, 2008; Israel, 2012; Osler & Starkey 2005), then the CDC framework represents an inherently global or cosmopolitan citizenship perspective.

The Empowerment of Learners One of the key features of the CDC project is its underlying goal to offer national education systems a framework that can be used to empower young people. In particular, the model enables educational systems to empower young people as autonomous social agents who are capable of choosing and pursuing their own goals in life, but always within the

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framework that is provided by democratic institutions and respect for human rights. Several competences in the model are especially pertinent to this goal. For example, if young people develop an attitude of openness towards other cultures, beliefs, world views, and practices, they will be willing to explore and investigate other perspectives and modes of life that lie beyond the traditional ones with which they have grown up, expanding the range of their experiences and their horizons. If they acquire autonomous learning skills, they will be able to learn independently about these new perspectives and modes of life and not be dependent solely upon information transmitted to them by others in their immediate environment. And if they acquire analytical and critical thinking skills, they will be able to subject alternative perspectives and modes of life, and new information and ideas, to detailed scrutiny and will be able to make their own evaluative judgements about whether or not they are acceptable or desirable. In addition, if young people learn to value human dignity and human rights, and cultural diversity and democracy, then these values will be used as the foundation for all of their choices and actions, and they will willingly pursue their lives in a manner that respects the dignity and human rights of other people and the principles of democracy. Thus, a key goal of the CDC project is to provide national educational systems with a framework which can be used to empower young people and equip them with the competences which they need to live their future lives as autonomous social agents, but always within the framework provided by human rights and democratic processes.

The Development of Descriptors for the CDC Framework At the time of writing, in addition to developing the model of competences, the CDC project has begun to develop the descriptors for all 20 competences in the model. In other words, the second phase of the project is currently under way. A descriptor is a short statement or description of something that a person is able to do if they have mastered a particular competence. The CDC descriptors are being formulated using the language of learning outcomes (Kennedy, Hyland, & Ryan, 2006): they start with a single action verb followed by the object of that verb, and they express a concrete outcome which is both observable and assessable. Some examples of the descriptors that have been formulated by the project are shown in Box 2. In total, 990 descriptors have been constructed covering all 20 competences, and these have been taken forward into a teacher survey for

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validation, rating, and assignment to levels of education (ranging from preschool through to higher education). The teacher ratings will subsequently be used to select a subset of the most suitable descriptors to go forward into the third phase of the project (in which an attempt will be made to assign the descriptors to levels of proficiency).

Box 2: Examples of the descriptors that have been developed by the CDC project ™ Openness x Uses opportunities to meet new people x Expresses interest in working with people from different cultural backgrounds ™ Civic-mindedness x Takes action to stay informed about civic issues x Collaborates with other people for common interest causes ™ Knowledge and critical understanding of culture and cultures x Can explain the dangers of generalising from individual behaviours to an entire culture x Can describe several different cultures, especially the values, customs, and practices which are common in those cultures

Some Reflections on the CDC Project The CDC project is extremely challenging and ambitious, and it does not pretend to be a panacea for the many and varied problems which currently afflict culturally diverse democratic societies. Even if all citizens were to be equipped with the most highly developed set of competences, these competences alone would not guarantee democratic culture and effective intercultural dialogue. This is for two reasons. First, democratic culture and intercultural dialogue depend not only on citizens’ competences but also on the nature of the institutional structures which are available within any given society. This is because institutional structures and procedures, and the opportunities for active engagement which they make available or deny to citizens, serve as significant inhibitors or enablers of the democratic and intercultural actions which citizens can undertake. To give a simple example, if a country denies

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voting rights to first-generation migrants prior to their naturalisation, then no matter how competent such a migrant might be, they will be unable to exercise that competence in elections unless they have been naturalised. Another example occurs when there are no or few institutional consultative channels or bodies through which citizens can communicate their views to politicians or policymakers. Under such circumstances, citizens will have no choice but to pursue alternative forms of democratic action in order to make their voices heard. A third example is when there are no institutional arrangements to support and encourage intercultural dialogue. In such circumstances, citizens are less likely to engage in such dialogue. However, if local or municipal authorities establish places and spaces in which dialogue can occur (e.g., cultural and social centres, youth clubs, education centres, other leisure facilities, or virtual spaces) and promote and encourage the use of these facilities, then citizens will be more likely to engage in intercultural dialogue. In other words, the exercise of competences is not solely dependent on whether or not they have been acquired, but also on the prevailing institutional arrangements which, depending on their configuration, can inhibit, constrain, channel, or enable the ways in which citizens exercise their competences. Second, democratic culture and intercultural dialogue also depend on the extent to which measures are taken to deal with systemic disadvantage, differentials in the allocation of resources within societies, and the exclusion of disadvantaged groups from positions of privilege and power. All of these factors can effectively disempower many people from participating in democratic processes irrespective of their levels of competence, by limiting their access to information and their access to the time or the financial resources which are needed to participate. Socioeconomic inequalities are often compounded by disparities of power and institutional biases which lead to democratic and intercultural settings being dominated by those who occupy positions of privilege. In other words, it is not sufficient only to use the educational system to equip young people with the competences specified by the CDC model. It is also necessary to adopt measures to tackle inequalities and structural disadvantages so that members of disadvantaged groups experience genuine equality of condition. Consequently, the CDC framework proposes that while the competences that are described in the conceptual model are necessary for participation in democratic culture and intercultural dialogue, they are not sufficient to ensure such participation. While the CDC model describes the competences which young people need to acquire and which therefore should be targeted by the educational system, there is an equally

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imperative need for action on institutional structures, inequalities, and structural disadvantages. Despite these caveats, however, equipping young people with these competences through the educational system is a crucial step which must be taken to ensure the future health of our culturally diverse democratic societies and the empowerment and flourishing of all young people who live within them.

Acknowledgements The CDC project is being conducted by Martyn Barrett, Luisa Black, Michael Byram, Jaroslav Faltyn, Claudia Lenz, Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard, Ketevan Natriashvili, Milica Popoviü, Câlin Rus, Salvador Sala, Hilligje van’t Land, Natalia Voskresenskaya, and Pavel Zgaga, with support from Sjur Bergan and Christopher Reynolds from the Education Department of the Council of Europe. My very sincere thanks to all members of the working group for their contributions to the ideas outlined in this chapter.

References Appiah, K. A. (2008). Education for global citizenship. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 107(1), 83-99. Barrett, M. (Ed.) (2013). Interculturalism and multiculturalism: Similarities and differences. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Barrett, M., Byram, M., Lázár, I., Mompoint-Gaillard, P., & Philippou, S. (2013). Developing Intercultural Competence through Education. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/3150166/Developing_Intercultural_Compet ence_through_Education Barrett, M. & Zani, B. (Eds.) (2015). Political and civic engagement: Multidisciplinary eerspectives. London: Routledge. Bohner, G. & Dickel, N. (2011). Attitudes and attitude change. Annual Review of Psychology 62, 391-417. Candelier, M., Camilleri-Grima, A., Castellotti, V., de Pietro, J.-F., LĘrincz, I., Meißner, F. J., Noguerol, A., & Schröder-Sura, A. (2012). FREPA – A framework of reference for pluralistic approaches: Competences and resources. Strasbourg: European Centre for Modern Languages/Council of Europe. Council of Europe (2008). White paper on intercultural dialogue: “Living together as equals in dignity.” Strasbourg: Committee of Ministers, Council of Europe. Retrieved from

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http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/intercultural/source/white%20paper_final_rev ised_en.pdf Hogg, M. A. & Vaughan, G. M. (2013). Social psychology (7th ed.). Harlow: Pearson Education. Israel, R. C. (2012). What does it mean to be a global citizen? Kosmos: Journal for Global Transformation, Spring/Summer 2012. Retrieved from http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/what-does-it-mean-to-be-aglobal-citizen/ Jonnaert, P., Barrette, J., Masciotra, D., Yaya, M., & Morel (2006). Revisiting the concept of competence as an organizing principle for programs of study: From competence to competent action. Geneva: International Bureau of Education, IBE/UNESCO. Retrieved from http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/COPs/Pages_docum ents/Competencies/ORE_English.pdf Kennedy, D., Hyland, A., & Ryan, N. (2007). Writing and using learning outcomes: A practical guide. In E. Froment, J. Kohler, L. Purser, & L. Wilson (Eds.), EUA Bologna handbook – Making Bologna work, Article C 3.4-1. Berlin: Raabe Verlag. Retrieved from http://www.tcd.ie/teaching-learning/academic-development/assets/pdf/ Kennedy_Writing_and_Using_Learning_Outcomes.pdf Osler, A. & Starkey, H. (2005). Changing citizenship: Democracy and inclusion in education. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Reber, A. S. (1985). The Penguin dictionary of psychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rychen, D. S. & Salganik, L. H. (Eds.). Key competencies for a successful life and a well-functioning society. Göttingen: Hogrefe & Huber. Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (vol. 25, pp. 1-65). New York: Academic Press. —. (2006). Les valeurs de base de la personne: Théorie, mesures et applications. Revue Française de Sociologie, 47(4), 929-968.

CHAPTER FOUR INTERCULTURAL MEDIATORS AS RELATIONAL FACILITATORS IN A PLURAL SOCIETY MARCO CATARCI

Multicultural society and intercultural perspective The multicultural dimension is a feature inherent to current societies, not only as a result of migration flows, but also because of the historical presence of cultural and linguistic minorities and the many connections with other cultures typical of the contemporary age. From this perspective, the notion of ‘multicultural society’ has been widely adopted to designate, in a descriptive sense, a situation in which subjects from different cultural backgrounds live in the same environment (Banks, 2008, p. 393). In this context, the need for an ‘intercultural perspective’ arises. In particular there is a need for an intentional educational project aimed at promoting effective relationships between individuals from different cultural backgrounds (Gundara, 2003, p. 5). Since their establishment in the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of ‘multiculturalism’, first in Canada and in Australia, then in the United States, policies to address the issue of the management of cultural differences within national borders have been implemented in the European context as a result of the increase in migration flows to countries such as France, Germany, the UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and later also in southern European countries such as Italy, Spain, and Greece. Thus, the perspective of ‘interculturalism’ represents the political and educational response to the challenges of multicultural society: the prefix ‘inter’ in the term ‘intercultural’ highlights the intention of programmes, policies, and practices to promote specifically processes of interaction among people of different cultural backgrounds (Gundara, 2003, p. 5; Allemann-Ghionda, 2009, p. 135; Portera, 2011, pp. 12–32).

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In particular, an intercultural approach in education aims to change the traditional perceptions and cognitive schemes generally used to understand others and the world, by means of an effective effort to promote dialogue and understanding on behalf of all and at all levels of the process of learning (curricula, teaching, disciplines, relationships, etc.), and therefore views diversity (of cultural origin, gender, social class, history, etc.) as a fundamental educational paradigm. In this sense, Gundara claims that a perspective of interculturalism also requires that educational inequality is addressed, that various forms of exclusion and marginalization are faced, and that policies that include the disadvantaged from all communities are developed (Gundara, 2003, p. 9). However, the spaces of intercultural effort within society must be constructed according to an intentional design which reconceptualises communication styles, the management of differences, and the overall response to cultural needs. To this end, intercultural mediation aimed at managing cultural conflicts and facilitating relationships between people of different cultures is crucial and without doubt represents a prominent intercultural strategy in multicultural society.

The Strategy of Intercultural Mediation The cultural shift in population produced by immigration flows in multicultural societies has undoubtedly affected cultural, health, and social services, which have progressively changed their characteristics according to the needs of their new users. To this end, strategies of intercultural mediation have been adopted in many contexts in order to establish connections and promote effective relationships between people from different cultures. In particular, two basic forms of mediation have been identified. The first is spontaneous and can be defined as ‘natural mediation’, which occurs sporadically in the context of the friendships or family relations of the subjects, particularly during encounters with institutions. The second is ‘professional mediation’, which is often carried out in the context of public services when third parties facilitate communication and mutual understanding between immigrant users and officials. Both have proved to be indispensable for immigrant inclusion as well as the creation of a positive social dynamic that not only prevents exclusion, but also opens the path towards respect for cultural diversity, by also proposing innovative actions that result in ‘creative’ changes to the institutions (Llevot Calvet, 2015, pp. 385–412).

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In general, an intercultural mediator (also called a ‘community interpreter’ or a ‘cultural linguist’ or ‘cross-cultural mediator’ in certain contexts) is an operator in charge of facilitating communication between individuals, families, and the community as part of measures to promote and facilitate the social inclusion of immigrants. As a mediator between immigrants and the host community, he/she promotes: the removal of cultural and language barriers; the development of a culture of openness; inclusion and the advocacy of rights; and an observance of the duties of citizenship. Moreover he/she facilitates the expression of immigrants’ needs, on the one hand, and the characteristics, resources, and constraints of the welfare system, on the other, by collaborating with the operators in public and private services, supporting them in carrying out their activities, and participating in the planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of social interventions (Tarozzi, 1998; Fiorucci, 2000; Conference of Regions and Autonomous Provinces, 2009; Luatti, 2011). From this perspective, the intercultural mediator also plays an educational role by promoting awareness, on the part of both immigrants and service operators, of the semantic and value codes associated with different cultures, by pursuing an intercultural perspective, and by urging services to adapt culturally. Although the term ‘mediation’ has specific meanings in many branches of the humanities and social sciences (e.g., in education, philosophy, psychology, theology, and civil and international law), all of these different meanings convey the idea that the actions and thoughts of human beings are expressed through a dialectic of different factors. Thus, a strategy of mediation does not suppose ‘neutrality’ or ‘freedom from conflicts’; on the contrary, it acts in a space of conflict, between, for example, different cultural, moral, political, or economic traditions or codes. Cohen-Emerique (1994) describes three different types of intervention related to the different meanings of the term ‘mediation’: -

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The first meaning concerns the action of an ‘intermediary’ in the context of communication problems. The type of mediation that takes place in this situation is aimed at the facilitation of communication and understanding between people of different cultural backgrounds. The second meaning refers to the area of ‘conflict resolution’ regarding values between immigrant families, communities, and the host society.

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-

The last meaning is connected to the process of ‘creation’, implying social transformation and the construction of new rules based on active collaboration between the different parties and ending with problem-solving.

In this sense the role of the intercultural mediator oscillates between the perspectives of ‘advocacy’ and ‘empowerment’. In the first case he/she speaks on behalf of and represents immigrant citizens who are exposed to forms of ‘institutional racism’ and difficulties in defending their rights; in the latter case he/she helps immigrants identify how best to use the information at their disposal and the most effective strategies to solve their own problems, thereby helping them to achieve the greatest possible independence (Sirna Terranova, 1996, p. 103). Today intercultural mediators are employed in many areas: education (e.g., in schools, non-formal education, etc.); healthcare (e.g., in hospitals or local health services); social support (e.g., in social services); public offices (e.g., in municipalities); immigration (e.g., in reception centres for asylum seekers, immigrants, separated children, etc.); and the judiciary (e.g., in penitentiary institutions, police stations, etc.). The main functions of intercultural mediators in these areas are the following: -

-

-

-

linguistic and cultural interpretation: decoding the cultural codes of the two partners in the relationship (usually the immigrant and the native service operator), as well as their verbal and nonverbal communication; information on the rights and duties of immigrant users of the service: promoting knowledge and appropriate use of the service in order to allow equal access to it; information for service operators on the cultural codes of immigrant users of the service and accompaniment of immigrant citizens in their access to the service; and support to the service provider through the analysis of immigrants’ needs and the identification of the most appropriate responses to these needs (Belpiede, 2002, pp. 29–31).

Traditionally, the role of intercultural mediator is played by an immigrant who has lived in the host country for long enough to acquire good knowledge of the language and the cultural codes, and who has successfully coped with his/her own experience of migration; although in

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some contexts also national and second/third-generation subjects operate as intercultural mediators. The essential requirements for an intercultural mediator are good knowledge of the two languages and cultural codes between which the mediation is carried out, and adequate communication, relationship, and conflict management skills. In this sense, flexibility, tolerance, hope, respect, and inquisitiveness are the basic intercultural principles necessary to create an operational third culture, to build the collaborative structures for this culture, and to distinguish between culturally appropriate and inappropriate behaviours (Townsend, 2002). Today, intercultural mediators are common in many European countries. A comparative analysis of the areas of intervention, access paths, and essential skills of intercultural mediators in six European countries (Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Spain, and the UK) has shown that in these contexts intercultural mediation is considered to be a strategic tool for the integration process in order to facilitate: -

communication and social cohesion between different groups (between ethnic minorities and majorities or immigrants and natives); access to public services and the citizenship rights of minorities and immigrants; and the management (identification, prevention, and resolution) of conflicts that arise in multicultural contexts (Casadei & Franceschetti, 2009, p. 99).

In some countries (e.g., Spain, France, Italy, and Germany) intercultural mediation is carried out by individuals who work alongside service operators and provide specific advice. In other countries (e.g., the UK) the device comes closely under the jurisdiction of the specific service and is inherent to its actions. In the first case mediation is the action of a third figure inserted between the two polarities (the immigrant and the native operator), while in the second case mediation is carried out by structures operating within the system (Casadei & Franceschetti, 2009, p. 101).

The Italian Case In Italy, intercultural mediators began to be needed at the end of the 1980s in order to promote better access for immigrant users to healthcare services, particularly women, by improving interaction between medical staff and patients with regard to the conceptions of personal well-being,

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discomfort, illness, sexuality, birth, death, etc. Today there are around 4,500 intercultural mediators active throughout Italy (Casadei & Franceschetti, 2009, p. 17). This section presents the results of a quantitative study that was part of a project funded by the European Fund for the Integration of ThirdCountry Nationals carried out by the NGO CIES (the Centre for Information and Development Education) and the Institutional Working Party on Intercultural Mediation (IWIM), coordinated by the Italian Ministry of the Interior, and composed of several institutional stakeholders (ministries, regions, public institutions, etc.).1 The main objective of the project was to draft useful guidelines for the establishment of a national statement on the competence of the profession of intercultural mediators (i.e., defining, at a national level, the requirements and functions of this role and the features of vocational education for the role), which was still absent in the Italian context even many years after these professionals had first been employed in the welfare system. It must be highlighted that such an issue is very significant for both the professional identity and the effectiveness of the interventions of intercultural mediators within the welfare system (IWIM, 2009, 2014). In 2011 the position ‘intercultural mediator’ was included in the national job classification of the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), under the professional class of ‘technicians of rehabilitation and social integration’, and was anchored to the category ‘social work associate professional’ in the ILO (International Labour Organization) International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO08). Moreover, in recent years three different bills on intercultural mediators (Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament, 2009a, 2009b, 2013) have been presented at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament, though none of these have been passed into law. The general objective of the study was to investigate the role of the intercultural mediator in Italy, in order to provide IWIM with useful empirical data for its task. In particular, the research questions were the following: ƒ RQ1. What are the main features of the biographical experience of intercultural mediators who are active in Italy? ƒ RQ2. What are the main features of their educational experience? 1

We acknowledge the support for this research given by Prof. Massimiliano Fiorucci, who carried out the field research along with the author, Dr. Elisabetta Melandri, President of the NGO CIES, and Dr. Maria Assunta Rosa, Vice Prefect, Ministry of the Interior.

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ƒ RQ3. What are the main features of their professional experience? ƒ RQ4. What is their view on the possible establishment of a national statement on the competence of the profession of intercultural mediators? The data were collected between April and June 2014 using a quantitative approach: an anonymous self-completed questionnaire comprising 24 questions (on the issues of biographical and educational experience, professional practice, and the possible establishment of a national statement on the competence of the profession), where 123 variables were assigned to a statistically representative sample of intercultural mediators active throughout Italy. The interviews were carried out using the CAWI (Computer Assisted Web Interviewing) method and the Limesurvey platform. As neither national lists nor data on the general population of mediators are available in Italy, sampling was based on an accredited estimation of the number of mediators active in Italy, which is estimated to be 4,500 mediators active in the country (Casadei & Franceschetti, 2009, p. 17). Setting the confidence level at 99% and a confidence interval of 5%, the stratified sample included 579 subjects. Intercultural mediators were interviewed in proportion to the distribution of resident foreigners by ISTAT region, with the cooperation of representative mediation agencies: 204 (35.2% of the sample) mediators in Northwest Italy; 154 (26.6%) in Northeast Italy; 140 (24.2%) in Central Italy; and 81 (14.0%) in Southern Italy (table 1). The substitution rate for the sample was 8.2%. At the conclusion of the data collection process, the number of valid respondents was 579. The data collected were then analysed through SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) software.

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Table 1 – Research sampling plan Area

Northwest (Liguria, Lombardy, Piedmont, Aosta Valley) Northeast (Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Trentino-Alto Adige, Veneto) Centre (Lazio, Marche, Umbria and Tuscany) Southern (Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Puglia, Sardinia and Sicily) Total

Foreign resident population n. %

Responses n.

%

1,542,753

35.2

204

35.2

1,169,134

26.6

154

26.6

1,060,899

24.2

140

24.2

614,935

14.0

81

14.0

4,387,721

100.0

579

100.0

Biographical Experience Three-quarters of the respondents were female (76.8%). This confirms a well-known aspect related to the high prevalence of female mediators (Carbone, 2004, p. 133). The average age of the respondents is about 41 years. It should be noted that, in comparison with a previous study (carried out ten years earlier) (Carbone, 2004, p. 137), the average age of respondents has increased (from 37 to 41 years), highlighting that mediators are an ageing population. The nationalities of origin of the respondents are extremely heterogeneous, as is the case for the overall immigrant population in Italy. The most frequent countries of origin are Romania (14.3%), Morocco (8.4%), Albania (7.1%), Peru (3.7%), and Tunisia (3.3%) (table 2). It should be underlined that among the respondents are several Italian mediators (14.6%), who were probably mostly second-generation subjects with an immigrant background who had been born in Italy. The most frequent mother tongues of the respondents are Arabic (17.3%), Romanian (15.7%), Spanish (7.9%), and Albanian (7.3%). In addition to the mother tongue, the vehicular languages spoken by the respondents were also investigated, as these represent a further instrument of mediation; the most common are English (32.4%), French (19.6%), and Arabic (5.3%).

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Table 2. Countries of origin of respondents

Valid

Missing Total

Italy Romania Morocco Albania Peru Tunisia China Moldova Egypt Senegal Other Total System

Frequency

Percentage

Valid Percent

84 82 48 41 21 19 14 13 13 12 227 574 5 579

14.5 14.2 8.3 7.1 3.6 3.3 2.4 2.2 2.2 2.1 39.2 99.1 0.9 100.0

14.6 14.3 8.4 7.1 3.7 3.3 2.4 2.3 2.3 2.1 39.5 100.0

With regard to educational qualifications (acquired both in the country of origin and in Italy), a very high educational profile is observable among the respondents, as more than half of them claim to have a university qualification (e.g., first tertiary degree) (54.5%), which corresponds to the sixth level in the 2011 UNESCO International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), while one-sixth of them (16.3%) hold a postgraduate title (e.g., Master’s or PhD), which corresponds to the seventh and eighth levels in the ISCED system (table 3). This high level of qualification is confirmed by the respondents’ answers to a question about the number of years of education completed in total – the average being 15.5. This corroborates the empirical data of the previous study, which showed an analogously high educational profile for intercultural mediators (Carbone, 2004, p. 143). It must be underlined that this high educational profile of the respondents often appears to stand in contrast to their working conditions: low salaries and little social recognition.

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Table 3. Educational qualifications (acquired both in the country of origin and in Italy) (multiple answers possible)

No qualification Primary education Lower secondary education Upper secondary education: professional Upper secondary education: technical Upper secondary education: high school Short-cycle tertiary education Bachelor’s degree or equivalent Master’s or Doctoral degree Not able to establish an equivalence of my qualification within the Italian education system 748 100.0

Responses N Percentage 1 0.1 22 2.9 47 6.3 51 6.8

Percentage of cases 0.2 3.8 8.2 8.9

45

6.0

7.8

127

17.0

22.0

39 314 94 8

5.2 42.0 12.6 1.1

6.8 54.5 16.3 1.4

129.9

Most foreign-born respondents have been resident in Italy for a long time. A little less than half (47%) of the respondents said they had resided in Italy for more than 15 years, while about three-quarters (73.9%) of the respondents stated they had been residents for over 8 years. This leads one to expect that the respondents would have a good knowledge of Italian society, which is an essential requirement for effective intervention on behalf of immigrant citizens. With regard to education in the field of mediation, most (86%) respondents had attended specific vocational courses for intercultural mediators, while over half (54.7%) of them had attended more than one programme. These courses were mostly provided by local authorities (municipalities, provinces, and regions) (33.5%) and by organizations, associations, and NGOs in the field of immigration (28.9%), and were of a considerable length, with most being between 501 and 1,000 hours (39.6%) or between 151 and 500 hours (24.7%). It must be underlined that, while the previous study highlighted NGOs in the field of immigration (75.1%) as the most common organizers of courses for intercultural mediators (Carbone, 2004, p. 186), today these

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providers seem much less relevant in this field, while local authorities (rising from 20.5% in 2004 to 28.9% in 2014), vocational training centres (absent in 2004 and accounting for 21.4% in 2014) and universities (rising from 2.9% in 2004 to 13.8% in 2014) have greatly increased their role as providers of education on intercultural mediation.

Professional Experience The aim of a further section of the questionnaire was to investigate the respondents’ professional experience. First of all, with regard to the area of employment, the respondents stated that they work mainly in education (e.g., schools, community centres, etc.) (69.6%), healthcare (e.g., hospitals, counselling centres, etc.) (63.7%), social services (56.6%), and public administration (e.g., public relations, municipalities, etc.) (51.9%) (table 4). Three-quarters of them work on fixed-term contracts (78%). Table 4. Areas of employment (multiple answers possible)

Health care (hospitals, counselling centres, etc.) Social services Education (schools, community centres, etc.) Public administration (public relations office, municipalities, etc.) Reception centres Public safety (police stations, etc.) Court Penitentiary (prisons) Companies Unions 2301 100.0

Responses n Percentage 367 15.9

Percentage of Cases 63.7

326 401

14.2 17.4

56.6 69.6

299

13.0

51.9

247 200 200 153 45 63 399.5

10.7 8.7 8.7 6.6 2.0 2.7

42.9 34.7 34.7 26.6 7.8 10.9

Regarding length of service, half of the respondents (51.2%) said they had been employed as an intercultural mediator for more than seven years. The fact that, in the previous research findings, only 17.7% of intercultural mediators had worked for a long period (more than seven years) (Carbone,

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2004, p. 136) might suggest that, since the first appearance of intercultural mediators in the Italian welfare system, a ‘historical’ core of them has been maintained over time, accumulating professional experience over the years. A specific section of the questionnaire was aimed at investigating problems perceived by the respondents in their activities, at both the personal and organizational levels. Among the personal problems, about half of the respondents claimed problems with low job satisfaction (due to low salary, lack of incentives, etc.) (56.6%) and an insufficient recognition of the role of intercultural mediator by institutions and services (50.4%), while 43.7% indicated insufficient supervision and personal reflection on their role (table 5). Table 5. Problems experienced at a personal level (multiple answers possible)

Lack of appreciation by service operators or users Low satisfaction (due to low salary, lack of incentives, etc.) Insufficient knowledge of language (e.g., English, French, Spanish, etc.). Insufficient knowledge of Italian language Difficulty of working in teams Difficulty in perceiving myself as neutral between service operator and user Insufficient knowledge of the service Insufficient recognition of the role of intercultural mediator by service users Insufficient recognition of the role of intercultural mediator by institutions and services Insufficient knowledge of immigration law Insufficient knowledge of characteristics and needs of service users

Responses n Percentage 142 10.6

Percentage of Cases 25.4

316

23.6

56.6

40

3.0

7.2

14

1.0

2.5

26 42

1.9 3.1

4.7 7.5

31 109

2.3 8.1

5.6 19.5

281

21.0

50.4

62

4.6

11.1

31

2.3

5.6

Intercultural Mediators as Relational Facilitators in a Plural Society

Insufficient supervision and personal reflection on the role of intercultural mediation 1338 100.0

244

18.2

77

43.7

239.8

Among the problems related to the organization of their employment, 66.5% of the respondents indicated a low and/or discontinuous salary, 51.6% of them indicated an indeterminacy of the functions of the mediator in the service, and 49.3% of them pointed to incomplete and/or distorted information about the role of the mediator in the service (table 6). Table 6. Problems experienced at an organizational level (multiple answers possible)

Difficulties in planning activities properly Difficulties in the relationships within the service Excessive flexibility required by the service Delegation of ‘immigrant question’ in the service only to the intercultural mediator Lack of cooperation between institutions and service Incomplete and/or distorted information on the role of mediator in the service Indeterminacy of functions of the mediator in the service Low and/or discontinuous salary of intercultural mediator Lack of communication and coordination between intercultural mediators in the service Difficulties in collaborating with other services 1934 100.0

Responses n Percentage 94 4.9

Percentage of Cases 16.5

217

11.2

38.2

93

4.8

16.4

137

7.1

24.1

240

12.4

42.3

280

14.5

49.3

293

15.1

51.6

378

19.5

66.5

104

5.4

18.3

98

5.1

17.3

340.5

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Among the aspects considered most relevant to being a good mediator, the great majority of the respondents stated that it was important to be able to interact properly with service users and operators (86.3%) and to have an appropriate knowledge of the Italian socio-cultural context and the background of immigrants (82.4%). To a lesser extent, a good knowledge of the Italian language (69.6%) and of the language and culture of origin of immigrants (69.2%) were considered relevant by respondents, along with having been specifically qualified in the field of service (66.8%) and an overall high educational level (acquired in a foreign country or in Italy) (66.1%) (table 7). Table 7. Most important aspects in being a good mediator (multiple answers possible)

Having experienced migration Having been specifically trained in the field of service Being able to interact properly with service users and operators Having appropriate knowledge of the Italian socio-cultural context and the background of immigrants Being recognized and appreciated by service operators and users Taking an equidistant and balanced position between service operators and users That the service where the intercultural mediator works understands his/her role That the service does not ask too much of him/her That the service does not underuse him/her Having a good knowledge of the Italian language Having a good knowledge of the language and culture of origin of immigrants

Responses N Percentage 331 8.2 386 9.6

Percentage of Cases 57.3 66.8

499

12.4

86.3

476

11.8

82.4

241

6.0

41.7

366

9.1

63.3

203

5.0

35.1

112

2.8

19.4

235

5.8

40.7

402

10.0

69.6

400

9.9

69.2

Intercultural Mediators as Relational Facilitators in a Plural Society

Having an overall high educational level (acquired in a foreign country or in Italy) 4033 100.0 697.8

382

9.5

79

66.1

Opinions on the Possible Establishment of a National Statement on the Competence of the Profession of Intercultural Mediators The last section of the questionnaire addressed the view of the respondents on the possible establishment of a national statement on the competence of their profession in Italy. With regard to this, it must first be stated that, when indicating the aspects they considered to be most relevant for improving the effectiveness of their service, the respondents identified the creation of a national statement on the competence of the profession of intercultural mediators as very important (the option was considered to have ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a very great deal’ of importance by 97.1% of the respondents). If all intercultural mediators were required by law to hold a specific licence to practice their profession, the requirements most frequently mentioned by the respondents for obtaining such an authorization include having an appropriate knowledge of Italian society and its welfare system (option considered to have “quite a lot” or “a very great deal” of importance by 98.6% of respondents), of the Italian language (in particular, at B1 level according to the CEFR – Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) (98.3%), of immigration law (96.4%), and of the characteristics of immigration in Italy (95.5%). Specifying the topics for a hypothetical exam to obtain a licence to practise the profession of intercultural mediator, the respondents stated that these should be focused on the verification of the possession of a B1 level (according to the CEFR) in Italian (10.1%) as well as an understanding of immigration law (8.9%), the methods and techniques of intercultural mediation (8.7%), intercultural communication (8.5%), social work (e.g., active listening, networking, team-working) (8.4%), and conflict management (8.4%). The final question of the questionnaire, which was open-ended, related to possible further comments or clarification. In response some respondents again highlighted the importance of establishing a national statement on the competence of the profession of intercultural mediators in Italy. One respondent stated,

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Chapter Four I hope that the role of intercultural mediator could be recognized and appreciated, considering the mediator not just as someone who speaks the language but also as someone who knows the culture of the country of origin of immigrants” (Int. No. 66). Some respondents also underlined that, to be valuable, intercultural mediators should have immigration experience, “I think an intercultural mediator should be an immigrant, as the service user which he/she will relate to. Culture, ethnicity, religion, experience cannot be studied. This is the worth of an intercultural mediator, as he/she has to bring out true and profound needs of immigrant users. (Int. No. 429)

Others underlined the essential requirements for working properly as an intercultural mediator, “In my opinion, a mediator should hold a high school diploma, the vocational course should have a minimum length of 800 hours and the salary should take into account those who hold a degree or a master or who have achieved a high school diploma” (Int. No. 29). In addition, another respondent highlighted that a national statement on the competence of the profession of intercultural mediators should first of all protect workers’ salaries, “The lack of a professional profile causes an everlasting salary drop” (Int. No. 295). This aspect is generally perceived as an important topic by intercultural mediators, who often complain of problems related to low salary. However, one responded was decidedly optimistic, “It’s never too late to improve!” (Int. No. 212).

Concluding Remarks Based on the research findings, some conclusions can be made regarding crucial aspects related to the effectiveness of the intercultural mediator in the welfare system. First of all, it must be highlighted that any reflection on the role of intercultural mediators concerns society as a whole: reflecting on the needs and the potential of this profession necessitates a reflection on the entire field of social work, and implies the adoption of an intercultural perspective for the welfare system. In fact, where there are now active professionals who are formally empowered to encourage a relationship between nationals and immigrants in the welfare system, the need for intercultural mediation has always been present in society (in the form of ‘natural’ mediation), and is extremely widespread in society, in every social sphere in which people from different cultural backgrounds have any kind of relationship. Moreover, it must be stressed that there is a need for a wider recognition of the role of the intercultural mediator, as emphasized by the

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problems the respondents say they have experienced, especially by increasing the awareness, on the part of the service provider staff cooperating with intercultural mediators, of the potential of this profession to contribute to the adoption of an intercultural perspective in the welfare system. The first recommendation is to recognize the high educational and professional status of the population of intercultural mediators, ensuring appropriate work conditions and avoiding the risk of ‘ethnicizing’ the profession (namely, making the profession ‘only for immigrants’). The second is to avoid the adoption of the view that intercultural mediation is only needed for emergencies (e.g., only to solve problems with interpretation), as this could hinder the potential of intercultural mediation for general consultation and the potential for a global reconceptualisation of the welfare system to ensure that immigrants have equal access.

References Allemann-Ghionda, C. (2009). From intercultural education to the inclusion of diversity: Theories and policies in Europe. In J. A. Banks (Ed.), The Routledge international companion to multicultural education (pp. 134-45). London: Routledge. Banks, J. (2008). Multicultural education. In G. McCulloch & D. Crook, The Routledge encyclopedia of education (pp. 393-396). London: Routledge. Belpiede, A. (Ed.). (2002). Mediazione culturale: Esperienze e percorsi formativi. Torino: Utet. Carbone, V. (2004). L’indagine quantitativa: Una descrizione. In M. Fiorucci & F. Susi (Eds.), Mediazione e mediatori in Italia: Mediazione linguistico-culturale per l’inserimento socio-lavorativo dei migranti. Roma: Anicia. Casadei, S. & Franceschetti, M. (2009). Il mediatore culturale in sei Paesi europei (Italia, Francia, Germania, Grecia, Regno Unito, Spagna): Ambiti di intervento, percorsi di accesso e competenze. Rome: ISFOL. Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament. (2009a). Proposta di legge d’iniziativa dep. Aldo Di Biagio: “Delega al Governo per l’istituzione dell’Albo dei mediatori interculturali,” n.2138, 2/2/2009. —. (2009b). Proposta di legge d’iniziativa dep. Jean Leonard Touadi: “Disciplina della professione di mediatore interculturale e delega al Governo in materia di ordinamento dei corsi di formazione per il suo esercizio,” n.2185, 10/2/2009.

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—. (2013). Proposta di legge d’iniziativa dei deputati Murer, Velo, Gnecchi, Berlinghieri, Taricco, Kyenge, Verini, Biondelli, Zardini, Martella, D’Incecco, Cimbro, Bossa, Mognato, Baretta, Zoggia, Narduolo: “Disciplina della professione di mediatore interculturale,” n.384, 21/3/2013. Cohen-Emerique, M. (2009). La négociation/médiation culturelle dans un processus d’intégration. Saarbruck: ARIC Conference. Conference of Regions and Autonomous Provinces. (2009). Riconoscimento della figura professionale del Mediatore interculturale. Rome. Fiorucci, M. (2000). La mediazione culturale: Strategie per l'incontro. Rome: Amando. Gundara, J. (2003). Intercultural education: World on the brink? London: Institute of Education, University of London. Institutional Working Party on Intercultural Mediation. (2009). Linee di indirizzo per il riconoscimento della figura professionale del Mediatore Interculturale, Rome: Italian Ministry of the Interior. —. (2014). La qualifica del mediatore interculturale: Contributi per il suo inserimento nel futuro sistema nazionale di certificazione delle competenze. Rome: Italian Ministry of the Interior. Llevot Calvet, N. (2015). Processes and dynamics of building an identity for intercultural mediators. In F. Sabaté (Ed.), Conditioned identities: Wished-for and unwished-for identities (pp. 385-412). Bern: Peter Lang. Luatti, L. (2011). Mediatori atleti dell'incontro. Brescia: Vannini. Portera, A. (2011). Intercultural and multicultural education epistemological and semantic aspects. In C. A. Grant & A. Portera (Eds.), Intercultural and multicultural education: Enhancing global interconnectedness (pp. 12-32). London: Routledge. Sirna Terranova, C. (1996). Pedagogia interculturale. Milano: Guerini. Tarozzi, M. (1998). La mediazione educativa: “Mediatori culturali” tra uguaglianza e differenza. Bologna: CLUEB. Townsend, J. (2002, December). The intercultural mediator: The nexus of practice and theory. Pacific Mountain Network News. Retrieved from http://www.agreementswork.com/TheInterculturalMediator.php

PART 2 – NEOLIBERISM AND MULTICULTURAL AND INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION

CHAPTER FIVE EDUCATION IN URBAN SPACES: NEOLIBERAL RHETORIC AND SOCIAL JUSTICE RESPONCES CARL A. GRANT

Media outlets across the United States report daily that these are difficult economic times and that schools have failed to prepare students for Twenty First Century employment, especially students in urban areas (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983; Peterson et al., 2011). The media focus is on the lack of achievement of Black and Brown students, especially African American boys. The New Times’ Trip Gabriel (2010) wrote “Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of White boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of White boys.” Gabriel further argues that tough economic conditions in urban areas are not the only major reason for the academic failures of students of color. Drawing on a study by the Council of the Great City, Gabriel states, “Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor White boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches”. Gabriel then continues borrowing from the research of Ron Ferguson, who contends that race is a major player in the achievement gap between Black and White. “There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten.… They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces.” Gabriel’s observation that both poverty and racism are causes of the lack of student success in urban spaces is not the thesis argued in most media reports and in the reports from many politicians and government officials. That said, although Gabriel’s observation is a bit more informative (e.g., race and class), it still neglects to frame the problem so that it takes into account the other power structures (e.g., sexism) and the

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intersection of for example race, class, and gender that network and perpetuate the problem (Grant, Manning, & Allweiss, 2014). The purpose of this chapter is to examine the response to the crisis of schools in urban spaces using a social justice lens to push back on neoliberal discourses and actions to reduce public expenditure on education in Chicago’s Black Belt. First, I define social justice and neoliberalism as understood in this chapter. Second, I discuss the urban space in Chicago that is the focus of the chapter. Next, I present the problems that the media, politicians, and others claim are responsible for the “urban crisis.” I follow this discussion with an exploration of the social justice arguments that push back against those that blame the failure of schools in urban spaces (and place the responsibility for fixing the problem) on the people who live in the urban communities.

Social Justice Theories of social justice serve as the frame for my discussion of education in the Black Belt. The first theory is John Rawls’ (1971) theory of distributive justice, which, as summarized by Cochran-Smith (2008), “focuses on equality of individuals, civic engagement, and a common political commitment to all citizens’ autonomy to pursue their own ideas of the good life” (p. 7). In this theory of distributive justice, injustice is rooted in macro-level, political/economic structures that cause exploitation and material deprivation and prevent self-actualization (Gibson & Grant, 2009). Material, political, and social exploitation is visibly observable in the Black Belt: predatory lending agencies, overabundance of bars and liquor stores, second class sanitation services and trash pick-up, run-down housing, unkempt supermarkets, schools with poor resources, and a lack of space for participation in school governance including decision making about school closings. The second theory is Nancy Fraser’s (2003) dualism of the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition. In this theory, there is acknowledgement that injustice does not just stem from one’s unfair exclusion from the macro-level political (e.g., denial of involvement in shaping education policy and practice) and economic order (e.g., inability to acquire Twenty-First Century employment because of inequity in the public school system) but also from the denial of one’s lived experience, identity, and culture. Fraser’s theory has currency with people of color in general and Black students who attend school in urban spaces. Black students in Chicago, much like students in other urban spaces, have had their history omitted, inaccurately reported, distorted, and misrepresented

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in their school curriculum (Grant & Grant, 2013). Besides the official curriculum, students of color have had to suffer through a hidden or informal curriculum that told them who they should model themselves after (i.e., White middle class heterosexual males); but were also told which career goals they should and should not strive to obtain. Thus, both the official and hidden curricula were constructed based on a Eurocentric way of thinking, living, and acting (Elson, 1964; Grant & Grant, 1981; Grant & Sleeter, 1996). Fraser contends that justice is not simply the redistribution of material (and social) resources but also the recognition and acceptance of diversity. Young (1990) called attention to this point: “Some distributive theories of justice explicitly seek to take into account issues of justice beyond the distribution of material goods. They extend the distributive paradigm to cover such goods as self-respect, opportunity, power, and honor” (p. 90). Young’s point is meaningful to any group of Americans whose history includes being humiliated by being “Othered”: having to use separate toilets because of their race and told “English only.” In addition, Smith (1994) posits, “Social justice is concerned with how people should be treated in particular circumstances, by other people directly or within the human creation of institutions whereby behavior is regulated” (p. 27). Smith’s beliefs invite us to take a look at the way African American males are treated in the classroom. The National Education Association (NEA) (2011) reports on three recent studies that concludes that “Black boys as more likely than their peers to be placed in special education classes, labeled mentally retarded, suspended from school, or drop out altogether” (p.1). The NEA also argues this is disturbing, surprising news, at once puzzling and promising because school systems have tools to reverse this trajectory with success stories to prove it.

Neoliberalism Stromquist (2002) argues that neoliberalism is “an economic doctrine that sees the market as the most effective way of determining production and satisfying peoples’ needs” (p. 25). Hursh (2008) notes that seeing the market as the most effective way to satisfy people needs leads us to “decreasingly think about democracy and our commitment to one another in terms of community and the common good, and instead conceptualize democracy as the individual rationally choosing within a competitive marketplace” (p. 7). In other words, people’s actions and dispositions move from being social citizens to entrepreneurs in competition with others (Rose & Miller, 1992; Simons & Masschelein, 2006; Hursh, 2008).

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Apple argues that neoliberalism transforms ideas of democracy from a “thick democracy to a thinner version of individualism” (2006, p. 16). Brown et al. support Apple’s (2006) thesis and contend that neoliberalism not only has economic implications but political and social implications because it extends market values to social practices, institutions and public policies, bringing about a new set of values upon which governing decisions are made. Brown et al.’s (2003) observations of neoliberalism point out not only the economic influences of the ideology but its political and social consequences that were significantly illustrated with the Chicago mayor’s decision to close 54 schools in the urban areas where Blacks live and it illustrates how neoliberalism operates in opposition to the social justice frames described above. In addition, Davis contends that not only are economics and politics prominent features of neoliberalism, but that neoliberals contend that the achievements gains from the Civil Rights Movement have led to the final consolidation of democracy in the United States. Therefore popular arguments about racism, classism, and sexism in society are not valid). The consequences of neoliberal ideologies that divide people through the push for market competition are that some are viewed as winners and others losers; some people receive benefits from this economic model that has strong political and social ties, and others are excluded from rewards and punished (Apple, 2006; Bauman, 1998; Hursh, 2008; Stiglitz, 2002; Stromquist, 2002). Businesses and cooperate leaders receive the substantial portion of the profits, while workers are at the mercy of corporations and their CEOs. Stiglitz (2002) writes, “They [workers] have seen their jobs destroyed and their lives become more insecure. They have felt increasingly powerless against forces beyond their control” (p. 248). This has been the experience of many living in urban areas. According to the 2000 United States Census, more than 35% of U.S. residents live below the poverty line and roughly 25% are unemployed. The median household income of families in Chicago’s urban communities where Blacks live is less than $25,000, with over 40% of households living below the poverty line of $16,500 for a family of four. Neoliberalism, as used in this paper, is a term inclusive of the political, economic, and social forces and actions that unite to form the systems of oppression that are impacting schooling in urban communities where Blacks and Latinos live.

Education in an Urban Space The urban space centered in this paper is the Black Belt. It is an area seven miles long and one mile wide on Chicago’s Southside. The

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community was formed in the 1840s by free Blacks and escaped slaves. It is also where African Americans were ushered when they arrived in Chicago during the Great Migration starting in the 1910s. Although some Blacks began to migrate out of the area in the 1970s, it remains significant to Black political, economic, and social life in Chicago (including education). Many homes, businesses, and schools fill the landscape of the area. When arguments about inequality in education in Chicago are made, it is the schools in the Black Belt that historically have been and continue to be the focus of racist attention. Sustar states: From the first attempts to steer the growing Black population into segregated schools in the 1930s to today's more sophisticated, corporatebacked ‘education reformers,’ Chicago politicians and school authorities have carried out a persistent effort to keep Black students in segregated, inferior schools. In the 1920s and 30s that meant channeling the city's booming African American population into ghettoes [on the Southside]. (2013, p.2)

However, in the 1990s, the mayor’s office and land developers saw the lake front area on the Southside of Chicago and much of the Black Belt, now known as Bronzeville, as land to be reimagined and gentrified for middle class families that wanted to live in the city and not the suburbs. Sustar (2013) posits, “It's no coincidence that the South Side lakefront and the nearby Bronzeville neighborhood have seen a disproportionate share of school closures since the 1990s, as developers have pushed gentrification in the area” (p.2). The Black Belt is a “social product” (Jackson, 1992; Jackson and Penrose, 1993) constructed out of racist polarization that included forced segregation through rejection and exclusion (Bonnett, 1996). The Black Belt not only expressed the spatial separation of Blacks from other ethnic groups, but it characterized the city’s governance plan toward Black people as being different and needing to be kept away from White people. The Black Belt became an expression of the influence of “race on an urban spatial structure” (Waddell, 1992). The spatial structure (e.g., being separate and isolated) became one that Chicago politicians have a history of wanting to maintain in order to have it as a space that Republican or Democrat politicians –whichever party was in power – could control and quantify (e.g., vote count and targeted campaigning) (Grant & Grant, 2013). Today this urban community remains governed by race and racism that continue to structure activities (e.g., politics and life chances) for Black people although the social justice efforts of the 1960s Civil Rights Movements and present-day struggles have produced some gains. That

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said, neoliberal policies and actions have exacerbated economic disparities, political disenfranchisement, and social inequities, which appear to be reducing Civil Rights gains (Barlow, 2003; Brown et al, 2003; Doane and Bonnilla-Silva, 2003). Examples from two points in time illustrate the persistence of racism on the Southside of Chicago and how it has been used to structure the location of Black people daily and where they have carried out much of their life activities, such as shopping, eating, entertaining, obtaining medical care, and attending neighborhood schools. During the second decade of the Twentieth Century as increased numbers of Blacks migrated to Chicago, Whites openly discussed the control of where they could live. An issue of The Property Owners’ Journal in 1919 stated: Keep the Negro in his place, amongst his people, and he is healthy and loyal. Remove him, or allow “his newly discovered importance to remove him from his proper environment and the Negro become a nuisance.” He develops into an overbearing, inflated, irascible individual, overburdening his brain to such an extent about social equality that he becomes dangerous to all with whom he comes in contact....[E]very colored man who moves into Hyde Park knows that he is damaging his White neighbor’s property. (quoted in Pattillo, 2007, p. 44)

After official policies of housing segregation and restrictions based on race were made illegal in 1948 (Glaeser & Vigdor, 2012), the corralling of Blacks in the Black Belt were sustained by a “new” idea in the 1960s that held fast until 2005. In the early 1960s the largest public housing project in the world at the time, the Robert R. Taylor Homes, was constructed in Chicago and became a forerunner to several other large public housing projects (e.g., Cabrini Green). The housing project emphasized Castells’s (2002) idea that “[s]pace does not reflect society, it expresses it” (p. 393). The Robert Taylor Homes were 28 high-rise buildings with 16 stories each, a total of 4,415 units, mostly arranged in U-shaped clusters of three, stretching for two miles (Modica, n.d.). The Robert Taylor Homes underscored the way Chicago is a racialized space and the way the city is not welcoming to progressive social change; and education in the Black Belt, which was to be changed with the Supreme Court decision in 1954 that pronounced “equal education” as the law of the land, has in practice remained segregated, Eurocentric, and inferior for Black children. The oppression in the Black Belt exemplified through the structural racism in the education system, exemplified through a biased curriculum, poorly resourced schools, a low number of teachers prepared for culturally responsive teaching, and a coded declaration that Black students do not have the “right stuff” to achieve the American Dream are dimensions of

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political and social racism that keeps in place the miseducation of Black children. In addition, the fact that Black families were forced to inhabit a particular racialized space in Chicago supported systems of oppression and marginalized experiences tied to the connection between housing and education. The schools, to borrow from Lefebvre (1991), are products of cultural and social processes shaped by the flow of power and privilege that control equity, equality, and students’ cultural recognition and opportunities to have a flourishing life. As a social product, schools in urban spaces are narrowly thought of and portrayed by the mainstream in particular ways, often using one or two deficit-oriented code words, such as “at-risk” and “poor performing.” This portrayal aids and abets the negative characterization of education in urban areas and gave the mayor, in the case of Chicago, the public cover to argue that 54 schools had “failed” and the education of Black students needed to be saved through school choice and/or privatization. Another challenge to education in Chicago’s urban area was the move away from elected citizens governing the schools through Local School Councils (LSCs) to the implementation of a mayoral control structure. In 1995, the elected school board in Chicago was replaced by mayoral control and governance based upon a business model with a board selected by the mayor (Lipman, 2011), thereby moving education decision-making farther away from the local community. The consequence of mayoral control has led to the closure of fifty-four schools in Chicago (Lutton, 2013). In addition, only 69 percent of the 10,542 students from “Chicago’s shuttered elementary schools ended up at so-called welcoming schools which have now been deemed ‘overcrowded’” (Lutton, 2013). African Americans who live in the Black Belt do not want their schools closed. This does not mean that they do not want the schools updated and stocked with resources and well-qualified, culturally sensitive teachers who have an understanding of multicultural education and culturally responsive pedagogy. It is that the simple, often singular explanations (e.g., poverty, low test scores) that characterize why schools are failing do not provide a comprehensive and honest analysis of a complex problem rooted in structural oppression and White privilege that remain uninterrupted. Poverty and low test scores, while contributing factors that challenge education in urban communities are mainly symptoms of larger structural inequalities and, therefore are not the root causes of why schools are failing and why African American students’ success in school is not taking place (Hartman, 2006). Wise (2006) states: [F]ew Whites think of our position as resulting from racial preference. Indeed, we pride ourselves on our hard work and ambition, as if we

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Elsewhere I (Grant, 2009) have argued that the achievement gap (the public indicator of a failing school) is comprised of the many problems that face urban communities: racism, poverty, health problems, few good employment opportunities, and under resourced schools. Analyses of the problems of schools in urban spaces that take into account multiple variables and the interaction of those variables is rare in the media and does not receive the attention it deserves in the education literature (Grant, Manning & Allweiss, 2014; Grant & Zwier, 2014). In addition, closing schools burdens parents who live in urban areas with unsettling problems and issues. One major concern is that children are confronted with a disruption in schooling. As I note above only 60% of the students who were affected by school closings were in their classrooms when schools opened in September of 2014 (Lutton, 2013). Parents and students have to deal with additional enrollment challenges such as developing rapport with new teachers and school staff. Students from the fifty-four closed schools were scattered throughout the school system to 410 different schools (Lutton, 2013). In addition, through no fault of their own some students are forced to travel through rival gang territory, consequently arriving at school with thoughts on their mind more important than the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic): their welfare and safety. Ben Austen (2013) penned the following insights about students going to school in a war zone at the start of the new school year in 2013: “For kids stuck in these areas wracked by shoot-outs, the best defense is learning how to minimize risk.… Most of them just want to appear hardened, tough, but not so tough that they stand out; the goal is a level of invisibility that makes them a less likely target” (p. 3). Moreover, with school closures neighborhoods lose the “lighthouse” in their community and teachers and staff have to search for new employment (de la Torre & Gwynne, 2009). Furthermore, people who live in the Black Belt have heard stories in the media that school closures would facilitate gentrification. On March 7, 2013, at the height of the school closing turmoil, referencing information acquired from the respected Crain’s Chicago Business and Financial News, Mike Klonsky contended, based on arguments by Greg Hinze,

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another Crain’s Chicago Business reporter, that the real reasons for Mayor Emanuel’s mass closures of neighborhood schools and their replacement with privately-run charters and selective-enrollment schools has much more to do with reshaping the city's demographics, that is, pushing out the poor and people of color from the inner city and replacing them with a new class of young, tech, and finance professionals (as noted above). Such discussions lead to Black people believing that once again the power and privilege of the dominant group is having its way at their cost. In addition, people in the Black Belt were further upset when they read reports that the closing of schools as a strategy to improve educational success made little or no difference in students’ academic “achievement.” A study by a de la Torre and Gwynne states: In summary, we found few effects – either positive or negative – of school closings on the achievement of displaced students. Although reading and math gains were lower than expected once students found out their schools would soon close, these short-lived deficits were no longer evident after displaced students’ first year in new schools. Changing schools neither resulted in additional negative effects on student achievement nor substantially improved the achievement of displaced students. Only the small number of students who transferred to academically strong receiving schools and found supportive teachers at these schools made significant gains in their learning. (2009, p. 26)

Education in urban spaces has been a challenge for many of the people that live in these spaces since they moved in. Systems of oppression, especially racism and White privilege, have been exercised to deny or control people of color from receiving educational opportunities in full bloom. African Americans since the 1840s, their earliest days in the Black Belt, have had to endure countless challenges manifest out of racism to receive an education. Now, in the Twenty-First Century the challenge is that to receive a quality education that will prepare them for a TwentyFirst Century social and civic life and quality employment continues under a framework of neoliberalism, which orchestrates the economic, political, and social systems in Chicago that are controlled by the mayor’s office. The rationale or cover offered to the media and to the African American community for the management of education in urban space is discussed in the next section.

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Poverty, the “More for Less” and “I Got Mine You Get Yours” Arguments In observing the school closings in Chicago three arguments from neoliberals have attracted my attention: poverty, “doing more for less,” and “I got mine you get yours”. The arguments are discussed below.

Poverty Argument The existence and extent of poverty in the Black Belt is one of the major reasons offered for the problem with schools. In Chicago less than one in eleven White students are living in poverty in comparison to one in two Black students (Bogira, 2012). According to data from the Education Law Center (Baker et al., 2012) “some 87 percent of all Chicago public school students qualifies for free or reduced lunch.” Supporting the salience of the poverty argument, Diane Ravitch, former U. S. Assistant Secretary of Education, states: In recent years, we have become accustomed to hearing prominent reformers like Secretary Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and Joel Klein say that reference to poverty is just making excuses for bad teachers and bad schools. But there is plenty of evidence that poverty affects students’ readiness to learn. It affects their health, their nutrition, their attendance, and their motivation. Being hungry and homeless distracts students and injures their health.… (2011)

Additionally, the National Association of Secondary School Principals (Riddile, 2010) posits, “Researchers report that perhaps the only true linear relationship in the social sciences is the relationship between poverty and student performance.” Another aspect of the poverty argument for the lack of academic success of students in schools in urban spaces is the lack of Black parents taking advantage of living and taking advantage of the “bounty” in the United States. Duncan and Murnane state: America has always taken pride in being the land of opportunity, a country in which hard work and sacrifice result in a better life for one’s children. Economic growth made that dream a reality for generations of Americans, including many people who started out poor.… In fact, for the first threequarters of the twentieth century, economic growth was a rising tide that lifted the boats of the rich and poor alike.” (2011, p. 3).

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The poverty argument, while fundamental to education in urban spaces, is not, as Hooks (2000) argues, discussed in substantive ways. It is couched from different perspectives that are narrowly stated, that is they do not discuss contributing factors and often ignore the legacy of oppression by claiming that: (1) parents have not made the most of living in the United States, and, therefore, their children are not successful in schools that demand a middleclass socioeconomic mindset; (2) people living in poverty, and/or people earning minimum wage, more so than living with full employment and earning a living wage, has become the “new normal” in the country; therefore, we should accept that people will be out of work and/or mainly have minimum wage jobs. This argument discounts the vision articulated during the 1963 March on Washington: “Fair employment, but fair employment within the framework of full employment, so that every American can have a job” (National Educational Radio Network, 1963). The job question is crucial, because Reuther’s thesis is viable today: “the country will not solve the education problem as long as millions of Americans, living both within and outside of urban spaces don’t have good jobs” (National Educational Radio Network, 1963).

The New Normal: Doing More with Less – Two Illustrations The global economic crisis has had a serious effect on states’ coffers and the cutback of federal funding to schools (Rich, 2012). As a result, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) argued it is economically prudent and socially responsible to close failing schools. According to the Chicago Tribune, “CPS officials report… [i]t is necessary to address a projected $1 billion deficit... [and the closing is]… expected to save $43 million annually in operating cost, starting next year and to save more than $560 million in capital costs over 10 years” (Ahmed-Ullah, Geiger, & Glanton, 2013). In addition, neoliberals argued it is time for “more for less.” The “more for less” argument is reflected in the following two illustrations. Illustration One: The Center for American Progress (Boser, 2011), an educational institute, argued in the report Return on Educational Investment that there is little proof that higher spending will equal greater student performance. Ulrich Boser the study director is quoted as saying, we’re not going to spend the same on students from disadvantaged backgrounds as students in the suburbs…[;] we see that some schools are able to do more for less…[;] we should be engaged in thoughtful reform and make sure that we’re focusing on student achievement, and not

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Return on Educational Investment notes that the center that funded the study strongly advocates equity, but that is done within a “productivity and efficiency” paradigm. The report states, “while the issue of fairness must be central to any conversation about education finance, efficiency should not be sacrificed on the altar of equity. Our nation must aspire to have a school system that’s both fair and productive” (p. 2). Illustration Two: Politicians at all levels of government are advocating cutting educational funds. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stated that this is the era of the “new normal,” a period in which budget cutbacks are the norm and local public school districts must learn to do more with less and do it better. Duncan argued that we are in an era of austerity and should therefore increase productivity and cut things that are ineffective. Central to Duncan’s vision is to increase class size for excellent teachers, pay them more money and use technology to improve productivity (Duncan, 2010). Supporting Duncan’s “great teacher” argument, Bill Gates, an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist, argues that the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while our student achievement has remained flat, and other countries have raced ahead, and therefore, states could save money by using only the best teachers (Gates, 2011). He additionally recommends lifting the cap sizes on classes and offering financial incentives to teachers to take on more students (Gates, 2011).

I Got Mine, You Get Yours Some of the arguments given about school failure in urban spaces build on the individual blame arguments and contend that people who live in urban spaces are morally bankrupt and/or lazy and must lift themselves up. Such arguments serve a dual purpose, to blame those who live in urban spaces and paint the rich as “deserving” to rally support for conservatives and neoliberals. Whereas the media is replete with these arguments, statements by two iconic conservative figures, Ronald Reagan and Mitt Romney, provide clear examples. President Reagan between 1977-1988 according to Phillips (1991) and George (1999) was at the forefront of the neoliberal revolution to “downsize the public sector, because it does not and cannot obey the basic law of competing for profits or for market share” (George, 1999, p .1) and to move the US toward privatization. Reagan foretold his neoliberal thinking during the 1976 presidential campaign when he told a story that was manufactured to appeal to his

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political base. Reagan argued that a woman on the Chicago’s Southside was the “Welfare Queen.” The presidential candidate said: She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000. (Zucchino, 1999, p. 64)

Reagan’s statement reignited the stereotypes and lies that Black people are lazy and morally corrupt that had been slowly dissipating because of the civil rights efforts of the 1960s and 1970s. Reagan instilled the neoliberal thinking that public expenditure for social services should be reduced and images of the welfare queen are continuously summoned to reinforce this thinking. Mitt Romney, described as the “poster child” for neoliberalism (“Seeing the economic forest instead of neoliberal trees,” 2012), was criticized for letting the “Neoliberal Cat out of the Bag” (“Mitt Romney lets the neoliberal cat out of the bag,” 2012) by making the “47% statement” as the Republican presidential contender for the 2012 presidential election. The remark, an illustration of basic neoliberal tenets, illustrated how, “Neoliberalism benefits primarily the already privileged to the detriment of most everyone else” (Stromquist, 2002). The remarks were made in May 2012 during a private funding dinner hosted for millionaire donors during the campaign. Romney stated: There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.… These are people who pay no income tax.… [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. (Camia, 2013)

Romney’s statement likes Reagan’s contends that people, like the poor people of color who live in urban areas and their children are not successful because they are and have poor models of success and they show little desire to fight for the American Dream. In other words, as Romney also stated in his speech, “95% of life is set up for you if you’re born in this country” (Grimm & Delaney, 2012). Therefore, if any American is not successful, it is their “bad.”

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A Different Argument On the other hand, there are arguments that push back on the neoliberal discourses that promote the privatization of schools, the heavy reliance on laziness and poverty as the cause of school failures and strict accountability measures by centering the importance of money to public schools. These arguments posit that “money does matter” and they address the effects of school closings on the families whose schools have been closed by counter-attacking the neoliberal discourse that reduces people to numerical classifications (e.g.,“47%”) and labels (e.g., “welfare queen”) that make them faceless, nonhuman, and economic misfits. In addition, included in these arguments are race and racism and the role they have played in shaping the structure of education in urban spaces.

Money Matters in Education “Does money matter in education?” is a central question recently revisited by Bruce Baker. Baker’s (2012) conclusion after an extensive review of the literature, including a re-analysis of James Coleman’s report Equality of Educational Opportunity, the first national large-scale quantitative analysis to examine this question, is “yes.” On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes…[;] money matters, resources that cost money matter, and more equitable distribution of school funding can improve outcomes” (p. iv-v). Research by Murnane and Olson (1989), Figlio (1997, 2002), and Loeb and Page (2002) also support Baker’s conclusion that money matters in the quality of the teaching corps, in that teacher salaries influence who chooses to enter the teaching profession. Also, money influences class size. The report from research on the threephase Tennessee Study of Class Size in the Early School Grades (Project STAR) by Mosteller (1995) and other studies of the significance of lower class size – which costs money in teacher salaries and classroom space – such as those by Konstantopolous and Chun (2009), Molnar et al (1999), and Blatchford et al (2005), posit that a reduction in class size, carried out effectively, has a positive effect on student academic success. Mosteller (1995) observes the following about Project STAR: Phase One: After four years, it was clear that smaller classes did produce substantial improvement in early learning; and the effect of small class size on the achievement of minority children was initially about double that observed for majority children, but in later years, it was about the same.

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Phase Two: Lasting Benefits. Observations made as a part of this phase confirmed that the children who were originally enrolled in smaller classes continued to perform better than their grade-mates (whose school experience had begun in larger classes) when they were returned to regular-sized classes in later grades. Phase Three: Project Challenge. Seventeen economically poor school districts were given small classes in kindergarten, first, second, and third grades. These districts improved their end-of-year standing in rank among the 139 districts from well below average to above average in reading and mathematics. (Mosteller, 1995)

In addition, schools in urban spaces have challenges and unique characteristics that make money matter more. A study from the University Of Michigan (“How does going to an urban school affect student achievement?”, 2011) posits five points that addresses why money matters to schools in urban spaces: 1. 31% of all students in the United States are concentrated in 1.5% of urban schools with total per person revenues that are only 89% of the average total pupil revenue. 2. Under-funding of urban schools is affected by a funding formula including low weights for compensatory education, bilingual or English as a second language programs, and attendance-based foundation programs. 3. Urban school enrollments are made up of 25% or more students who are low income. 4. Urban schools enroll higher rates of immigrant and diverse students, including ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious populations. 5. Urban students are likely to have higher rates of mobility, absenteeism, and poor health. They are also less likely to have health coverage, which decreases attendance and reduces funding based on attendance-based formula. The report goes on to argue that since fairness or equity in public education is a hallmark of democracy, achieving equality is not a simple matter of allocating equal dollars per students. Instead, expenditures need to be adjusted to reflect variations in the needs of students and the cost of purchasing educational resources in different areas (“How does going to an urban school affect student achievement?”, 2011). Shaw and Kelly (2012) crystalize the “money matters” point in their analysis of the impact of Wisconsin Act 32, the state’s biennial budget law

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for 2011-2013, on education funding, teacher quality, student learning, and property taxpayers. Shaw and Kelly compared state funding reductions in high poverty school districts under Act 32 to reductions in low poverty school districts as measured by student eligibility for free and reduced price lunch. The authors argue that their analysis has important educational, legal, economic, and social implications because the Wisconsin State Constitution guarantees school districts will be “nearly uniform as practicable.” Dramatic differences in achievement for poor and minority students, reductions in education funding, and an increase in the numbers of poor, diverse, and special education students put the state system at risk of not fulfilling its commitments to provide a “basic” education for all children. The result of Shaw and Kelly’s study and its meaningfulness to my argument is significant, so I quote the authors’ summary statement at length: This study paints a grim picture of funding gaps in Wisconsin public education. The recent historic cuts in state revenue for public education fall heavily on the thirty high poverty school districts that educate more than a quarter of all Wisconsin’s poor children, 61% of all Black children, 34% of Hispanic children, and 25% of American Indian children. The percentage of academically advanced children in low poverty districts is almost three times higher than in high poverty districts. At the same time, taxpayers in high poverty districts have higher and increasing property tax rates compared to taxpayers in low poverty districts with lower and declining property tax rates. The reductions in state support for public education threaten to increase achievement gaps, and challenge Wisconsin’s constitutional and long standing commitment to equal educational opportunity. (2012, p.24).

Also, supporting the idea of fairness and the significance of money is an observation by Delisio (2005) who contends if you take into account the needs of the students and the cost of educational resources in urban areas, it is apparent that school funding needs to be adjusted accordingly; in other words, high poverty schools should receive more funding. However, this is not the case; rather states allocate what they consider to be “sufficient funds” to urban schools and although these funds are determined by state officials, they are shaped by what the richer districts determine to be enough. Baker posits: While political rhetoric is often divorced from empirically rigorous research, the echo chamber regarding the unimportance of funding for improving school quality has amplified, and has migrated to the entirely unsupportable proposition that funding cuts cause no harm. In other words, the political message has gone several steps beyond questioning whether

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or not a systematic relationship exists between funding and school quality – a classic research framing of the issue – to bold assertions that we now know, with certainty, that money doesn’t matter and that the path to school improvement can be accomplished despite – or even because of – reductions in spending (2012, p.2).

Quality research studies conducted over the past twenty years have argued that money matters in education, especially in closing the achievement gap between students of color and White middle class students. Nevertheless, this research is being marginalized and/or ignored as education leaders (e.g., the Secretary of Education, conservative think tanks, and prominent talking heads) are espousing neoliberal taking points that include “doing more with less” and “95% of life is set up for you if you’re born in this country.” Both statements implicitly argue that money is not a major concern and that a lack of money should not be a negative consequence to receiving an education that prepares students for TwentyFirst Century employment opportunities.

Emotional Argument There is a great deal of emotional outpouring around schools that are being closed. Fear of uncertainty regarding students crossing into rival gang turf, student achievement declining within the last six months before students transfer (de la Torre & Gwynne, 2009), student dropout rates (Zachary, 2011), and students not being assigned to “academically strong” new schools (Seattle Education, 2013). Also, school closure has a significant impact on students who are homeless because as the Institute for Children, Poverty, & Homelessness (2010) notes “these students are already housing displaced, at an educational disadvantage, and highly likely to fall through the cracks during transfers and phase-outs” (p. 9). This is a very real concern as school closures in Chicago brought about CPS losing track of 11% of the students (Karp, 2013). Parents, students, community members, teachers, and union representatives who reside in urban spaces are the sources of emotional arguments that come when their neighborhood schools are closed arguably due to low achievement, “under utilization,” and the needs for the officials to save money (Canon, 2013; Lipman, 2011; Grant, Manning, & Allweiss, 2014). Parents’ emotional outpouring is featured in newspapers and on television (Allweiss, Grant, & Manning, 2014; Seattle Education, 2013). This is highlighted in a Chicago Tribune news article caption that read, “Closing plan ignites emotions” (Ahmed-Ullah, Geiger, & Glanton, 2013).

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Like many of the articles that reported on school closings, it included parents and students’ emotional reactions to their school being placed on the chopping block. Many articles contain pictures of students crying, parents protesting with signs that ask “to keep students and teachers together” and “don’t close our schools.” However, pictures and parents’ emotional appeals have done little to halt neoliberal discourses and the conservative rhetoric of accountability, school closing, “doing more with less”, and “I got mine you get yours.” Arguably, it could be that the pictures and captions that show emotions are used by the media in ways that work against what the parents were attempting to accomplish. I have argued elsewhere (Grant, Manning, & Allweiss, in press) that media images are produced within dynamics of social and political power and ideologies that are operating within a political system of neoliberalism, globalization, and digitized media technology images and thus can be used to promote values, ideologies, and ways of reasoning about a particular phenomenon (i.e., students in urban spaces). Thus, it could be that the images of the parents, students, community members, teachers, and union representatives framed in an emotional context may be used to engender more resistance to their cause than support and help.

The Race and Cultural Argument Related to the emotional argument is the racism and cultural argument. However, this argument is often muted to a good extent in the mainstream media as a reason for the failure of schools in urban space. In addition, the cultural argument is often characterized in a deficit and pathologizing argument as depicted in Reagan and Romney’s statements referenced previously. Over the past months during which I have followed the debates in the popular media and in some of the academic literature about school closings in Chicago, racism and “race” (e.g., African American, Latino) is not associated with the problem, or is left on the margins of the discussion except in presenting test score comparison data (e.g., Black vs. White) or demographic data (e.g., number of Latinos in the free or reduced price lunch program). A full exploration of “race” to refer to a marginalized group of people, including their history, culture, and grievances against the dominant group is absent from many discussions on school closing. In other words, race (i.e., Black and Brown) is invisible or a deficit classification within the neoliberal thesis of school reform. An illustration of this is a Chicago Sun-Times editorial (“Editorial: Real hurdle to education reform is poverty,” 2012) that appeared next to a picture of Chicago Teachers Union president, Karen Lewis, speaking

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before the City Club of Chicago, and which included her statement: “We cannot fix what’s wrong with our schools until we are prepared to have honest conversations about poverty and race.” The subtitle for the editorial however reads, “Real hurdle to education reform is poverty.” The caption for the editorial did not include “race” although Lewis had said “poverty and race.” In addition, the editorial completely avoids using the word “race” in the narrative except when quoting Lewis’ statement. Instead the editorial reads: There is nothing easy about trying to boost academic outcomes for poor kids. That is why we’ve supported a range of aggressive interventions for the Chicago Public Schools over the years, including school closures, charter openings, turnarounds, improved teacher evaluations, a longer school day, and changes to teaching tenure, hiring, and firing rules.

The avoidance of a discussion of “race” (and here my reference is about structural racism in the political, economic, and social systems of Chicago and the nation) by the editorial writers of a leading Chicago newspaper fixes the discussion of school failure mainly on poor African Americans previously stereotyped by the likes of Reagan (1976) and Romney (2012) and allows the dominant governing structures and their neoliberal discourses to evade their role and responsibility in school failure. A conversation about “poverty” in an urban space and any space or place in America is not difficult to have because the free and reduced lunch program is as much a part of the daily school schedule as math and reading, and homelessness and food insecurity is very much a part of many students’ daily lived realities. The 2013 United States Census stated that in 2012 the official poverty rate was 15 percent and that there were 46.5 million people living in poverty. In addition, poverty is a condition that we all have been socialized to understand since early childhood. Starting in our infant years, we were read nursery rhymes about poor children (e.g., The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe), and throughout our pre-school years and the rest of our twelve-plus years of schooling we were taught to give to the “needy” by participating in good-will activities such as bake sales or carwashes to contribute to the less fortunate. The “red kettle” of the Salvation Army is an icon of the winter holidays. In addition, most people learn that the reason for the Common School (i.e., public school) was to help lift people out of poverty so that they could have a future free of economic hardship. Many Americans, however have trouble having full-throated conservations about race and its impact on the economic, political, social, and cultural

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life of the United States, because as Nakagawa (2013) argues, “White supremacy is ingrained in White identity.… We live in a society that has so deeply internalized race that race, and by extension racism, is at the very core of who we are as a people… [and] [r]ace was, for most of U.S. history, an important system of political and social organization” (p. 1). In schools, the RTI Action Network (Ahram et al., n.d.), argues that race and racism are not interrogated but are discussed as cultural challenges brought on by “cultural dissonance that is manifested in policies, practices, beliefs, and outcomes in a myriad of interconnected ways.” RTI states: Taken together, these elements of cultural dissonance constitute a prevailing pattern that includes (but is not limited to): officials’, including mayors’, school CEOs’, principals’ and teachers’ perceptions of race and class as limiting predictors of school achievement; perceptions of different learning styles versus intellectual deficiencies; and lack of cultural responsiveness in current policies and practices. (p.1).

Old-fashioned blatantly racist behavior still appears too often and has seemingly increased since President Obama has been in office. OnwuachiWillig, writing in the New York Times, states, Racial tensions in the United States have changed since Obama’s election as president, and for the worse… and the president’s images have become tools for harassing and otherwise discriminating, in the workplace and in places of public accommodation, against Blacks and Whites in romantic relationships. (2013, p.1)

At the same time race and cultural relations are made to appear much better. This is visually apparent in most institutions in America, including shopping malls, restaurants, and state and city agencies. Positive illustrations of good race relations and examples that the United States is a multicultural society are increasingly seen on daily television in commercials and daily programming. Yet forms of racism and cultural dissonance still exist and persist. Subtle and subliminal forms of racism are present and continue to persist in a manner that Joyce King (1991) describes as “dysconscious racism… an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs) that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given… tacitly accept[ing] dominant White norms and privileges” (p.134). In addition, Perry’s (2011) scholarship makes a valuable contribution to this discussion of race when she describes present-day “intentional racism” in employment. She states, “An employer can intend to hire a particular person and make

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that decision while being highly influenced by racial stereotypes and yet not intend to be ‘racist’” (p.21). Perry further notes, We should no longer frame our understanding of racially discriminatory behavior in terms of intentionality. It is too unsophisticated a conception of discriminatory sentiment and behavior. It doesn't capture all or most discrimination, and it creates a line of distinction between “racist” and “acceptable” that is deceptively clear in the midst of a landscape hat is, generally speaking, quite unclear about what racism and racial bias are, who is engaging in racist behaviors, and how they are doing so. (2011, p. 21)

Such is so, when neoliberalism and conservative restoration operate under the cover of improving education for students of color. Perry (2011) also argues that saying we must think post-intentionally escapes the problem of what is meant with intentionality. Instead Perry contends that we should no longer use “intentionality” as a focus because given our cultural logic it allows us to easily distance ourselves from both the people who make mean-spirited racist remarks and in doing so we overlook the persistence of race-specific inequality, its operation, and its meaning. Research shows that people’s habits, attitudes, behaviors, preferred forms of entertainment, and a plethora of choices offer evidence of the existence of racial inequality (p. 22). Nakagawa’s analysis that race and racism are at the “very core of who we are as a people” (p. 1) and Perry’s thesis that we easily distance ourselves from “the inequality of the society,” (p. 2) within the context of the RTI’s observation about how “elements of cultural dissonance constitute a prevailing pattern” (p. 4) present among officials responsible for the education in urban spaces, all illustrates how and why the cultural experiences of African Americans, including their dignity, their contributions to America, and their desire for economic and social success and well-being are often dismissed in the debate over education in urban spaces.

Conclusion Having used a social justice frame that considers the equality of individuals; civic engagement; political commitment to citizens to be able to pursue a good life; the significance of cultural identity, self-respect, opportunity, and recognition; and the acceptance of one’s lived experience along with the fair treatment of people in particular circumstances on the part of fellow citizens and institutions, it is apparent that the neoliberal

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discourses shaping education in the Black Belt and other urban spaces are destructive to the education of students of color. Mayoral control of CPS has diluted civic engagement and a primary tent of democracy – participation in local decision-making. Self-respect and honor are disparaged in urban communities by public statements such as Romney’s framing of the “47%” because they stir old images of a “welfare queen.” The culture, identity, and inclusion of people of color living in urban communities are often ignored in political, social, and economic discourses because society has so deeply internalized race that much of White supremacy is taken for granted or has been made invisible. In addition, the closure of 54 schools in the Black Belt suggests the absence of political, social, and economic power on the part of the residents as well as the mainstream governing structure’s disregard for the equality of all individuals (specifically in this case, Black citizens). Such a distressing analysis can lead to hopelessness and anger, or it can motivate a greater push against neoliberalism. The effects of the social justice discourses in urban areas seems (to me) to be lagging behind the effects of neoliberal discourses. The “money matters” argument is having a difficult time gaining traction, in part because the country is in a financial crisis and state and federal officials are not very motivated. The emotional argument does not have the constituency or the research base and has been susceptible to manipulation in order to support the neoliberal argument. The cultural argument, while always a powerful argument, needs greater and on-going access to the media in order for a substantive discussion to take place. Finally, while observing the actions and activities in urban areas, I have been reminded of many past movements for social justice: the feminist movement, the Civil Rights movement, protests abroad in Greece or South Africa, and movement in Chicago against the closing of schools. The efforts of citizens to push back against systems of oppression and the neoliberal attack on poor people and the spaces in which they live bring forth memories of days of promise and days of darkness. At the core of most of these movements throughout the early history of the United States is protest against systems of oppression (e.g., White male supremacy and privilege, heterosexism, ableism, and classism) and currently protest against neoliberalism (e.g., exorbitant corporate profits, tax breaks for the rich, corporate lobbying in Congress, and bank bailouts as middle class and working class people are losing financial ground and/or their jobs) (Velasco, 2011). Throughout this nation’s history, people have had to organize and protest in order to receive fair and respectful treatment and the right to a quality education. It looks like this is yet another instance.

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CHAPTER SIX RESPONSIBILITY TOWARDS DIVERSITY: AN EDUCATIONAL PROPOSAL FOR THE ENHANCEMENT OF DEMOCRACY ROBERTO FRANZINI TIBALDEO

Even at a first glance, the past decades have been of extraordinary importance for the comprehension of difficulties related to the accommodation of ethnic and religious diversity, both at the European and at the global level. Public opinion, politicians, and scholars in many countries have levelled criticisms against multiculturalism for being unable to provide satisfactory policies on social cohesion and the governance of ethnic and religious diversity (Jura, 2012). Others, however, prefer not to abandon multiculturalism in spite of its faults, and argue for its expansion (Parekh, 2000; Vasta, 2007; Kymlika, 2007; Silj, 2010; Taylor, 2012). To some extent, the alleged ineffectiveness of multiculturalism highlights a deeper problem: since the 1990s (war in the former Yugoslavia), and especially since the beginning of the new millennium (11 September 2001 in the USA, but also 7 July 2005, 7 January 2015, and 13 November 2015 in Europe), a growing fear of the so-called “clash of civilizations” has spread all over the globe. According to this trend, ethnic and religious diversities and traditions are perceived as menaces to the status quo and therefore trigger problematic reactions: first, the social group’s enclosure within the defensive barriers of static identities, which are often created ex nihilo and manipulated for political purposes; and, second, the tendency of the members of a dominant group not to recognize the “other” and his or her equal in rights – i.e. a tendency which in some cases ends in the adoption of assimilationist policies (Greblo, 2013). In addition, the current global economic crisis has given people and politicians of several developed European and Western countries an excuse to engage in further defensive processes: all who are perceived to some extent as “different” or “outsiders” are likely to suffer various forms

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of discrimination, and are in many ways excluded from the alleged community of the “self,” which has no intention of giving up its privileges for any reason. Therefore, we are witnessing an additional threat to society: the “us vs. them” conflict discriminates against the weakest members of society and the so-called “minorities within minorities”, that is – generally speaking – the women, the young, and the immigrants (Ambrosini, 2005; Eisenberg, Spinner, & Halev, 2005). As a result, our epoch seems to be afflicted with a series of problems, such as the spread of stereotypes, social prejudice, and discrimination; an increasing lack of faith in forthcoming opportunities; a generalized breakdown of critical and reflective thinking; and a pervasive mistrust of democracy (Bobbio, 1988; Appadurai, 1996; Galli, 2011; Magatti, 2012; Pulcini, 2013).

The Focus on Intercultural Competence at School Of course, among the aspects directly involved in this landscape, the issue of education plays an important role, especially in the current multicultural and/or intercultural societies. However – as often happens – the relevance of education is largely underestimated or even ignored in too many Western and European countries. As a consequence, educational methods, strategies, and practices appear not to be as effective as expected at facing the above-mentioned challenges – that is, at enhancing critical thinking and social integration, at offering job opportunities, and at educating reflective democratic citizens (see, among others, Torres, 2009; Nussbaum, 2010; Grant & Portera, 2011; Nowak, 2013; Nowak et al., 2013). To be sure, the criticism of traditional education’s incapacity to be abreast of the contemporary situation and to understand the signs of the times is nothing new (see, for instance, John Dewey’s (1916) reflections on this matter or the educational reform already invoked in the USA by Matthew Lipman (2003) together with Ann M. Sharp at the end of the 1970s). However, the present context is quite different, due to factors such as globalization, social and cultural complexity, and the current trends in international migration (Gobbo, 2000; Portera, 2006; Portera et al., 2007; Bauman & Mazzeo, 2012). Western culture has been forced to put aside the presumption of being the centre of the world, and is currently undergoing a thorough revision of particular widespread yet problematic attitudes, such as the uncritical acceptance of mainstream opinions and the hindrance of “methodological nationalism” (Beck 2006, 24 ff.). These circumstances also affect education, which is forced to review its overall aims and develop new pedagogical methods and practices in order to

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reconnect itself with what is happening in the world and eventually restore its formative, leading, and propulsive role in society (Portera 2003b, pp. 22–23). Among the new challenges to be addressed, the issue of dealing with the pluralism and diversity of values, cultures, religions, etc., is certainly of the greatest importance (and, of course, one of the most debated – as evidenced by Turgeon (2004, pp. 102–104), who provides an interesting outline of the recent “curriculum wars” over the educational “canon”). To be sure, “diversity” is no newcomer in contemporary society, and several forms of diversity have been didactically and pedagogically dealt with in various ways in recent decades, especially in schools, including: disabilities; economic, social, and cultural differences; differences concerning race, gender, and sexual orientation, etc. Therefore, theoretically speaking, the specific form of “diversity” only recently generated by the stream of global migration adds but only another item to the list of “intercultural” issues (Gobbo, 2000, 46 ff., 89 ff.; Portera 2003b, p. 25; Rey & von Allmen 2003, pp. 36–37; Turgeon 2004, p. 97). Still, it is an item that makes a difference, as it is connected with a wide range of social and political challenges, which at the present moment are far from being successfully handled by social and educational institutions. In this respect, my aim is to undertake an interdisciplinary inquiry into diversity within educational contexts, in order to highlight innovative and effective ways of enhancing intercultural competences. The aim is to successfully deal with the plurality of existing diversities, which are to be considered not as threats, but, on the contrary, as opportunities for the development of individual and social self-awareness, maturity, and education. Such an analysis can reap great benefit from the mare magnum of existing projects, experiences, and best practices. In particular, I wish to mention recent research projects, such as Accept Pluralism at the European University Institute – Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies (see http://www.accept-pluralism.eu); the International and European Normative Framework (see UNESCO, 2001; COE, 2004; UNESCO, 2005; COE, 2008; as well Keast, 2007), and other national and regional laws or statements of best practice, such as the Region of Tuscany’s decree D.R. 530/2008, Per una scuola antirazzista e dell’inclusione (For a Non-Racist and Inclusive School), and its related projects: La scuola di tutti: Pluralismo, intercultura, inclusione, diritti (Everybody’s School: Pluralism, Interculturality, Inclusion, Rights, 20102012) and A scuola di diversità: Pluralismo, intercultura, inclusion, diritti (Learning from Diversity: Pluralism, Interculturality, Inclusion, Rights, 2012-2014, see www.ascuoladidiversita.it).

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Philosophical Inquiry and Interculturality The issue of intercultural education and the development of intercultural competence at school can greatly benefit – this, at least, is the core idea I wish to argue – from philosophy, and specifically from the social practice of philosophical dialogue and critical reflection. As we shall see, this experience is of extreme importance for the enhancement of mutual respect, tolerance, reciprocal understanding, a sense of belonging, empathy, etc. – that is, the most relevant virtues and ethical values upon which any attempt at appreciating diversities and acknowledging their worth ultimately rests (see among others Taylor 1994; Gutmann, 1994; Rovatti, 2007). Among other philosophical practices, I wish to draw specific attention to Matthew Lipman’s philosophy for children/community (P4C), which emphasizes two interesting aspects: on the one hand, the multidimensionality of creative, critical, and caring thinking; and, on the other hand, the importance of thinking-with-others, i.e. of a community of inquiry (Lipman, 1995; Lipman, 2003). Lipman’s thinking begins with a negative experience: in the 1960s, while teaching philosophy to college students and adult education students, he witnessed the failure of traditional education to promote the ideal of reasonableness (Lipman, 1995) and to effectively instil civil virtues (Lipman, 2003). Therefore, Lipman went in search of a new philosophical and pedagogical paradigm, so as to comprehend the overall formation of the individual’s dispositions, along with the main features of the democratic citizen. Indeed, education and democracy ought not be separated. This idea Lipman borrows directly from Dewey (Dewey, 1916). Like Dewey, Lipman believes that the democracy is simultaneously the foundation and the goal of an ideal education system, the aim of which is to stimulate the spread of reflection, autonomy, and critical thinking. Moreover, the aim is to give rise to dialogue, self-correction, and inquiry, in order to eliminate the forces which cause violence, ignorance, injustice, and the spread of stereotypes and prejudice. Democracy is, according to Lipman, the social and political environment where human relations take place, and where – I wish to add – human diversities and their “contradictory certainties” ought to peacefully compete within an atmosphere of mutual respect in order to construct common experiences, enterprises, and new forms of culture (Beck, 2006; Lam, 2013). Indeed, as Ulrich Beck states, we live in “a world in which it has become necessary to understand, reflect, and

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criticize difference, and in this way to assert and recognize oneself and others as different and hence of equal value” (Beck, 2006, p. 89). This approach is, however, incomplete without an indication of the extent to which philosophy plays a relevant role. Lipman refers to an idea of philosophy as a philosophical practice, and not as a mere exercise of theoretical and abstract knowledge. In keeping with this, Lipman defines thinking as a synonym for (philosophical) inquiry, and sees it as something that has to be understood to mean perseverance in self-corrective investigation regarding relevant and problematic questions (Lipman, 1995). A “Community of (philosophical) Inquiry” (CI) – which is, by the way, an embodiment of “democracy” – originates from a common desire to participate in a dialogue, whose tangible shape is the circle formed by the participants and whose steps are reading, questioning, and discussing (Lipman, 2003, pp. 97–100). Participants (normally from 13 to 15-20 per session) are reciprocally committed “to reasonableness – that is, to rationality tempered by judgement” (Lipman, 2003, p. 111). In other words, they are committed to undertaking a broad reflection upon their respective ways of thinking. To some extent, such inquiry is a practical experience in which each member contributes the perspective that arises from his or her own values in an attempt to come to a productive result. The community reflection works as a device which opens the possibility for negotiation, mutual understanding, translation, social inclusion, and, ultimately, as a practice of reciprocal recognition and respect, selfregulation, and reframing of ideas and perspectives – that is the practice of democracy. As a result, such philosophical inquiry fosters the cohesion of the community, which becomes “increasingly sensitive to meaningful nuances of contextual differences” (Lipman, 2003, p. 102). The heart and vehicle of expression of the inquiry is, according to Lipman, philosophical dialogue, which differs from conversation, debate, and mere communication (Lipman, 2003, pp. 87–93). From a technical point-of-view, each session of P4C follows a predetermined structure: the discussion is stimulated by what might be called a “text-pretext” (i.e., an episode from specific short stories and novels written by Lipman and other researchers, such as Ann M. Sharp); then participants pose questions and propose issues to be discussed, debated, and reflected upon; each session ends with an individual and collective self-evaluation. Philosophical dialogue is based on argumentative and “critical” thinking, but gains effectiveness only by putting into practice “higherorder thinking” (Lipman, 1995, p. 1), by activating at the same time the “creative” and “caring” dimensions of thinking, and by enhancing contribution that emotions make to human thought (Lipman, 2003, pp.

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127–138). Due to this multidimensionality (see especially Lipman, 2003, p. 200), any CI can successfully tackle delicate and complex issues, such as recasting individual and social values, and enhancing community inclusion – indeed, “inclusiveness” is the first of the features of communities of inquiry listed by Lipman (Lipman, 2003, p. 95). These achievements are closely related to the individual and social competences that are enhanced by the CI, such as: autonomy, reflectivity, selfreflectivity, self-correction, sensitivity to context, ability to apply critical and self-critical thinking skills, creative and caring thinking, as well as the ability to argue and to sustain the reasons for personal choices, actions, values, and beliefs (Lipman, 2003, pp. 25–27). As for the intercultural and democratic issue we are considering, I would like to stress the unique role played by “caring thinking”: To care is to focus on that which we respect, to appreciate its worth, to value its value. Caring thinking involves a double meaning, for on the one hand it means to think solicitously about that which is the subject matter of our thought, and on the other hand it is to be concerned about one’s manner of thinking. (Lipman, 2003, p. 262)

This peculiar dimension of rationality highlights our intense desire for reality and for the abundance of diversities, which endow reality with worth and value (Lingua, 2013). Moreover, caring thinking appears to be unavoidably entangled in a subtle paradox connected to appraising differences: caring is a kind of thinking when it performs such cognitive operations as scanning for alternatives, discovering or inventing relationships, instituting connections among connections, and gauging differences. And yet, it is of the very nature of caring to obliterate distinctions and rankings when they threaten to become invidious and, thereby, outlive their usefulness. Thus, caring parents, recognizing that “being human” is not a matter of degree, just as “being natural” is not a matter of hierarchy, do not attempt to assign rankings to their children; yet at the same time they recognize that there are significant differences of perspective so that things have different proportions in one perspective than they have in another. Those who care, therefore, struggle continually to strike a balance between that ontological parity that sees all beings as standing on the same footing and those perspectival differences of proportion and nuances of perception that flow from our emotional discriminations. (Lipman, 2003, p. 264)

Lipman describes “caring thinking” as being “appreciative” (or “valutational”), “affective”, “active”, “normative”, and “empathic” (Lipman, p. 1995, 8 ff.; Lipman, 2003, pp. 264–271; Marsal et al., 2009,

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pp. 411–420). As a result, I believe it is precisely due to the combination of mutual respect and philosophical inquiry that the community and its members are able to foster inclusiveness and achieve criteria (gained through the shared discussion) by which they increase their sensitivity to context and diversities, their empathy for other people’s situations, their ability to recognize and nurture plural viewpoints, their capacity to “build on each other’s ideas, although not necessarily with identical architecture” (Lipman, 2003, p. 97), and to evaluate what is relevant and to distinguish it from what is not (Bitting, 1995; Turgeon, 2004, pp. 105–107; Marsal et al., 2009, pp. 89–102; see also Fraser, 1990, pp. 65–70).

Responsibility, philosophical inquiry, and intercultural pedagogy In light of this, it should be clear that the outcome of communal philosophical inquiry is the undertaking of a cooperative “quest for meaning” in which each member of the community takes part (Lipman, 2003, pp. 95–96; Striano, 2005). Because of its intrinsically philosophical character (i.e., fallible, revisable, and self-corrective), this product ought to be continuously and reflectively revisited (for the idea of “reflectivity”, see Dewey, 1933 and Schön, 1983). In addition, the process of philosophical inquiry highlights a unique methodology: tackling a problem involves at first an effort to widen its context and horizon, in order to acknowledge which philosophical devices (terms, ideas, interpretative keys, etc.) are at issue. As a consequence, the matter is examined in a new light and in a renewed context. However, is this effort likely to generate some durable modifications to the life of the community and of its members, and in what sense are these practical modifications to be experienced, understood, and investigated? What I intend to argue is that the issue can be clarified through the idea of responsibility, the meaning of which is indeed double: first, it pertains to the effective consequences of human behaviour; however, it also evidences a wider and challenging horizon of sense, within which any concrete human being exists and performs his or her actions (Jonas, 1984; Benhabib, 1985; Nussbaum, 2010). Moreover – and this is certainly relevant for the present chapter – I wish to demonstrate that responsibility helps us, among others things, to better understand the overall meaning of human existence and freedom in terms of a reflective relationship to otherness and diversity. As indicated by twentieth century hermeneutical, cultural, and philosophical anthropology, the peculiarity of the human being’s dynamic

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constitution is exemplified by a dual polarity of opposites, such as selfcentredness and being-othered (in German: “Veranderung”: Theunissen, 1965; Friese, 2002), relation-to-the-self and relation-to-the-other, autonomy and heteronomy, assimilation and accommodation, etc. (see among others Geertz, 1983, 2000; Remotti, 1992; Augé, 1995; Gobbo, 2000, 45 ff.; Paolicchi, 2007; Fistetti, 2008, 111 ff.; Waldenfels, 2008; Henry, 2009; Grant-Brueck, 2011, pp. 4–5). Freedom and responsibility are just another exemplification of the same polarity. Moreover, they seem to gain hermeneutical clarity only due to their mutual relationship. Thus, on the one hand, freedom can be interpreted as a tendency towards self-realization, the fulfilment of desires, the achievement of goals, the need for relationships with other (human) beings, the active process of giving shape to the world, the capacity to design, etc. On the other hand, due to responsibility, the human being experiences his or her own specific commitment to listen and (freely) respond to claims coming from others (Jonas, 1984; Murphy-Gilligan, 1980; Benhabib, 1985). Responsibility entails sensitivity to the pressure of circumstances, and an awareness of the “other’s” claims, specificity, and difference, along with his or her right to be treated with equal respect and concern. Therefore, any responsible individual evidences the basic twofold possibility/duty to carry out a critical inquiry into otherness, in order to clearly recognize, accept, and eventually enhance or criticize the prerogatives of the so called “other” (see among others Taylor, 1994; Benhabib, 2002; Beck, 2006; Waldenfels, 2006; Fistetti, 2008, 133 ff.; Rosario del Collado, 2011-12; Taylor, 2012). However, the “good balance” between freedom and responsibility requires thorough education, the aim of which is the overall flourishing of the human-being. This goal is achieved through the cultivation of personal desire, the empathic recognition of the other, and a self-reflective attitude towards one’s own existence/diversity (Nussbaum, 1997; Gobbo, 2000, pp. 9–16; Turgeon, 2004, pp. 98–100; Giusti, 2004, 100 ff.; Nussbaum, 2010; Rosario del Collado, 2011-12). Moreover, the close relationship between education and responsibility elucidates a normative issue (i.e., not only a fact, but something we ought to do): I ought to build strong and dynamic relationships with the so-called “diversities;” I ought to engage in dialogue with them, and to take care of them in order to give my contribution to the building of inclusive communities. However, on the other hand, I have to “resist any simplistic dismissal of differences or uncritical embracing of them” (Turgeon, 2004, p. 107). And -- this is a topic which requires further research – one of the most effective ways of understanding the complexity of this duty, is to share with others a

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philosophical inquiry into the common good, like the one proposed by Matthew Lipman’s philosophy for children/community. This takes us back to democracy, since the idea of responsibility may also act as a guide for the realization – in the era of globalization – of innovative and democratic forms of intercultural citizenship, which distance themselves from two dreadful pathologies of the globalized age, namely the construction of “exclusive identities” (and “endogamic communities”), on the one hand, and forms of “nihilistic relativism” (with their pendant of “unrestrained individualism”), on the other hand (Pulcini, 2013; see also Bleazby, 2006; Turgeon, 2004). Before concluding, I wish to draw attention to the close relationship of these philosophical reflections to intercultural pedagogy. In particular, I wish to single out the following common issues, which unfortunately I cannot develop further in this context: a) the need for pluralistic dialogue, reflectivity, and the practice of empathy (Giusti, 2004, pp. 74–76; Portera, 2006; Perry, 2011, p. 454); b) interculturality as a thorough methodology for the understanding of knowledge, diversity, and human relations, and not as merely a specific branch of education (Portera, 2003b, p. 22; Portera, 2011, p. 17); c) the need to abandon substantialising, static and monolithic views of individual and social identity in favour of dynamic, multifaceted, and porous interpretations of the latter (Rey-von Allmen, 2003, pp. 39–40; Gobbo, 2000, 68 ff.).

Conclusions This chapter has attempted to verify whether the combination of philosophical inquiry and intercultural education is able to provide a fruitful understanding and, at least some elements of, a feasible management of the complex socio-economic, political, and cultural dynamics of the globalized era, especially those related to the appreciation of cultural and religious diversities in democratic contexts. The main result of this philosophical investigation is the revision of certain notions, such as identity, democracy, freedom, and responsibility. This effort entails abandoning substantialising models of interpretation and evidencing the “intercultural” structure of those ideas – that is, their intrinsic connection to otherness, difference, and diversity. This is particularly true for freedom and responsibility: their unique brotherhood evidences that they can only be understood as co-freedom and coresponsibility. Therefore, freedom and responsibility reveal their deepest meaning through an intrinsic being-related-to-otherness. This means that any specific and concrete manifestation of freedom and responsibility (be

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it an individual deed or a community inquiry process) entails a reflective process of continuous re-acceptance, re-configuration, re-framing, and renegotiation of understandings, meanings, demands, values, etc. The approach I have described above – Lipman’s P4C – succeeds precisely in showing how this process (which is also an ethical duty) can be practically fulfilled through a public activity focusing on (philosophical) inquiry. Furthermore, it highlights that this dynamic enhances intercultural competences, reinforces individual and social sensitivity to otherness and diversity, and gives strength to any attempt to support differences.

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UNESCO. (2001). Universal declaration on cultural diversity. Retrieved from http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13179&URL_DO= DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html UNESCO. (2005). Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions. Retrieved from http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_ TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html Vasta, E. (2007). Accommodating diversity: Why current critiques of multiculturalism miss the point (No. 53). Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society Working Paper. Retrieved from http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/files/Events/Events_2007/WP0 75%20Accom%20Div%20Vasta.pdf Waldenfels, B. (2008). Fenomenologia dell’estraneo. Milano: Cortina.

CHAPTER SEVEN CURRICULUM INTERNATIONALISATION AND INTERCULTURAL LEARNING FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF RECOGNITION: A CRITICAL PEDAGOGIC REVIEW AND DISCUSSION OF THE LITERATURE VICTORIA PERSELLI AND DIANA MOEHRKE-RASUL

This chapter presents a review and discussion of various approaches to the internationalisation of education at the tertiary level, problematised through a critical pedagogic lens. It focuses on two issues foregrounded within this process and the literature: firstly, the move from deficit and assimilationist thinking towards a “pedagogy of recognition” (Caruana & Spurling, 2007, p. 67); and, secondly, views on recognition and their function towards positively repositioning international students and their learning. We argue that whilst new perceptions are emerging which acknowledge international students as “resourceful peers” in their own right (Jin & Cortazzi, 2013; Ryan, 2011; Trahar & Hyland, 2011; Welikala, 2013; Urban & Bierlein Palmer, 2014), the practical implications for learning and teaching in culturally diverse settings represented by this ideology require further explication (Jin & Cortazzi, 2013; Lillyman & Bennett, 2014; Welikala, 2013). We propose that the time for recognising intercultural learning has therefore come, as well as the time to grapple with the question of how this might be realised in internationalised educational contexts.

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Definition of International Students In this chapter we will use the term ‘international students’ to signify students “who have chosen to travel to another country for tertiary study” (Ryan & Carroll, 2005, p. 3). Although we acknowledge recent arguments for viewing all students as international or “mobile students” (Killick, 2013, p. 182), we have opted to deploy Ryan and Carroll’s (2005, p. 3) definition in order to differentiate our focus on the “incoming” mobility of students and the political structures within which this practice is located, rather than “study abroad,” which is not central to our current research.

Further Contextualisation: Towards Recognition Whilst intercultural learning is a familiar term in many educational contexts (Portera, 2011), we notice that it is infrequently used in the literature on internationalisation to examine actual pedagogic thinking and practice with regard to international students in tertiary education. That is, educational environments are being “internationalised” (“done to”) rather than students in these environments being provided with opportunities to experience intercultural learning (“done with”). This chapter is therefore contextualised within our ongoing research into the lived experiences of internationalisation and intercultural learning among students and staff in the UK. It foregrounds issues arising from a literature review of various approaches to internationalisation at the tertiary level. Our review considers scholarly work within the UK and wider, predominantly Anglophone settings and contexts since this is where most of the discussion takes place, to illustrate the historical development of these approaches in these settings. Our reading suggests that, despite an increasing emphasis on inclusive and transformative pedagogies, the overall internationalisation discourse generally lacks illustrations of what such pedagogies might look like in practical terms (Leask & Carroll, 2011; Lillyman & Bennett, 2014; Robson, 2011; Ryan, 2011). Furthermore, when practice is considered, it focuses predominantly on identifying solutions to the challenges and difficulties experienced as a result of a seemingly greater diversity of students (Leask & Carroll, 2011; Robson, 2011). For many years conflicting values have operated with regard to the contribution of international students to the economy, culture, and society of their host countries. Whilst appreciated for their financial contributions to educational and economic systems (Kreber, 2009; Ryan, 2011), less emphasis has traditionally been placed on creating spaces for cultural and social exchange between students from different backgrounds. For

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example, Welikala offers the following quote by a UK university teacher which neatly illustrates this tension: When international students come here, we have to show that they are important and that their experience counts and so on. We have to treat them as customers and… they bring revenue and if we are going to be the second highest market for international students, we have to provide more and better learning experiences. (2013, p. 49)

Recently however, a number of authors such as Welikala (2013), Jin and Cortazzi (2013), Ryan (2011) and Lillyman and Bennett (2014) have argued in their writings for a positive shift away from the provision of education as a means (merely) of profit generation and adaptation to existing standards, towards a critical and reflexive process that acknowledges the socio-cultural dimensions of learning. In the following, we will therefore apply a critical pedagogic lens to these discourses in the internationalisation movement to explore to what extent the issue of intercultural learning might be addressed.

Internationalisation, Critical Pedagogy and Discourses of (Mis)Recognition Although the term “internationalisation” is more or less ubiquitous in educational discourses across the globe, its function – how it is operationalised – varies considerably. What internationalisation signifies when contextualised in current public and private tertiary institutions will depend on the intentions and purposes of the policymakers and educators who use the term (Maringe, 2010). For example, economic, free-market rationales for institutional internationalisation are frequently identified and highlighted in the literature (De Wit, 2011; Maringe, 2010; Trahar & Hyland, 2011). From this perspective, international student recruitment is seen as a money-making initiative, with international students regarded as “cash cows” who help cut institutional budget deficits (Brown & Jones, 2007; Kreber, 2009; Ryan, 2005, 2011). Partly as a reaction to such economic rationality, alternative understandings of the term have been deployed which assert the socio-cultural and educational merits of diverse learning environments (Jin & Cortazzi, 2013; Robson, 2011; Trahar & Hyland, 2011; Welikala, 2013). Accordingly, internationalisation is a value-laden term and “is not a phenomenon that is neutral or value free” (Gu, Schweisfurth, & Day, 2010, p. 8). Such value-ladenness is further revealed in the various approaches to internationalisation that have been adopted in tertiary education over time. However, before proceeding to

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characterise these, we will illustrate what we understand by critical pedagogy as a theoretical lens that allows us to unveil discourses of misrecognition insofar as these have determined, and may continue to determine, how internationalisation at the tertiary level is understood – and possibly – practised. By “misrecognition” we refer to processes which undermine a praxis of “humanization” which views students and teachers “as persons” (Freire, 1970, p. 44) and not, for instance, as homogeneous groups. Critical pedagogic approaches enable us thereby to become more alert to instances of (mis)recognition which may be encountered in culturally diverse learning environments (Giroux, 2010; Kincheloe, 2005). We accept the view of exponents of critical pedagogy that education is always already political (Apple, 2010; Giroux, 2010; Kincheloe, 2005), and that social oppression occurs through the influence of political and related power struggles. This makes pedagogy more than a “discipline” since it is also “about the creation of a public sphere, one that brings people together in a variety of sites to talk, exchange information, listen, feel their desires, expand their capacities for joy, love, solidarity, and struggle” (Giroux, 1994, p. x). To realise its “social and educational vision of justice and equality” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 6), critical pedagogy employs concepts with a mainly twofold focus: critique (to raise awareness of and critique oppressive forces) and change (to initiate change towards a more socially just world). The development of a “critical consciousness” is generally regarded as the first of many steps and struggles towards opposing forms of social oppression (Freire, 1970). However from a critical pedagogic perspective, being aware of oppressive forces alone does not bring about change. Educators and students are therefore encouraged to act upon identifiable forces of oppression (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Giroux, 2010; Kincheloe, 2005; Shields, 2012). By applying a critical pedagogic lens to the internationalisation literature in this paper, we aspire to a) raise awareness of unjust thinking within this educational field, and b) facilitate the development of recognising pedagogic approaches to intercultural learning that foster humanisation inside the classroom and beyond.

Correcting Deficiencies and Assimilationist Practices Before the late 1990s the literature charts a predominantly deficit view whereby international students were conceptualised as a homogeneous group, needy of the appropriate knowledge and skills required to be academically successful in the host environment (Caruana & Spurling,

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2007; Louie, 2005; Ryan, 2005, 2011). From this perspective the aim was to correct students’ “missing skills”, requiring them to adjust to existing standards (McLean & Ransom, 2005; Ryan & Hellmundt, 2005), that is, learning “to master the rules of the game” according to Welikala (2013, p. 40). International students were accordingly characterised as passive and linguistically incapable class fellows, rote learners, plagiarisers, uncritical thinkers, and so forth (Leask & Carroll, 2011; Ryan & Carroll, 2005). Such stereotypes and misconceptions rendered meaningful intercultural interactions among students – and with teachers – problematic (Harrison & Peacock, 2010), as it enforced a one-sided process of adaptation (Welikala, 2013). By the end of the 1990s, this deficit approach to internationalisation was receiving widespread criticism for “charging” international students with academic shortcomings (Biggs, 1999; Louie, 2005) and was superseded by an assimilationist approach (Caruana & Spurling, 2007; Thom, 2010). In this version, international students’ diverse cultural origins were more likely to be acknowledged, with educators and peers demonstrating meta-cultural sensitivity, for example by reflecting on their own and other cultures, and seeking to foster more inclusive learning (Louie, 2005; Ryan & Carroll, 2005; De Vita, 2005). Nonetheless, being required, still, to adapt to existing institutional conventions and social expectations (Gu, Schweisfurth, & Day, 2010; Montgomery & McDowell, 2009; Ryan & Carroll, 2005) it is hard to see how the contributions that international students might make within the prevailing learning environment might be recognised – on their own terms and in their own right. Furthermore, the literature that traces assimilationist approaches to internationalisation mainly considers the dilemmas and challenges of international students studying on Western campuses. It focuses primarily on comparative studies of home and international students in higher education from a qualitative, practitioner-led perspective (Caruana & Spurling, 2007; Gu, Schweisfurth, & Day, 2010; Kimmel & Volet, 2012), with an emphasis on interaction and group work among students from different cultural backgrounds in classroom-based activities (Gu, Schweisfurth, & Day, 2010; Trahar & Hyland, 2011). This literature proposes that students do not interact spontaneously with those of a different culture, ethnicity, religion, or language community (Hyland et al., 2008; Leask, 2010; Peacock & Harrison, 2009; Turner, 2009; Volet & Ang, 1998, 2012). Language barriers, stereotyping on ethnic or nationalistic lines, academic pressure (for example, where group work is formally assessed), pragmatic matters (such as work commitments after

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class), lack of opportunities for socialising, and feeling culturally and emotionally more connected with students from similar backgrounds, were all reasons given by home and international students who participated in research studies that aimed to elaborate and address why students prefer to stay within their own cultural groups (Hyland et al., 2008; Peacock & Harrison, 2009; Turner, 2009; Volet & Ang, 2012). As Volet and Ang (2012) acknowledge, however, these reasons were not mutually exclusive but, rather, complex and interrelated. To overcome the apparent lack of student interaction, teachers sought to discourage students’ self-selection in groups and make culturally mixed group work the expected norm (Jones & Caruana, 2010; Leask, 2010; Trahar & Hyland, 2011; Volet & Ang, 2012). According to Rienties et al., when “forced” to work together in multinational teams for a substantial period… students seem to be able to overcome some of the initial cultural barriers that prevent students to learn [sic.] together in multinational teams. (2012, 17)

Rienties’ team used social network analysis to establish, over the course of 14 weeks, how students from different socio-cultural backgrounds formed relationships with other students – in this case, 69 mainly international students enrolled on a postgraduate course at a UK university. However from a critical pedagogic perspective, and consistent with our own feelings about internationalisation as a “done to” process, “forcing” students to work together is problematic. Our research therefore derives from alternative ways of doing and thinking internationalisation. We refer to this as intercultural learning to semantically differentiate these pedagogic features of internationalisation in terms of both ideology and praxis (Freire, 1970).

Pursuing Intercultural Learning However not all international student cohorts are resistant to working together and socialising with students from diverse cultural backgrounds (Montgomery, 2009; Montgomery & McDowell, 2009; Peacock & Harrison, 2009; Trahar & Hyland, 2011; Volet & Ang, 2012). Montgomery, for example, found that for the majority of the 33 international and 37 British business, engineering, and design students interviewed in her study mixed group work was a welcome “opportunity”, and was perceived to be “commonplace” and “more fun” (2009, p. 263). Montgomery concluded that there seemed to be a “different social atmosphere,” with participating students enjoying the international

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dimension of their courses (2009, p. 263). Conflicts of opinion arising from work on a group task were not perceived to be the result of language barriers or cognitive deficiencies on the part of international students, but rather the students’ varied approaches to completing the task. On the interpersonal plane, developing new friendships and intercultural skills as well as consciousness-raising regarding stereotyping have been reported (Montgomery, 2009; Peacock & Harrison, 2009; Trahar & Hyland, 2011). Volet and Ang (2012), for instance, observed that through working together in a group, a number of students noticed that they had wrongly stereotyped (that is, “misrecognised”) group members. On a professional level, students have reported that they feel better prepared to work in culturally diverse company and have more respect for the knowledge and skills of their peers (Montgomery, 2009). Overall, a number of personal and professional benefits were identified in studies conducted from this perspective. Yet despite illustrations of greater awareness among students of the benefits of intercultural interaction, this would appear to be of a rather ad hoc nature, as the following statement by Peacock and Harrison (2009) illustrates: The examples given tended to be incidental; shiny anecdotes which point to a very surface level of understanding and awareness, rather than being bound into a wider context of cross-cultural communication, appreciation of diversity, or global awareness. (2009, p. 502)

This leads Volet and Ang to conclude that “students’ accounts did not provide any evidence that once they had been involved in a successful mixed-group experience, they would seek further inter-cultural encounters” (2012, p. 34). Nonetheless, these findings do appear to have engendered greater reflexivity and discussion on the part of educators regarding what internationalisation of tertiary education might look like in the future. For us, one of the most significant developments illustrated in the literature is the appreciation of international students as resourceful peers from and with whom everyone has something to learn (Jin & Cortazzi, 2013; Ryan, 2011; Urban & Bierlein Palmer, 2014; Welikala, 2013). In this view, internationalisation ideology yields to more precise pedagogic practices involving students as active agents of their own learning (Marginson, 2014). For example, Caruana and Spurling refer to a “pedagogy of recognition” (2007, p. 67), whilst Jin and Cortazzi propose “cultures of learning” to signal how learning has cultural dimensions, how it is a culturally pluralistic process, and to emphasise the fact that participants in international and multicultural contexts may well bring quite different

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social practices and cultural expectations with them (2013, p. 5). This is good news for us as researchers and teachers, in that it proposes more inclusive and transformative practices which recognise international students for the contributions they themselves make in diverse educational contexts, constituting a pedagogy that is dynamic and multi-directional.

Practice Realisations: Beyond Creating a “Positive Social Atmosphere” The most useful evidence to emerge from our review is that the provision of culturally diverse education at the tertiary level may be located within positive attitudes toward internationalisation. This view simultaneously recognises the importance of inclusive and transformative pedagogies, if international students’ social, economic, and cultural backgrounds, their experiential knowledge and current ontological positionings or their “sense of self” are to become informative and proactive features of the learning process (De Vita, 2005). To this end, a number of issues remain prescient for us, such as: In what ways do students become empowered as active agents of their own – and our – learning in our classes (Freire, 1970), without “forcing” students to interact? How can we, as educators, generate socially just learning environments through our teaching, especially when the provision of education is firmly rooted in post-capitalist, neoliberalising processes? How can formal and informal curricula be intertwined within and beyond the classroom to generate experiential, intercultural knowledge and experiences, and so forth? It can therefore be said that offering opportunities for “recognising” intercultural learning at the tertiary level is an already complex endeavour, requiring reflexivity, flexibility, engagement, and – in an ideal world – political commitment on the part of all stakeholders. Our current hypothesis regarding why some students cherish the experience of working together in diverse groups, whilst others object to it, hinges in part on the prevailing social atmosphere (Marginson, 2014; Montgomery, 2009) in which students from different socio-cultural backgrounds interact (Kimmel & Volet, 2012) and, we would add, the pedagogies that might generate a positive social atmosphere (Dunne, 2011), which we as teachers need to actively engage (Freire, 1970). This relies in turn on a complex matrix of stakeholder attitudes and positionalities, curricular (and extra-curricular) content, learning, and teaching methods. Indeed, the teacher as an active “facilitator in the creation of meaning” (Dunne, 2011, p. 619) and “interaction and dialogue” (Dunne, 2011, p.

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616) have been suggested as vital curricular means for promoting meaningful, non-discriminatory intercultural learning opportunities (Caruana & Ploner, 2010). This is in accordance with principles of critical pedagogy where dialogue and love for others are considered key in terms of “the overcoming of alienation” between educational participants (Freire, 1970, p. 44). However, critical pedagogues remind us that a positive social atmosphere where the language of celebration and benign forms of interaction prevail is not “harmless” (Rains, 2000, p. 79), since such action produces a “sense of denial” (Rains, 2000, p. 88). In other words, it inhibits direct engagement with prejudices and power structures. Creating a positive social atmosphere whereby diversity is seen as normative and celebratory would therefore be insufficient, requiring a more finely differentiated and humanising approach. For instance, how do teachers respond to students who choose not to discuss their experiences, or alternatively who participate without desiring to be “transformed,” according to their worldview? Consequently, the recent view of international students as a resource for learning emerges as more ideological than practical, since it assumes students’ willingness and acceptance of resourcefulness, and portrays these as universal and desirable characteristics. We therefore wonder whether recent practice suggestions, based on a recognising perspective which require students to “identify shared concerns and values” (Spiro, 2011, p. 635) or to “reach consensus” (Cruickshank, Chen, & Warren, 2012, p. 801) – that is, to coconstruct new knowledge as part of classroom group work activities – might obstruct processes of humanisation and agency, since such requirements leave little space for differentiated views and actions that are unique to the student(s) perceptions of the world. The movement towards recognition as an inclusive and transformative endeavour thus necessitates continuous and careful negotiation of what is meant – and what is understood – by transformative learning and teaching. Here we are reminded of Freire’s (1970) positioning of transformation as a process with students and not for them. This emerges as an important guiding principle in the context of curriculum internationalisation from the perspective of recognition; namely, transformation with students fosters engagement with what might otherwise remain normative or celebratory and which in our view needs further critical pedagogic theorisation. For example, in the following quotation from a lecturer in Cruickshank, Chen, and Warren’s exploration of culturally diverse practice, we might want to ask what additional information could be useful to this “group of local girls” regarding intercultural learning, which goes beyond the notion of “splitting up” their friendship group:

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Openings in the Discourse of Curriculum Internationalisation The following conclusion can be drawn from our reading of the literature to date: Although the most recent trend in the internationalisation literature is to re-think existing approaches and to include a stronger pedagogic dimension, there are openings and possibilities for culturally diverse practices which ensue following its problematisation through a critical pedagogic lens. These openings are intricate practice/theory opportunities pertaining to cultural diversity in a context where educational expectations are increasingly uncertain, located within “a changing world,” and “an unknown future” (Barnett, 2012, p. 76). They necessitate consciousness-raising regarding intercultural learning opportunities which can be neither prescriptive nor assumed (Freire, 1970). Future research might thus explore how intercultural learning as consciousness-raising might be “lived” in practice by students and staff in internationalised settings and the implications for “recognising” theory that such learning might have, for instance in response to recent “big data” research into internationalisation (Mellors-Bourne, Humfrey, Kemp, & Woodfield, 2013) and the derivation of internationalisation policy frameworks (Higher Education Academy, 2014) that are emerging in the UK and, no doubt, in other parts of the globe as well.

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Caruana, V. & Ploner, J. (2010, November). Internationalisation and equality and diversity in higher education: Merging identities. Retrieved from http://www.ecu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/external/ internationalisation-equality-diversity-in-he.pdf Caruana, V. & Spurling, N. (2007). The internationalisation of UK higher education: A review of selected material. Retrieved from http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/tla/internationalisation/ lit_review_internationalisation_of_uk_he_v2.pdf Cruickshank, K., Chen H., & Warren, S. (2012). Increasing international and domestic student interaction through group work: A case study from the humanities. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(6), 797-810. De Vita, G. (2005). Fostering intercultural learning through multicultural group work. In J. Carroll & J. Ryan (Eds.), Teaching International Students. Improving Learning for All (pp. 75-83). Abingdon: Routledge. De Wit, H. (2011). Globalisation and internationalisation of higher education. Revista De Universidad y Sociedad Del Conocimiento (RUSC), 8(2), 241-248. Retrieved from www.raco.cat/index.php/RUSC/article/download/254141/340980 Dunne, C. (2011). Developing an intercultural curriculum within the context of the internationalisation of higher education: Terminology, typologies and power. Higher Education Research & Development, 30(5), 609-622. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Freire, P. & Macedo, D. P. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word & the world. South Hadley: Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Giroux, H. A. (2010). Bare pedagogy and the scourge of neoliberalism: Rethinking higher education as a democratic public sphere. The Educational Forum, 74(3), 184-196. —. (1994). Disturbing pleasures: Learning popular culture. New York: Routledge. Gu, Q., Schweisfurth, M., & Day, C. (2010). Learning and growing in a ‘foreign’ context: Intercultural experiences of international students. Compare, 40(1), 7-23. Harrison, N. & Peacock, N. (2010). Interactions in the international classroom: The UK perspective. In E. Jones (Ed.), Internationalisation and the student voice: Higher education perspectives (pp. 125-142). Hoboken: Routledge.

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Higher Education Academy. (2014). Internationalising higher education framework. Retrieved from https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/International isingHEframeworkFinal.pdf Hyland, F., Trahar, S., Anderson, J., & Dickens, A. (2008). A changing world: The internationalisation experiences of staff and students (home and international) in UK higher education. Retrieved from http://escalate.ac.uk/downloads/5248.pdf Jin, L. & Cortazzi, M. (2013). Introduction: Research and levels of intercultural learning. In L. Jin & M. Cortazzi (Eds.), Researching intercultural learning: Investigations in language and education (pp. 1-17). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, E. & Caruana, V. (2009). Preface: Nurturing the global graduate for the twenty-first century: Learning from the student voice on internationalisation. In E. Jones (Ed.), Internationalisation and the student voice: Higher education perspectives (pp. xv-xx). Hoboken: Routledge. Killick, D. (2013). Global citizenship and campus community: Lessons from learning theory and the lived-experience of mobile students. In J. Ryan (Ed.), Cross-cultural teaching and learning for home and international students: Internationalisation of pedagogy and curriculum in higher education (pp. 182-195). Abingdon: Routledge. Kimmel, K. & Volet, S. (2012). University students’ perceptions of and attitudes towards culturally diverse group work: Does context matter? Journal of Studies in International Education, 16(2), 157-181. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang. —. (2005). Critical constructivism primer. New York: Peter Lang. Kreber, C. (2009). Different perspectives on internationalization in higher education. New Directions for Teaching & Learning, 118, 1-14. Leask, B. (2010). ‘Beside me is an empty chair’: The student experience of internationalisation. In E. Jones (Ed.), Internationalisation and the student voice: Higher education perspectives (pp. 3-16). Hoboken: Routledge. Leask, B. & Carroll, J. (2011). Moving beyond ‘wishing and hoping’: Internationalisation and student experiences of inclusion and engagement. Higher Education Research & Development, 30(5), 647659. Lillyman, S. & Bennett, C. (2014). Providing a positive learning experience for international students studying at UK universities: A

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literature review. Journal of Research in International Education, 13(1), 63-75. Louie, K. (2005). Gathering cultural knowledge: Useful or use with care? In J. Carroll & J. Ryan (Eds.), Teaching international students: Improving learning for all (pp. 17-25). Abingdon: Routledge. Marginson, S. (2014). Student self-formation in international education. Journal of Studies in International Education, 18(6), 6-22. Maringe, F. (2010). The meanings of globalization and internationalization in HE: Findings from a world survey. In F. Maringe & N. Foskett (Eds.), Globalization and internationalization in higher education: Theoretical, strategic and management perspectives (pp. 17-34). London: Continuum International Publishing. McLean, P. & Ransom, L. (2005). Building intercultural competencies: Implications for academic skills development. In J. Carroll & J. Ryan (Eds.), Teaching International Students. Improving Learning for All (pp. 45-62). Abingdon: Routledge. Mellors-Bourne, R., Humfrey, C., Kemp, N., & Woodfield, S. (2013, September). The wider benefits of international higher education in the UK (Bis Research Paper nr. 128). Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_d ata/file/240407/bis-13-1172-the-wider-benefits-of-international-highereducation-in-the-uk.pdf Montgomery, C. (2009). A decade of internationalisation. Journal of Studies in International Education, 13(2), 256-270. Montgomery, C. & McDowell, L. (2009). Social networks and the international student experience: An international community of practice? Journal of Studies in International Education, 13(4), 455466. Peacock, N. & Harrison, N. (2009). ‘It’s so much easier to go with what’s easy’: ‘Mindfulness’ and the discourse between home and international students in the United Kingdom. Journal of Studies in International Education, 13(4), 487-508. Portera, A. (2011). Intercultural and multicultural education: Epistemological and semantic aspects. In C. A. Grant & A. Portera (Eds.), Intercultural and multicultural education: Enhancing global connections (pp. 1232). New York: Routledge. Rains, f. V. (2000). Is the benign really harmless? Deconstructing some ‘benign’ manifestations of operationalized White privilege. In J. L. Kincheloe, S. R. Steinberg, N M. Rodriguez, & R E. Chennault (Eds.), White reign: Deploying whiteness in America (pp. 77-102). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Rienties, B., Nanclares, N. H., Jindal-Snape, D., & Alcott, P. (2012). The role of cultural background and team divisions in developing social learning relations in the classroom. Journal of Studies in International Education, 17(4), 1-22. Robson, S. (2011). Internationalization: A transformative agenda for higher education? Teachers & Teaching, 17(6), 619-630. Ryan, J. (2011). Teaching and learning for international students: Towards a transcultural approach. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 17(6), 631-648. —. (2005). Improving teaching and learning practices for international students: Implications for curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. In J. Carroll & J. Ryan (Eds.), Teaching International Students. Improving Learning for All (pp. 92-100). Abingdon: Routledge. Ryan, J. & Carroll, J. (2005). ‘Canaries in the coalmine’: International students in Western universities. In J. Carroll & J. Ryan (Eds.), Teaching International Students. Improving Learning for All (pp. 310). Abingdon: Routledge. Ryan, J. & Hellmundt, S. (2005). Maximising international student’s ‘cultural capital.’ In J. Carroll & J. Ryan (Eds.), Teaching International Students. Improving Learning for All (pp. 14-16). Abingdon: Routledge. Shields, C M. (2012). Critical advocacy research: An approach whose time has come. In S. R. Steinberg & G. S. Cannella (Eds.), Critical Qualitative Research Reader (pp. 2-13). New York: Peter Lang. Spiro, J. (2011). Guided interaction as intercultural learning: Designing internationalisation into a mixed delivery teacher education programme. Higher Education Research & Development, 30(5), 635-646. Thom, V. (2010). Mutual cultures: Engaging with interculturalism in higher education. In E. Jones (Ed.), Internationalisation and the student voice: Higher education perspectives (pp. 155-165). Hoboken: Routledge. Trahar, S. & Hyland, F. (2011). Experiences and perceptions of internationalisation in higher education in the UK. Higher Education Research & Development, 30(5), 623-633. Turner, Y. (2009). ‘Knowing me, knowing You’: Is there nothing we can do?: Pedagogic challenges in using group work to create an intercultural learning space. Journal of Studies in International Education, 13(2), 240-255. Urban, E. L. & Palmer, L. B. (2014). International students as a resource for internationalization of higher education. Journal of Studies in International Education, 18(4), 305-324.

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Volet, S. E. & Ang, G. (2012). Culturally mixed groups on international campuses: An opportunity for inter-cultural learning. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(1), 21-37. Volet, S. E. & Ang, G. (1998). Culturally mixed groups on international campuses: An opportunity for inter-cultural learning. Higher Education Research & Development, 17(1), 5-23. Welikala, T. (2013). Inter-perspective pedagogy: Rethinking culture and learning in multicultural higher education in the United Kingdom. In L. Jin & M. Cortazzi (Eds.), Researching intercultural learning: Investigations in language and education (pp. 36-57). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER EIGHT WHO TALKS TO WHOM IN SCHOOLS AND CAFES?: ADULT STUDENT INQUIRY FOR INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE GRETCHEN WILBUR

Who talks to whom in schools and cafes in different cultures, and how do the interactions differ? This was the question behind a travel course designed to develop intercultural competence through an inquiry approach. Driven by curiosity, adult students from a U.S. Midwestern university investigated public spaces in Italy and Estonia and compared intercultural variables, such as non-verbal interactions, power distance, and technology use. The course fostered intercultural competence by engaging students, while abroad, with resident scholars who probed their assumptions and opened their eyes to different perspectives, an essential element of intercultural competence (Bennett, 2009; Deardorff, 2006). Students applied these insights and attitudes when practicing intercultural skills in the day-to-day interactions within the diverse travel group. In the course, three themes—noticing, seeing differently, and seeing within ourselves—built upon one another and demonstrated how reflective inquiry can progress to develop intercultural competence. Here, I describe the inquiry approach that propelled stages of development using Bennett’s (2009) intercultural positioning system. I outline the role of reflective inquiry for adult development of intercultural competence. The course design and an analysis of students’ reflective journals highlight the learning conditions that fostered their growth, especially in the affective dimension of intercultural competence. These learning experiences shed light on how reflective inquiry is a vehicle for effective and appropriate cultural interactions.

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Frameworks for Inquiry and Intercultural Competence Connecting approaches for intercultural competence and reflective inquiry that address adult learning principles can offer an integrative process for designing travel courses that deepen student learning and informed action. Characteristics of these approaches identify how they can work together to create opportunities for intentional discovery and growth.

Intercultural Competence Janet Bennett (2009) offers a framework for developing intercultural competence that builds upon the metaphor of GPS, global positioning system. Her IPS, Intercultural Positioning System, stresses the importance of cultural mapping and locating ourselves to identify and bridge intercultural positions. Through mapping, students compare observations across cultures on variables about which they are curious, such as gestures, proximity, technology use, and advertising images. As they notice different ways of interacting, they locate or position themselves by identifying contextual characteristics. Consequently, they clarify a perspective and compare it with others, and as a result, they begin to identify social, political, and cultural characteristics that influence positions. Reflective inquiry on the interface among positions provides “a strategy for integrating their values, beliefs, and behaviors to enhance the effectiveness of their interaction” (Bennett, 2009, p. 126). Bennett defines intercultural competence as “a set of cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills and characteristics that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts” (Bennett, 2009, p. 122). She identifies four steps for developing competence. First, fostering attitudes that motivate us often begins with curiosity or “unbridled inquisitiveness” (Gregersen, Morrison, & Black, 1998), which is foundational for global leaders and a core component of the affective dimension of intercultural competence (Bennett, 2009, Deardorff, 2006). This inquisitiveness fosters attitudes that motivate us to observe, see things differently, and critically examine social and political contexts that influence actions and reactions. Curiosity leads to discovery in step two of IPS, knowledge that informs us of our own and others’ cultural positions. This increases flexibility in thinking and tolerance of ambiguity. With a budding openness, awareness of others and of self helps develop skills of “effective and appropriate communication and behavior in intercultural situations” (Deardorff, 2011, p. 67). Practicing these skills, for instance in travel group problem solving,

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gives opportunities for IPS step three, assessing the challenge and support factors that affect our adaptation. This sets the conditions for the fourth step of IPS, “the lifelong task of developing skills for adaptation” (Bennett, 2009, p. 132), which include empathy, listening, adapting, resolving conflict, and managing social interactions and anxiety. Approaches for reflective inquiry assist with the ongoing refinement of these skills and their application in new situations and different settings.

Reflective Inquiry Nona Lyons’ (2010) interpretive framework for reflective inquiry and its practice actively engages students in exploring their curiosity with intention. The value of intercultural competence development through reflective inquiry is that adult learners can transfer, into their own personal and professional practice, a way of thinking that uses experiential evidence to interrogate social and political contexts, for the purpose of interacting effectively and appropriately in a variety of cultural contexts. Lyon’s framework integrates features of three prominent theorists: Dewey’s (1910) inquiry thinking as a method for investigating experiences in real world situations; Schon’s (1992) emphasis on reflecting in action and on action; and Freire’s (1970) critical inquiry of social and political contexts. Integrating these three distinctive contributions to reflective inquiry offers a framework for action and behavior (Lyons 2010). Inquiry within reflective practices promotes critical examination of observational patterns across different cultural contexts. In making such comaprisons, students identify their own location, that is, they gradually become aware of their positionality and its impact on actions. This kind of thinking about experience fosters curiosity and extends experience and humanness by learning other points-of-view, a foundation in Freire’s critical reflective inquiry. Relevant and systematic investigations applied in action create conditions where learners increase their skills for effective and appropriate interactions in various contexts, that is, for developing intercultural competence. This is especially meaningful for adult learners. Adult learning principles focus on the concepts of experience, relevance, reflection, and active engagement. Learning is contextualized within experience and prioritizes action, dovetailing with Dewey and Schon’s features embedded in reflective inquiry and practice (Lyons, 2010). Reflection on the process and context of knowing and its application to experience represents Freire’s influence and engages adult learners in

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affirming, extending, expanding, and transforming meaning (Knowles, 1980, Brookfield, 2000, Jarvis, 1999).

The Course and Travel Experience The travel course, Who Talks to Whom in Schools and Cafes?, was designed for a competence-based, undergraduate program for adult learners 24 years and older. The course emphasis on evaluating how intercultural communications are affected by place led students to use an inquiry approach to develop and demonstrate intercultural competence. Throughout the course—pre, during, and post travel—students applied theories of intercultural communication; analyzed how different sociocultural factors interact to shape individuals and interaction patterns; compared and contrasted interaction patterns within and across three different cultures; and developed effective intercultural communication strategies. Pre-travel activities, that is, problem solving scenarios and online discussion forums for selecting observation criteria, required students to apply theoretical constructs from readings (e.g., Hall, 1969, Hofstede, 2012, Triandis, 2012). They used these to analyze dimensions of intercultural competence and examine interaction variables. They began with identifying their own experiences, observations, and curiosities. Readings and discussions suggested methods of inquiry, which they tailored for their use in developing competence. During travel in Venice, Padua, and Verona in Italy and Tallinn and Paldiski in Estonia, students observed interactions and recorded evidence of intercultural variables through cultural mapping. They reflected in action about their own attitudes and behaviours and the actions they observed, often curious about the unexpected action-reaction. In these contexts, they wondered out-loud and in reflection journals why the interaction occurred as it did, curious about the social and political factors that influenced interaction dynamics in public spaces. In dialogue with local university students and scholars, they interpreted patterns and more importantly, considered other social, cultural, and political perspectives for interpreting their evidence. Focused on examining others in Italy and Estonia, they compared and contrasted social and cultural contexts. Soon, elements of their shared experience in the travel group were revealed, upon which they began to critically reflect. The group provided an immediate laboratory for applying intercultural concepts and skills. For example, one student writes,

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While walking in a large group and crossing a narrow bridge, one student accidently bumped another student and that was the trigger to light the emotional fuse. The students had a confrontation and our critical reflection about this pointed to increased anxiety when personal space is violated, as Hall (1969) explained.

The group dynamics provided a real situation, a context for reflecting in and about action. Students were diverse on several dimensions. Their interests differed; some were curious about nonverbal interactions, others about power distance, and several wondered how technology mediates communications. Additionally, the group was 87% female, 53% persons of colour, 20% self-identified homosexuals, and 73% monolingual speakers, although 45% of these had taken Italian conversation lessons. Their backgrounds varied; some were from privilege, others not, ages ranged from 20 to 60, with most between 25 and 40. The inquiry approach set the conditions to practice intercultural skills and attitudes within an immediate context, our diverse group, to make a positive difference in intercultural interactions. Post-travel assignments demonstrated competences through a variety of means (e.g., essays, videos, and symbolic representations) that required a synthesis of theories, experiences, and interpretations. Students were expected to contextualize their experiences—readings, observations, and interactions—through reflections on their own identity and on their developing intercultural competence. Thematic analysis of these assignments describes their curiosity, struggle, and growth in the affective dimension of intercultural competence.

Thematic Analysis The themes evident in student journal entries reflect stages of intercultural development moving from noticing, to seeing differently, to seeing within and among ourselves. Not only did students observe others but also themselves, and used intercultural variables and frameworks to analyze their development of attitudes, skills, and shifting frames of reference (Deardorff, 2006). In the following analysis, students’ voices punctuate the themes, contextualizing how reflective inquiry deepened throughout the experience.

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Noticing Student selection and use of observation criteria in different locations developed their inquiry skills. The focused approach to recording evidence heightened their precision in identifying contextual features of cultural mapping. In Italy, an observed pattern was the closeness of people to one another, for example, sitting side by side instead of across from one another in cafes, and walking arm in arm, hand in hand through piazzas. One student reported, I paid attention to some of the people sitting in the cafés and piazzas; I made note of how they were positioned as well as how they were communicating. I noticed that if there were two people at a table in an open area, they would, sometimes, both sit on the same side of the table.

In Estonia, students observed a greater personal distance among individuals, although this was influenced by the venue. In public spaces, eye contact and interactions were minimal while in schools and bars this was not the case, as shown in the following observation report. From my observations, Estonians did not often shake hands or hug each other. However when a few of us ventured off to a local bar where we met three local Estonians, we found the Estonians expected more physical interaction with us and reciprocated touch very well.

In both countries the lack of cell phones and computers in public spaces was noted; people talked with one another, friends looked directly at another, and rarely did people hold or interact with a technology device. As one student observed, I didn’t see people, sitting together or alone, in restaurants and cafes, ignoring one another in favor of the electronic device in their hands. I didn’t see people taking photos of the meals to Instagram up to Facebook. I didn’t see coupons or discounts to businesses in the FourSquare geolocator application.

Noticing particular things in different cultural spaces challenged expectations: “I was seriously taken aback by the lack of technology use in public,” and “This was quite a discovery and challenged a generalization.” Alternatively, some students were tempted to jump to conclusions: “I would argue that people want to take in their companion as well as share the experience of having the same view of the ‘action’,” and “I think they would rather interact with each other, face to face, than in an interface through a web portal.”

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Seeing Things Differently Students’ preliminary interpretations were probed by resident scholars in Italy and Estonia (Portera, 2012, Vogelberg, 2012), who led them to question premature conclusions and generalizations. Consequently, they began to consider other interpretations and perspectives, expose their own assumptions, and examine the contextual dimensions influencing their own actions. One student captured the insights of many others: I look at the world with different lenses; my vision is stronger and more colorful. This experience has helped me to become more open-minded. I appreciate and respect cultural difference; I even embrace it as my own.

Another reflects that, I was able to look at life events differently. I have a greater appreciation for something as simple as a cup of coffee after immersing myself in a culture that adores cappuccino.

As students describe, they began to reflect in action and about actions (Schon, 1989) and this led to new knowledge about social and cultural factors influencing interactions (Bennett, 2009). They identified and, at times, shifted their perspectives about life experiences. This encouraged some to contextualize their own practice (i.e., to see that norms are humanly constructed and reflect certain values and interests) and to see opportunities for change that could lead to greater intercultural competence within their personal and professional lives.

Seeing Within and Among Ourselves Students’ insights about the host countries began to inform their understanding of themselves, both individually and collectively. The diversity of the group was obvious, at times, painfully so. Interactions with one another became a way to apply intercultural skills using reflective inquiry. While observations in Italy and Estonia sensitized them to interaction variables, intercultural attitudes and skills were fostered through the discord among the travel group. Differences and assumptions based on age, ethnicity, privilege, gender, and sexual orientation came into prominent focus. Because of their close proximity and shared curiosity, they took the uncomfortable leap to investigate, rather than hide behind, their attitudes. This is evident in their self-reflections:

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Chapter Eight Honestly, when I picked my topic, I thought the culture shock that the group would experience would be from the diversity of the foreign country. It was my surprise that the shock was more internal and among ourselves. Feeling out of place in the beginning, I felt I had to prove something and show my worth to the group. As we began to really get to know each other, I found myself playing offensively. I reflected on everyone else’s privileges and forgot that I possessed certain privileges. The experience also was an eye opener to see our own cultural struggles when you get fifteen strangers together and out of their comfort zone. Observations of our own power struggles to determine a place in the group dynamics was fascinating. As the days went by, it was clear to see how walls went down and friendships bloomed within the group. I loved learning and seeing firsthand how there is no such thing as a fixed reality or a pre-given identification solely based on culture.

Evident in students’ reflections, inquiry can deepen cognitive, affective, and behavioural skills to enhance interactive effectiveness in various cultural contexts. The diversity in the travel group provided a vehicle for recognizing and applying the four developmental steps of the Intercultural Positioning System. Students’ curiosity and cultural maps fostered motivating attitudes. Suspending judgments and becoming more open to multiple perspectives occurred after interpretations were probed by resident scholars with whom we met. This stimulated students to see things differently, to use other lenses to interpret their cultural mapping. Consequently, they became more flexible in their thinking and more tolerant of ambiguity, thereby nurturing the affective dimension of intercultural competence The shared, daily experiences within the travel group created an authentic situation for assessing the challenge and support factors for intercultural competence. Unable to escape or withdraw, since we must travel together, there was transparency in the challenge and support that was initiated. Indeed, there were individual differences, but many students in their daily practice began adapting in culturally sensitive ways. The cultural diversity within the group, and the inevitability of continuous interactions, seemed to spur the development of intercultural competence. As one student reflected,

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The group dynamic grew so strong throughout the 10 days that we all stood on a cliff together at the edge of Europe to take a picture, even when clearly advised it was a hazard to our life. Our group was an example of Hofstede’s cultural dimension of individualism vs. collectivism. In this case, individualism took a back seat to the collectivism of the group.

The reflective inquiry approach in the course design actively engaged adult students in examining their own experience and taking action. The students are eager to continue their intercultural skill development, as described by one: It is now my lifetime goal to keep these intercultural lessons in mind on a daily basis and not be so quick to judge and begrudge. I know I have changed because of the people I met.

The inquiry approach applied to their immediate, lived experience and the methods are seen as transferable; “I have, permanently I hope, integrated the skills of observation I learned both in the classroom and abroad into my communication tool library.” Relevance was constructed based on their curiosity; “learning about and being among different cultures adds richness to my own identity, culture, and beliefs.” Beginning with their curiosity, students examined their place within a global context. Their inquiry transformed how they viewed themselves in relation to others. Able to demonstrate effective interactions in a variety of cultural contexts, they can continue their lifelong quest for intercultural competence.

Concluding Reflections The themes of noticing, seeing differently, and seeing within ourselves depict an interplay, rather than a sequencing, of steps in the Intercultural Positioning System. An awareness of others enhances an awareness of self, which in turn motivates effective interaction within and between groups. The course captured the curiosity of students, directed initially to observing what makes others different. During their interpretations, they exposed their fixed-reality and became aware of their positionality. This self-insight extended their inquiry about political and social contexts and expanded their observations of individuals within different cultural contexts. They expressed shifts in their perspectives that can advance their ongoing development of intercultural competence. However, the staying power of these shifts needs to be assessed to determine the impact of the inquiry approach to change practice. Reflective narratives after one and two years from a sample of students will be analyzed to examine influence over time.

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Inquisitiveness sets conditions for learning where students can investigate characteristics about which they are curious. This motivates and engages students and can foster intercultural attitudes, knowledge, and skills. However, varied curiosities can present challenges to course design when there is a wide array of investigations. Coordinating student curiosities may serve to deepen learning while honouring their inquisitiveness. Reflective prompts can be constructed to guide students to coordinate their investigations with a least three sources of evidence, for example, interviews, field notes, and personal narratives. This triangulation of evidence will enable diverse perspectives to flourish and can aid in the systematic, rather than superficial, analysis of social and political contexts. These additions will be implemented when the travel course is offered again in Jamaica. Music and dance as forms of intercultural communication will be highlighted here and the course will include reflective prompts and a triangulation of evidence to coordinate investigations while preserving individual curiosities. Results will be analyzed and compared to those from this travel course in Italy and Estonia. Studying the effects of course modifications can advance the research on reflective inquiry as a method for intercultural education, potentially integrating learning experiences that make the findings from critical inquiry more apparent. Moreover, such research may contribute to global initiatives dedicated to advancing humanness within and across cultures, a primary aim for both intercultural education and critical reflection.

References Bennett, J. M. (2009). Cultivating intercultural competence: A process perspective. In D. K. Deardorff (Ed.), The SAGE handbook of intercultural competence (pp. 121-140). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Brookfield, S. (2000). The concept of critically reflective practice. In A. L. Wilson & E. R. Hayes (Eds.), Handbook of adult and continuing education (pp. 33-50). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Gregersen, H. B., Morrison, A. J., & Black, J. S. (1998). Developing leaders for the global frontier. Sloan Management Review, 40, 21-33. Hall, E T. (1969). Proxemics. Current Anthropology, 9, 83-100. Deardorff, D. (2011). Assessing intercultural competence. New Directions for Institutional Research, 149, 65-79.

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—. (2006). Identification and assessment of intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationalization. Journal of Studies in International Education, 10, 241-266. Hofstede, G. (2012). Dimensionalizing cultures: The Hofstede model in context. In L. Samovar, R. Porter, & E. McDaniel (Eds.), Intercultural communication: A reader (pp. 19-33). Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Jarvis, P. (1999). The practitioner-researcher: Developing theory from practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Knowles, M. (1980). The modern practice of adult education: From pedagogy to andragogy (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge Books. Lyons, N. (2010). Reflection and reflective inquiry: Critical issues, evolving conceptualizations, contemporary claims, and future possibilities. In N. Lyons (Ed.), Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry: Mapping a way of knowing for professional reflective inquiry (pp. 3-24). New York: Springer Books. Portera, A. (2012). Intercultural education. [Lecture and discussion at the University of Verona, Verona, Italy, October 15]. Schon, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner. New York: Basic Books. Triandis, Harry. (2012). Culture and conflict. In L. Samovar, R. Porter, & E. McDaniel (Eds.), Intercultural communication: A reader (pp. 3444). Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Vogelberg, K. (2012). Politeness. [Lecture and Discussion at University of Tallinn, Tallinn, Estonia, October 19].

PART 3 – INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCES IN EDUCATION AND PRACTICES

CHAPTER NINE LEARNING HISTORY AS VIEWS SHARING EXAMPLES OF COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES ALESSIO SURIAN, CHIARA GRECO, MARWA MAHMUD AND GIUSEPPE MANTOVANI

Transmodern Maps and Recent Developments in History Teaching This chapter presents the key results of Reggio Emilia’s (Italy) secondary school intercultural education workshops run by the Mondinsieme Intercultural Centre. The workshops focused on historical periods that are instrumental for comparing European perspectives with South American and Indian perspectives. During the workshops these periods were discussed on the basis of texts that deconstruct a supposed superiority of the European world (Mantovani, 2012). The workshops were intended to encourage a reflection upon preferable and desired futures (Appadurai, 2004) as well as dialogues, by taking into account the decolonial and transmodern epistemic turn as outlined by authors such as Quijano (2000) and Mignolo (2011), which entails “delinking” from and a necessarily disobedient approach to hegemonic and prevailing historical canons. Peruvian scholar Anibal Quijano draws attention to Jose Carlos Mariategui’s reflection about the hierarchical features of power relations. Mariategui’s and Quijano’s writings contribute to highlight the “dependence” aspects that the dominant development model has promoted worldwide. They stress the imperialistic aspects of such models and their impact upon South American cultures.1 Quijano demonstrates that it is 1

For instance in texts such as Dominacion y cultura. Lo cholo y el conflicto cultural en el Peru (Mosca Azul Editores, Lima) and Modernidad, identidad y utopia en America Latina (Editorial El Conejo, Quito).

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possible to structure a “Southern” epistemology based on his analysis of agrarian changes, the dynamics of political and cultural movements amongst peasants, and the urbanization process in Latin America. Quijano’s “coloniality of power” is a key concept which has not yet found an echo in Western intercultural studies. In a recent article (2000) he analyses how the recent political and cultural movements of indigenous people and Afro-Latin-American people have radically challenged the European narrative concerning modernity and rationality. Alternative rationalities undermine any legitimacy of racial and ethnic categorisations while they favour the principle of social equality. These perspectives do not acknowledge the legitimacy of the nationstate as grounded upon the coloniality of power. According to Quijano “body” is the core dimension where one can explore and assess power relations in order to transcend the various Eurocentric dichotomies (bodysoul, mind-body, Europe-Non Europe), which emerged in the Western world at the end of the 18th and 19th Centuries—when the idea of social classes was taking shape—and were based on the idea of a linear historical development that views Europe as its final stage.

“Other’s” History: De-constructing the Presumption of Moral Superiority Today this linear notion of development has an impact upon national policies concerning immigration. A key intercultural challenge within the present Italian social context is the need to help people overcome the inherited cultural barriers of “us” and “them”, between people born in Italy who possess full citizenship rights and foreigners deprived of these same rights and exposed—without any protection—to the duress of the present economic crisis. Charitable, paternalistic, and patronizing attitudes towards foreigners are no solution. On the intercultural agenda there is the need not simply to accept coexistence with immigrant foreigners, but to build a society which includes both “us” and “them” on an equal basis, and overcome the opposition between “us” and “them.” The peaceful coexistence of different “cultures” has been the aim of the multicultural approach which has been adopted in recent years in many EU countries. However, working towards equal rights for the “new us,” as promoted by groups and institutions inspired by an “intercultural” perspective, seems to be a more adequate challenge and goal for social action. While “peaceful co-existence” tends to maintain and to crystallize existing cultural differences, the latter fosters co-evolution, innovation, and exchange

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within and across “cultures” (Baumann, 1996; Benhabib, 2002; Grant & Portera, 2011; Mantovani, 2000, 2012). Ethnocentrism is a powerful obstacle to the formation of “new us” societies. The presumption of “moral superiority” is deeply rooted in many Western societies as a lasting heritage of the colonial era. Then, the staging or placement of cultures relied on a few supposedly highly correlated and supposedly objective indices of progress... the direction of advance was said to run from poor to rich, from magical to scientific, from illiterate to literate, from uneducated to educated, from simple to complex, from authoritarian to democratic, from polygamous to monogamous, from pagan to Christian, from oppress to liberated. The basic claims were that our way of life is more true, good, beautiful and efficient; and that to the very degree that the beliefs, values, and practices of others differ from our own, they are false, base, foul, or irrational. (Shweder, 2003, pp. 347-348)

Italy has its own late although robust record of colonial crimes: In 1935 the fascist regime launched a peculiarly cruel war against Ethiopia, after having completed the occupation of Libya, which started in 1911. In 1938, Race Laws were issued against Jews and in 1938, with the Pact of Steel, Italy allied with the Nazi regime. The memory of Italy’s colonial and racist crimes has been largely omitted from public discourse, in the media and even in schools (Del Boca, 2012). This is the likely reason why racist attitudes, which for more than twenty years have been spread by powerful fascist propaganda, can still be found amongst Italians, inclining them to support explicitly racist and xenophobic political parties. In this historically specific context “decolonizing intercultural education” is a necessary precondition of every serious attempt at intercultural education. In this situation “good intentions are not enough,” because “an intercultural education dedicated, first and foremost, to dismantling dominant hegemony, hierarchies, and concentrations of power and control” has to be put in place (Gorski, 2008, p. 515). Much theoretical work on intercultural education (Bash & Gundara, 2012; Gundara & Portera, 2008; Portera, 2013) strongly recommends avoiding an under-theorization of the context and the resulting de-politicisation, by engaging in self-reflection (Dietz & Mateos Cortés, 2012), taking into account the specific situations (Bieszynska, 2008), going beyond the “well intended but potentially dangerous tendency towards the romantic version of everyone’s points-of-view are valid,” in order to adopt a stronger “framework of anti-oppressive intercultural education” (Min Shim, 2012, p. 209). The shift from multicultural to intercultural education can be understood in more depth with the following:

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Chapter Nine [D]id it not serve to disguise the realities of much cultural interaction: conquest, slave trade, genocide? What are the theoretical premises of intercultural education? Is the aspiration realistically for an education able to negotiate between cultures rather than to show that there is more than one culture? (Coulby, 2006, p. 245)

School is an important place for the deconstruction of persisting colonial prejudices. The idea that Western societies are morally superior is tacitly accepted and supported by the claim that “democracy” has been invented and nurtured only by Western countries, especially the UK and the US, in spite of criticisms to the contrary such as that of Amartya Sen (2011). “The West vs. the Rest” is the most frequently used framework in the historical and geopolitical explanation of events. The same can be said of the imaginary genealogy of a “Western culture” (Wolf, 1982), which was born in the “democracy” of Athens, came of age in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, emerged victorious in the “glorious” French and American Revolutions, and has finally achieved its full political, moral, and scientific maturity in our present times. An example of an innovative history teaching project is the Through Other Eyes (TOE) project, which is translating the intercultural work of Indian philosophers Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999) and Homi Bhabha (1994) into an international curriculum. Within each curriculum topic, TOE’s educational approach exposes learners to different perspectives in order to provide them with opportunities to position themselves in relation to different views. They are required to develop reflexivity by forming connections between different contexts. The six metaphors of the pedagogical process “in practice” employed in TOE’s design are also relevant to the intercultural history teaching workshops run by Mondinsieme in Reggio Emilia. The six metaphors are: writing of identities, construction of difference, positionality, the four lenses that frame otherness and reinforce unequal relations of power, the scale of worth, and the partiality of perspectives. The first metaphor, writing of identities, challenges culturalism and essentialism in favour of the concept of hybridity (Bhabha, 1994), by taking into account the ways in which identities are constantly constructed and reconstructed in interactions that take place in the different social groups to which people belong; that is, identities are written within social contexts. One has the choice to re-write identities and to favour new perceptions by exploring relationships that are different from the original social group. The second metaphor concerns the construction of difference and its colonial definition as deficiency. TOE has favoured the metaphor of a

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hand in order to promote a notion of difference based on the idea of different as well as interdependent individuals who can be regarded as insufficient by themselves but indispensable within their communities to which they can offer a unique contribution, that is, considering difference as a source of learning. Positionality, the third metaphor, refers to “the impossibility of putting ourselves in the shoes of others while we still have our own shoes on.” This metaphor suggests that we cannot really take our shoes off, as we cannot simply forget all of our own experiences, languages, and concepts, while at the same time we lack other people’s experiences: “cultures are context-bound, all shoes are ‘coming from’ somewhere.” This notion is best expressed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) concepts of “dialogism” and “exotopy,” which question the idea of privileging one consciousness over another, and instead promote, in addition to mere empathy, the recognition of and evolutionary dialogue between distinct viewpoints. The fourth metaphor is Spivak’s idea that colonial heritage frames otherness in ways that “subalternise” difference, that is, four lenses that have been used to frame otherness while reinforcing unequal relations of power: the lens of the missionary, the teacher, the tourist, and the anthropologist. The lens of the missionary frames difference in terms of “salvation,” that is, by increasing privilege for the “saviour.” The teacher frames difference within the process of “enlightenment,” that is, by increasing privilege for the holder of knowledge. The tourist frames difference in relation to “consumption” or “entertainment.” Finally, the anthropologist frames difference in relation to “preservation.” No equal grounds are provided by these lenses/worldviews for dialogue among peers. The fifth metaphor consists of a scale of worth. It refers to the worth attributed to knowledges, cultures, and individuals, and exposes the colonial epistemic violence as well the need for an ecology of knowledges (De Sousa Santos, 2009) and ponders what can be learned from different ways of knowing. The sixth metaphor concerns the partiality of perspectives. It highlights the importance of situatedness and the context dependency of language, stressing that the process of questioning reflects the pedagogical process. On the basis of the previous six metaphors, TOE and Mondinsieme’s intercultural history teaching workshops draw four educational principles from Spivak’s work (1999): learning to unlearn; active listening; learning to learn; and learning to reach out. Learning to unlearn allows us to reflect upon what we consider “good” by understanding how much this is dependent upon where we come from

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socially, historically, and culturally, and allows us to acknowledge that there are internal differences and conflicts within all social groups and therefore that culture is a dynamic and conflictual production of meaning in a specific context. In order to acknowledge the limits of our own perspective, we need to explore other perspectives as valuable and as sources of insights into our own mental frameworks. Practicing active listening is a way to encourage our own receptiveness of other worldviews. Through learning to learn we provide ourselves with opportunities to negotiate and rearrange our understanding, take into account different worldviews, and deal with potential uncomfortable feelings and positions while inhabiting transitional spaces. Most importantly, within a learner-centred perspective, in order to apply intercultural education to our own contexts, we need to promote learning to reach out, that is to remain open to potential unpredictable outcomes of active listening and dialogical learning, while at the same time approaching conflicts as learning opportunities and therefore as productive components of learning.

Mondinsieme’s Intercultural History Teaching Workshops In considering how the previous metaphors and educational principles can be translated into learning practice within Italian secondary schools, the core question is how to facilitate learning about the history of others as well as the history of ourselves concurrently in formal education. This very question was the theme of one of the workshops for secondary schools offered by the Mondinsieme Intercultural Centre. A common feature of all the workshops is an active and learner centred approach, which room for reflection about the current students’ interests and aspirations. The core idea is that it is the student her/himself who is actively producing her/his knowledge within a collaborative environment that encourages dialogue and reflection in cooperation and coproduction with the other students. The intercultural history teaching workshop was based on a narrative approach (Mantovani, 2012; Benhabib, 2002) and it encouraged secondary school students to work with each other through cooperative learning activities. In order to trigger students’ attention to problematic historical periods regarding Europe’s relation with other regions of the world, such as the Americas and India, the workshop was based on selected texts by Mantovani (2012). According to Mantovani, “knowing positive aspects of

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other peoples’ traditions is a way to challenge the ethnocentric attitudes that education has inoculated in each of us.” In order to plan the implementation of the workshop two focus groups were organised involving Reggio Emilia secondary school teachers from the secondary schools that had scheduled the workshop. Teachers suggested to focus on the following educational objectives: 1. To encourage the affective involvement of students in history learning (lycée, liceo classico); 2. To encourage students’ in-depth study and critical thinking (vocational school); 3. To go “beyond the history of the textbook” and to focus on the ability to address and manage conflicts.

Two Approaches to the Workshop Implementation The workshop was implemented both with 16 year-old students in a liceo classico, as well as with 18 year-old pupils in a vocational school. In both cases the workshop was based on one chapter from the book Spezzando ogni cuore: Dal Messico di Cortez alla Roma dell’Inquisizione (Breaking every heart: From the Mexico of Cortez to the Rome of Inquisition, Mantovani, 2012), and it included a minimum of five 2-hour sessions. The liceo classico students focused on the Spanish invasion of South America during the 16th Century. The vocational school students discussed a chapter dealing with India after 1556, during the rule of Akbar, who adopted an inclusive approach to the non-Muslim population. During the first session the “jigsaw” approach was used to invite students to study and to discuss one of the book’s chapters. The class was divided into five groups, where each group was asked to read only one of the five paragraphs included in the chapter and then prepare a poster outlining the paragraph’s key ideas. In the second session each member of the groups from the previous session formed a new group together with one member from each of the other four groups. In this way all paragraphs could be shared and discussed together in small groups. The third session provided an opportunity for the students to meet with the author of the chapter that they were studying and with an expert in order to reflect upon what they had learned, to clarify controversial issues, to link what they had studied with issues relating to their own contexts, and to explore potential links between history topics and their own realities.

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The last two sessions (and usually one additional session) were devoted to planning and to developing a presentation of issues from the topics that students had discussed in order to share them with a wider group of students. A power point presentation (in the case of the liceo classico students) and a short documentary video (in the case of the vocational school students) were the two chosen forms of communication featured on March 21st—official day against racism—during a municipal gathering of secondary school students. For their final project, the liceo classico students chose to delve into one of the main reflections which emerged during the discussions of the content of the book, namely the theme of “friction.” In this case the project materials included: the text Spezzando ogni cuore, resources accessed from the Internet (such as interviews, historical pictures and essays, articles, and testimonies), and an audio interview produced by the students themselves. The vocational school students completed their final project by delving into one of the themes regarding their personal experiences which emerged during their classroom discussions under the guidance of the experts, after the dialogic processes of the discussions were analysed. The project materials included: the text Spezzando ogni cuore, interviews, and original video footage produced by the students. In parallel to classroom sessions, we decided to use a Facebook group, administered by the educator and consisting of the students of the two classes, the professor, and the expert. The aim of the Facebook group was to stimulate and maintain the exchange of information, reflections, ideas, and materials. The Facebook group saw the participation of the majority of the students of the liceo classico (except for two students who did not have a Facebook profile), a third of whom participated assiduously by sharing comments and reflections. On the contrary, only 4 out of the 16 vocational students regularly checked the posts, while none of them posted a message.

Key results The workshop was developed in different ways for the two classes, which resulted in different outcomes. The following provides a summary of the results in the two classes.

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Liceo Classico Students The class was composed of 17 students (2 males, 15 females, one girl from Ukraine). The workshop responded to the expectations that were expressed by their teachers during the initial focus group, that is, it facilitated an affective involvement of students in history learning and their active participation in the co-construction of the project’s contents. Positive indicators included: the quality and quantity of interventions made by the majority of the students during the group discussions and during the planning of the final product. Some of the students’ reflections included: - Why did the Spanish act so violently? - Were there other interests apart from the religious interests (which was supposedly the goal of converting “inferior populations” in order for them “to save themselves”)? - Generally speaking, is human behaviour always principally driven by the will to prevail economically and culturally? Moreover, students drew connections to current events, such as the French-led military intervention in Mali: - Concerning the current events, what happens when a group of people lands in a territory already inhabited by another population? Have the processes of encounter-clash changed? What are nowadays the real reasons of these encounter-clashes? Overall, it is evident that the workshop motivated the students to become more involved, although they tended to underestimate the seriousness of the recent military interventions involving the Italian Government and the Italian Army since 1991 in the Middle East, the Balkans, in Africa and in Asia. Their general impression was that colonialism is an element of the past, with no connection to the present international policies that affect the country in which one lives. The following is an excerpt from one of their dialogues: Student A: “Nowadays the processes of globalization, relocation, and economic exploitation afford all populations a decent development or are we producing the same process of encounter-clash as in the past?”

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The final product Students focused on two main issues: - presenting their critical views on different historical conflicts between different populations; - presenting first-hand narratives by people living in countries that have recently been invaded; - presenting topics which are not usually addressed by mainstream media, in order to trigger deeper reflections on these issues. They produced a power point presentation divided into three parts: 1. The Latin-America conquest by the Spanish Crown in the 16th Century; 2. Imperialism in Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries; 3. The French-led military intervention in Mali in January 2013.

Vocational School Students The class included 16 boys, 5 of which born in Italy, 4 in Pakistan, 3 in Morocco, 1 in Albania, 1 in Moldova, and 1 in India. At the beginning, students needed support from the Mondinsieme trainer in order to comprhend the text and to organize themselves into groups. Once they were acquainted with this approach, the majority of the students actively participated in the composition of a collective text (only three of them consistently demonstrated indifference). The group posters demonstrated several indicators of a good level of comprehension by the students: they expressed doubts and reflections that were inspired by Mantovani’s text and they sought a synthesis of the ideas put forth by Mantovani’s text and their own opinions on the same topics Students’ main discussion topics often related to their personal experience. Some of the themes that emerged during classroom instruction are presented below.

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Arranged marriages Student A (Italian): “In the families in which parents decide who you should marry, can you object to their decision?” Student B answers by telling his own experience of a Muslim Pakistani boy who just married a girl who is still living in Pakistan. Student C (Italian): “Do you think that it is right or wrong that your parents choose for you?” Student D (Moroccan origin): “It is right because your parents choose in your own interest.” Student E (Italian): “I can’t find anything positive in this.” Student F (Albanian origin): “In my country they organize arranged marriages for economic reasons: when a girl receives the proposal from a rich boy, she can’t refuse.”

Differences between religious rites and differences between what everyone thinks religion allows or does not allow Religious spaces The students debated about the fact that the mosque is divided into the section for men and the section for women; non-Muslim students did not understand the reasons for this separation, while a Muslim pupil explained that the separation of the religious spaces according to gender is intended so that participants are not distracted while praying. Differences between religious rules and deviant behaviours Starting from a reference in one of Mantovani’s text to the relationships between Sufi and hardliner Muslims at the end of the 16th Century, students debated about the divergent was to determine what is halal (allowed) and what is haram (forbidden). Students wanted to understand why some behaviours are considered halal (allowed) or haram (forbidden) in relation to music. A Muslim student suggested that: “According to the Qur’an, listening to music or dancing are haram because they distract from prayer and meditation.” Students with a Catholic background responded: “So why do you always listen to music using your mobile phone?”. A Tunisian Muslim boy answered that we should understand the difference between what is considered a sin, what is

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forbidden, and what is current permissible. In his view the Qur’an offers “guidelines” to check the nature of our intentions.

Final product Students decided to produce a video presenting the key narratives of the workshop. They decided on the following video script: - Introduction - Discussion of what is haram/halal in dealing with music through: o The reading of the Qur’an and its interpretations o An interview with a Catholic priest - Conclusions

Discussion As already mentioned, the workshop was conducted both with 16 yearold students from a liceo classico, as well as with 18 year-old pupils from a vocational school. Liceo classico students took responsibility for the design, the development, and all the various stages of producing the final presentation. They enjoyed collaborating with each other and demonstrated an excellent degree of autonomy. In terms of contents and objectives, they focused upon identifying and conveying the “voice of the other” and to explore and deconstruct from a critical perspective the dominant stereotyped image of the other that mainstream texts and images in Italy convey with regards to the historical period that was the subject of their study. Vocational school students had to approve their ideas and proposals with the workshop reference teacher and required that the Mondinsieme workshop trainer play a role in ensuring consistency between the contents of the documentary video, the content and methods of the workshop, and available equipment and materials. Students had clear ideas about how to shoot interviews and to record their contributions to the video once the trainer encouraged them to focus on one of the topics debated in the workshop. Mantovani’s (2012) text triggered a deconstruction of cultural frames in the case of the liceo classico students. As for the vocational school workshop, the text provided students with an opportunity to identify and discuss key cultural diversity issues that are relevant in their everyday life. In the case of the liceo classico, reflecting upon historical events accompanied a critical inquiry into the students’ own society and their

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capacity to aspire (Appadurai, 2004). The vocational school students found an opportunity to discuss the tensions between the norms of the societies to which they belong. In the first case Europe seems to remain the main reference point. In the second case such reference points cannot be taken for granted.

References Appadurai, A. (2004). The capacity to aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition. In V. Rao & M. Walton (Eds.), Culture and public action (pp. 59–84). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. M. Holquist (Ed.). (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. (Original works published in 1930s) Bash, L. & Gundara, J. (2012). Contesting borders: A challenge to some paradigmatic assumptions of intercultural and comparative education. Intercultural Education, 23(5), 383-395. Baumann, G. (1996). Contesting culture. Discourses of identity in multiethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhabha H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge. Benhabib, S. (2002). The claims of culture: Equality and diversity in the global era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bleszynska, K. M. (2008). Constructing intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 19(6), 537-545. Coulby, D. (2006). Intercultural education: Theory and practice. Intercultural Education, 17(3), 245-257. Del Boca, A. (2012). Italiani, brava gente? Vicenza: Neri Pozza. De Sousa Santos, B. (2009). A non-occidentalist west?: Learned ignorance and ecology of knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7/8), 103125. Diaz, G. & Mateos Cortés, L. S. (2012). The need for comparison in intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 23(5), 411-425. Gorski, P. C. (2008). Good intentions are not enough: A decolonizing intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 19(6), 515-525. Grant, C. A. & Portera, A. (2010). Intercultural and multicultural education. Enhancing global interconnectedness. Abingdon: Routledge. Gundara, J. S. & Portera, A. (2008). Theoretical reflexions on intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 19(6), 463-468. Mantovani, G. (2000). Exploring borders: Understanding culture and psychology. London: Routledge.

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—. (2012). New media, migrations, and culture: From multi- to interculture. In L. Fortunati, R. Pertierra, & J. Vincent (Eds.), Migration, diaspora, and information technology in global societies (pp. 21-34). Abingdon: Routledge. —. (2012). Spezzando ogni cuore. Dal Messico di Cortez alla Roma dell’ Inquisizione. Retrieved from http://ilmiolibro.kataweb.it/libro/storia-efilosofia/73882/spezzando-ogni-cuore/?refresh_ce Mignolo, W. (2011). Epistemic disobedience and the decolonial option: A manifesto. Transmodernity, 1(2), 44-66. Min Shim, J. (2012). Pierre Bourdieu and intercultural education: It is not just about lack of knowledge about others. Intercultural Education, 23(3), 209-220. Quijano A. (2000). Colonialidad del Poder: Eurocentrismo y América Latina. In E. Lander (Ed.), La colonialidad del Saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales: Perspectivas latinoamericanas (pp. 201-246). Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Sen, A. (2011). Peace and democratic society. Oxford: Open Books. Shweder, R. (2003). Why do men barbecue? Recipes for cultural psychology. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Spivak G. C. (1999). A Critique of post-colonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the peoples without history. Berkeley: The University of California Press.

CHAPTER TEN WHAT COOPERATIVE LEARNING CONTRIBUTES TO THE INTERCULTURAL CLASSROOM YAEL SHARAN

When teachers stand in front of a classroom, looking out at a sea of students who speak different languages or dialects and come from diverse countries and counties, can they continue to teach what they have always taught and in the way they have always taught—even employing some cooperative learning (CL) procedures? The challenges presented by the intercultural classroom may be daunting for teachers as they face varied and unfamiliar behaviours and perceptions of learning and teaching. They are also challenged to find a curriculum that is both meaningful and engaging. This chapter will explore how CL responds to these challenges in the intercultural classroom. On what basis can it be claimed that CL is appropriate for the intercultural classroom? Because CL is a generic and varied pedagogy, it has always viewed the classroom as heterogeneous. CL procedures are designed to draw out each learner’s potential contribution to learning. Even CL’s ancestry is heterogeneous: It was born to several “parents:” John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and Morton Deutsch, to name a few. In the late 19th century John Dewey, the philosopher, psychologist, and educator, sought educational means for establishing and nurturing the connection between the individual and society. He believed that offering learners opportunities for taking responsibility for their learning would stimulate their interest and involvement in their studies, and prepare them for active engagement in society. His ideas took shape in the work of the developers and researchers of CL models such as group investigation (Sharan & Sharan, 1992; Thelen, 1981). To this day his ideas influence educational policymakers, and even school designers, who seek to make the classroom

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a relevant place for all students in the complex and fast-changing reality of schools and classrooms (Ujam & El-Fiki, 2006). Several developers of CL methods trace their roots to social interdependence theory, conceptualized by Morton Deutsch (Johnson & Johnson, 2010); others trace their roots to a neo-behaviourist orientation and a motivational perspective, incorporating the ideas of competition and the accumulation of rewards (Slavin, 1995, 2010). Given that CL methods and models always include some form or degree of group interaction, lessons taught by Kurt Lewin’s school of group dynamics are applicable to all forms of cooperative learning, whatever their primary theoretical orientation (Sharan & Sharan, 1992). Most CL researchers in the last half of the twentieth century were also educators who designed a variety of methods (which consist of steps to be followed systematically), models (which present guidelines that can be adapted flexibly), and short term procedures, all of which promote learning together in small groups, making CL the most thoroughly researched of all pedagogies. Common to all CL methods, models, and procedures is that they organize students “to work in groups toward a common goal or outcome, or share a common problem or task, in such a way that they can only succeed in completing the work through behaviour that demonstrates interdependence, while holding individual contributions and efforts accountable” (Brody & Davidson, 1998, p. 8). Before discussing how to activate the application of CL to the field of intercultural education in the classroom, let us first explore a few of the more common ways culture affects learning.

Avoiding Uncertainty One of the dimensions that characterize a culture is the degree to which it avoids uncertainty and the ways it seeks to do this. Students who grow up in societies typified by what Hofstede (1986) calls low tolerance of uncertainty, prefer structured learning situations with precise objectives, detailed assignments, and strict time frames. They will hesitate to answer a question put to them directly so as to avoid possible failure. Teachers are respected as experts and are expected to have all the answers. By contrast, in cultures with “weak uncertainty avoidance,” with high tolerance of uncertainty or ambiguity, students view intellectual disagreement as a stimulating facet of cognitive development and are not deterred by teachers who may say “I don't know” (Sharan, 2010a). The degree to which a culture avoids uncertainty or tolerates ambiguity is particularly relevant to the application of cooperative learning. A CL

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task often invites more than one answer and may thus be a cause of potential discomfort for students who come from a culture that does not tolerate ambiguity and emphasizes highly structured learning tasks. For example, students from a Confucian heritage culture tend to feel more comfortable when told what they need to know and precisely how to prove what they have learned (Thanh, 2011). In today's highly mobile world circumstances are such that, regardless of their cultural background, uncertainty is often the only certainty in the lives of so many children. Their lives demand that they familiarize themselves with new social rules and cues in and out of school—often several times in a short period. Understandably many prefer the comfort of routine, well-defined tasks that follow detailed procedures and precise steps to arrive at one correct answer or a predetermined solution.

Verbal participation structures Another relevant dimension of culture, studied by sociolinguists is the kind of verbal participation structures it develops in its children. A teacher may plan a CL activity designed to have students voice their opinions openly, for example as in Think Pair Share (Lyman, 1981). Students from a Euro-American background adapt easily to this invitation, while those from a Latin or Southeast Asian background may expect the teacher to initiate communication and will speak up only when called upon, for fear they will say the “wrong” thing. This reluctance may be in sharp contrast to the bi- or multilingual communication many students experience in their life outside of school, where out of necessity they make meaning in bi- or multilingual ways (Stewart, 2012). In some cultures students are used to nonverbal participation and may not volunteer comments to the group, such as Native Hawaiian students who are not used to asking questions in school. Students from some Native American nations are used to patiently speaking in turns and will not eagerly raise their hands to interrupt a fellow student (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991).

Language Use and Narrative Styles Culture also affects language use and narrative styles and when those of the teacher are different from those of the students, another challenge is added to classroom life. Imagine the gap between children from China who are used to reading signs that say: “Little grass is smiling lightly” and an American teacher used to seeing signs that bluntly say “keep off the grass.” What a world of difference between the two! In traditional Chinese

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culture, words for natural phenomena are not objective descriptions but are couched in metaphors that embody the social and cultural values the culture assigns to them. If the use of metaphor and other ornamental forms of speech is new for the teacher he or she may perceive their use as less intelligent and less competent (Sharan, 2010a). The progression of stories found in Western literature—beginning, sequence of events, resolution, ending—is not universal. Indeed, learning a language requires learning its unique organization of paragraphs and stories. Because cultures vary in the kinds and frequencies of discourse children encounter, teachers should not assume that children have within their language repertoire the narrative genres necessary for academic success in the dominant school culture (Heath, 1982). Moreover, insisting that students adopt unfamiliar literacy patterns may threaten familiar and valued aspects of their identity, and add to their feelings of alienation from school (Hedegaard, 2003). The contrast between teachers’ language patterns and students’ language patterns and learning styles in higher learning institutions in New Zealand was the focus of a study by Baker and Clark (2010). They examined the implementation of cooperative learning in culturally mixed groups of international students. Their findings highlight the obstacles in interpersonal interaction experienced by students with language difficulties. It is not surprising that these obstacles hamper effective participation, which is at the heart of productive group functioning.

Transmission of Knowledge Another element that is helpful for teachers to be aware of is how culture has shaped patterns of transmitting knowledge. How do the ways of acquiring information at home differ from the approaches typically used at school? To the extent that they differ it may take students a while to learn new information easily. For example, children who are accustomed to more holistic and intuitive ways of transmitting information may have to struggle to adjust to a teacher’s sequential, linear ways that may seem to them disassembled and fragmented. Not every mother rehearses with her children the list of things to be done to get ready for school or cautions the child that if he does “x” the result will be “y.” Some mothers tell stories that do not have clear time frames and teach their children by example. By learning about their students’ varied cultural traditions and linguistic and learning styles, and at the same time integrating CL procedures into their teaching repertoire, teachers activate the partnership between CL and intercultural education. Putting this partnership into effect

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helps create a culturally sensitive, cooperative learning classroom, where learning is made meaningful for all (Sharan, 2010a, 2015a).

The Culturally Sensitive Cooperative Learning Classroom When the classroom is viewed as an intercultural setting, children of various religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are “no longer regarded as a ‘problem’ or ‘risk,’ but as ‘resources’” (Portera, 2008, p. 484). As of the 1960s, when CL emerged as a systematic pedagogy, CL procedures offer learners the opportunity to harness these various “resources” in the pursuit of learning goals in an environment respectful of all contributions to learning, in which learners will be more inclined to value themselves and others. The culturally sensitive CL classroom creates opportunities for the exchange of ideas, for a coming together of different viewpoints, and for an appreciation for alternative ways of thinking. The rich pool of CL teaching procedures offers teachers in the intercultural classroom many ways to actively engage their students’ varied backgrounds and learning styles in the learning process. There are specific CL methods, models, and procedures based on tasks that delegate learning roles, thus affording each group member an opportunity to do his or her share, taking into account learners’ different backgrounds and abilities. This task design also promotes learners’ status and acceptance among their peers (Cohen, 1994; Sharan & Sharan, 1992). In general, authentic, well designed and well executed CL methods, models, and procedures motivate teachers and learners to learn with members from different cultural and linguistic groups (Lotan, 2003). From simple CL activities that require minimal interaction, to complex models such as complex instruction and group investigation, (and other inquiry-based models), CL creates learning opportunities that call for and promote diverse skills and knowledge (Damini, 2014; Pescarmona, 2014). With time and practice students and teachers realize that the different interests, backgrounds, values, and abilities of group members are in fact the group’s greatest asset and enrich the class’s pool of resources for expanding knowledge. Recently the influence of this approach to teaching and learning has been felt in the field of assessment, as demonstrated in the question that Filkin (2012, p. 20) suggests teachers ask themselves in order to guide assessment: “How are my students making sense of the texts they read in class?” Posing questions like this represents a significant step in developing the basic components of teachers’ cultural competence in the classroom: knowledge (of how different cultural groups understand the world); skills (in handling classroom interaction to facilitate equitable

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learning); and disposition (open-minded attitudes and respect for diverse worldviews) (Mushi, 2004, p. 184).

Building Community At the core of the culturally sensitive cooperative learning classroom is a sense of community, nurtured by activities that develop the interpersonal communication and helping skills required for learning together. This is one important step in the attempt to redress the loss of a sense of community that many immigrants feel in their new countries (Palaiologou, 2007). At the foundation of all CL methods are activities that slowly build up the interpersonal communication, helping skills, and sense of belonging required for learning together. Community building has always been stressed in CL classrooms precisely because in many societies there is a marked loss in the feeling of mutual responsibility and help. Ironically, in CL classrooms in New Zealand, for example, Maori children learned anew how to cooperate, a quality they had lost after having assimilated into the dominant competitive culture that gives priority to the individual and to working independently. The attempt to redress the loss of a sense of community is appreciated today even outside the classroom, in many organizations and businesses that emphasize teamwork and collaboration. It has even spread to virtual teams that also require a solid foundation of mutual trust and collaboration to function effectively (Holton, 2001).

Cooperative Climate Together with a sense of community in the CL classroom, teachers strive to create a cooperative climate. By highlighting the contribution diverse perspectives can make to learning, such as when carrying out simple CL procedures that invite multiple and diverse answers, the teacher establishes a balance between individual, pair, and group work and a gradual and smooth transition from teacher directed learning to cooperative learning, where acceptance of diversity is the norm.

Discover What is Meaningful Researchers too numerous to name are concerned with students’ and teachers’ efforts to bridge any mismatch between students’ cultures and the cultural model of the teacher and the school. All agree that in the intercultural classroom students often need help in finding meaningful

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connections between the curriculum and their personal worlds (Gay, 2002; Hedegaard, 2003; Sharan, 2015a). A teacher cannot discover what is meaningful to students by the traditional one-way communication from teacher to students, like a “banker” (to borrow Paolo Freire's term), who “deposits” knowledge without taking time to explore the students’ mindset. Ways to make learning more meaningful and increase school success were explored in a three yearlong studies in a western Canadian high school where Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students studied together. Attempts by one teacher to integrate aspects of Aboriginal cultural knowledge and perspectives into the social studies curriculum were clearly appreciated by the students. They reported that the teacher used different teaching methods to help them understand, such as drawing their ideas or writing them in poetry, discussion circles or problem-solving circles. They were motivated by the fact that the teacher knew a lot about Aboriginal culture and content, had a positive attitude toward the students, and clearly wanted them to do well (Kanu, 2007). Another attempt to make learning meaningful is described by Stewart (2012) in her work with Latino and Latina immigrant high school youth new to the U.S. Noting that these students demonstrated out-of-school literacies mainly on Facebook, at work, and through their entertainment, the teacher created the opportunity for them to research topics meaningful for them. When the students researched topics such as Latin American music, the college and university system in the U.S., and immigration laws, their interest in learning increased as did their school related language skills. Naturally teachers play a key role in promoting the kind of verbal behaviours that ensure interaction and exchanges among group members. Sharing ideas, challenging perspectives, and discussing alternative answers before reaching agreement do not necessarily come easily to students. One way to develop effective communication among group members and in the class as a whole is to pose questions with more than one answer. When teachers repeatedly model this behaviour it becomes a permanent feature of classroom discourse, highlighting the inherent heterogeneity of the classroom and of each student’s potential contribution to learning. This verbal behaviour does not involve a major change in classroom organization, yet it is significant for setting the stage for CL (Sharan, 2015b).

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Group Investigation and Diversity One of the CL models that affords students the time and means needed to learn how to make meaningful connections between their world and the world of school is the group investigation model (Sharan, Sharan, & Tan, 2013). Group investigation (GI) integrates interaction and communication between learners with the process of academic inquiry. Group members begin by deciding what they want to investigate about a given topic and then plan how to go about their investigation. They discuss and determine their individual and group learning goals, two CL features that have been shown to be significant for group members (Hijzen, Boekaerts, & Vedder, 2007), and delegate different parts of the inquiry to their members. As learners grow accustomed to sharing responsibility for investigation projects and see the benefit of diverse contributions, appreciation of their classmates’ diversity increases and status issues in the classroom are also positively affected (Cohen, 1994; Damini, 2014). All the basic cooperative learning and communication skills are part and parcel of the investigation; therefore it is preceded by the many teambuilding and communication activities that set the stage for any CL method, model, and procedure (Baloche, 1998; Sharan & Sharan, 1992). Also helpful are the basic guidelines and examples that Watson (2001) offers to enable students to use what they know to help construct new meanings. For a start teachers may make one specific small change in their traditional practice by inviting students to voice their understanding of a concept before teachers share their own understanding of it. Throughout the investigation project students have opportunities to involve their varied backgrounds, interests, and learning styles. The diverse skills and knowledge involved in an inquiry project increase students’ interest in learning, and allow them to gain some insight into the work ethic of their peers, features found to be important in motivating students to work in multicultural groups (Strauss & Stuart, 2011). Whether students and teachers carry out the full GI model or its components (e.g., the cooperative planning of a task), they experience how diverse interests, backgrounds, values, and abilities enrich the class’ pool of resources for expanding knowledge (Sharan, Sharan, & Tan, 2013). An example of the positive effect of GI on teachers’ and learners’ attitudes towards diversity is based on Damini’s (2014) two-year study of the implementation of GI in multicultural classrooms. The majority of teachers in this study maintained that the sharing of a learning goal chosen cooperatively promoted the perception of diversity as a potential resource for learning. In their interviews teachers said that well-structured GI

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enhanced cooperative behaviour, a view reinforced by student feedback. Students came to appreciate the opportunities to learn together with diverse classmates and felt that their perceptions of their fellow students and of diversity in general, even outside school, were significantly enhanced.

Benefits of Responsibility for Learning Some cooperative learning methods and models call for more teacher direction than others, but all of them enable students to interact, in varying degrees, and to talk to one another about what they think, know, and feel about what they are learning. In addition, when studying together in small groups, students help each other, and at the same time, develop selfdirection and responsibility for their learning; many learners find a voice they did not know they had. Pescarmona (2014) points out that by enabling pupils to perceive themselves as an active part of the learning process, cooperative learning turns the classroom into a new public space in which students are empowered to exercise their own voice. Intercultural education is also concerned with what to teach while developing the acceptance of diversity as part of every subject (Bash, 2014). A helpful and even refreshing way to do this is for teachers and students to learn about the contributions that different ethnic groups or nationalities have made to their content areas. They may be familiar with the achievements of select, high-profile individuals from a few ethnic groups in some areas, but there is more to each culture than what is popularized on television, movies, or on the soccer field. As Sleeter reminds us, we have to avoid “the tendency to view culturally responsive pedagogy as cultural celebration that is disconnected from academic learning…(where) learning ’about’ culture … substitutes for learning to teach challenging academic knowledge and skills through the cultural processes and knowledge students bring to school with them” (2012, p. 569). Actually it is not necessary to go far afield: A rich and valuable resource for the study of cultural diversity is right there in the classroom. Teachers may make use of students’ knowledge to bridge between their worlds and mandated subject matter. For example, students’ surnames, a concrete and diverse phenomenon, could be the catalyst for an inquiry into their sources and meanings. They could then go beyond the classroom to inquire into the origin of diverse street names and eventually expand the study to an investigation of how recent settlers in the area influenced changes in shops, various institutions, restaurants, etc. (Sharan, 1998).

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This way social, geographical, and historical content are combined as a result of the cultural diversity in the classroom, stem naturally from students’ reality, and are not added on in separate artificial patches. But a word of caution: As much as teachers need to learn about the general characteristics of different cultures, it is helpful to keep in mind that children do not come to school as official ambassadors of their countries of origin (Sharan, 2010a). We need to remember that every individual student is not an automatic product of culture, but one who actively interprets it in his or her own way. There are as many variations within a group as there are commonalities, and each individual manifests the characteristics of his or her cultural background differently. This is especially true of children who were not born in their ancestral country, and may have fragmented knowledge of their heritage or even of their heritage language. They certainly cannot be seen solely in light of the traits of their ancestral culture and may in fact have very complex identities, which is all the more reason for teachers to encourage and enable students to clarify what they do know, build on it, and seek ways to relate it to new learning (Gay, 2002). To this end Tharp and Gallimore (1991) developed instructional conversations to help teachers guide small discussion groups that encourage students to relate concepts and texts to their personal experience, and compare and discuss how they understand them. Teachers establish a climate that promotes expression of and respect for diverse viewpoints so that children feel free to share their understandings with the teacher and with fellow students. Teachers who implement instructional conversations in their classrooms note visible changes in their pupils’ learning patterns: Students give longer responses, initiate conversations, and learn to contribute to, challenge, and extend one another’s statements. While instructional conversations are not considered a cooperative learning model per se, they are most compatible with the basic principles of CL (Sharan, 2015b) and may serve as an effective platform for the implementation of CL methods, models, and procedures.

Conclusion The wealth of CL research and practice over the past 60 years allows us to confidently claim that all students benefit from learning this way. Yet the effect of CL is not automatic. As we all know, in any context just placing students in groups does not guarantee that they will work smoothly together, all the more so when there is a potential gap between teachers’ and students’ expectations and behaviours in the classroom (Sharan,

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2010b). It is essential to create a balance between judicious, gradual implementation of cooperative learning procedures, and sensitivity to the multiple manifestations of diversity. When teachers build on these practices and attitudes, they provide a safe environment in which all students can create meaningful connections between their worlds and school.

References Baker, T. & Clark, J. (2011). Cooperative learning: A double edged sword: A cooperative learning model for use with diverse student groups. Intercultural Education, 21(3), 257-268. Baloche, L. (1998). The cooperative classroom. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Bash, L. (2014). Some issues for cooperative learning and intercultural education: Reflections on aspects of the recent work of Jagdish Gundara. Intercultural Education, 25(3), 179-186. Brody, C. & Davidson, N. (1998). Introduction: Professional development and cooperative learning. In C. Brody & N. Davidson (Eds.), Professional development for cooperative learning: Issues and approaches (pp. 3-24). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Cohen, Elizabeth. (1994). Designing groupwork (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Damini, M. (2014). How the group investigation model and the sixmirrors model changed teachers’ roles and teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards diversity. Intercultural Education, 25(3), 197-205. Filkins, S. (2012). Beyond standardized truth: Improving teaching and learning through inquiry-based reading assessment. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE. Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53, 106-116. Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11, 49-76. Hedegaard, M. (2003). Cultural minority children’s learning within culturallysensitive classroom teaching. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 11(1), 133-152. Hijzen, D., Boekaerts, M. & Vedder, P. (2007). Exploring the links between students’ engagement in cooperative learning, their goal preferences and appraisals of instructional conditions in the classroom. Learning and Instruction, 17, 673-687. Hofstede, G. (1986). Cultural differences in teaching and learning. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 10(3), 301-320.

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Holton, J. A. (2001). Building trust and collaboration in a virtual team. Team Performance Management, 7(3/4), 36-48. Johnson, D. & Johnson, R. (2009). An educational psychology success story: Social interdependence theory and cooperative learning. Educational Researcher, 38, 365-379. Kanu, Y. (2007). Increasing school success among aboriginal students: Culturally responsive curriculum or macrostructural variables affecting schooling? Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education: Studies of Migration, Integration, Equity, and Cultural Survival, 1(1), 21-41. Lotan, R. (2003). Group-worthy tasks. Educational Leadership, 6(6), 7275. Lyman, F. (1981). The responsive classroom discussion: The inclusion of all students. In A. S. Anderson (Ed.), Mainstreaming Digest (pp. 109– 113). College Park, MD: University of Maryland. Mushi, S. (2004). Multicultural competencies in teaching: A typology of classroom activities. Intercultural Education, 15(6), 179-194. Palaiologou, N. (2003). School adjustment difficulties of immigrant children in Greece. Intercultural Education, 18(2), 99-110. Pescarmona, I.. (2014). Learning to participate through complex instruction. Intercultural Education, 25(3), 187-196. Portera, A. (2008). Intercultural education in Europe: Epistemological and semantic aspects. Intercultural Education, 19(6), 481-492. Sharan, S., Yael, S., & Tan, I. G. (2013). The group investigation approach to cooperative learning. In C. Chinn, C. Hmelo-Silver, A. O’Donnell, & Carol Chan (Eds.), The international handbook of collaborative learning (pp. 351-369). London: Taylor and Francis. Sharan, Y. (1998). Enriching the group and the investigation in the intercultural classroom. European Journal of Intercultural Education, 9(2), 133-140. —. (2010a). Cooperative learning: A diversified pedagogy for the diverse Classroom. Intercultural Education, 21(3), 195-203. —. (2010b). Cooperative learning for academic and social gains: Valued pedagogy, problematic practice. European Journal of Education, 45, 300-313. —. (2015a). Meaningful learning in the co-operative learning classroom. Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education, 43(1), 83-94. —. (2015b). How can teachers’ questions contribute to the cooperative classroom? BETTER, 7(1), 12-13. Sharan, Y & Sharan, S. (1992). Expanding cooperative learning through group investigation. New York: Teachers College Press.

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Slavin, R. E. (1995). Cooperative learning: Theory, research, and practice (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. —. (2010). Instruction based on cooperative learning. In R. E. Mayer (Ed.), Handbook of research on learning and instruction (pp. 344360). London: Taylor & Francis. Sleeter, C. E. (2012). Confronting the marginalization of culturally responsive pedagogy. Urban Education, 47(3), 562–584. Stewart, M. A. (2012). Juxtaposing immigrant and adolescent girl experiences: Literature for all readers. English Journal, 101(5), 17-22. Strauss, P., U, A. & Young, S. (2011). “I know the type of people I work well with”: Student anxiety in multicultural group projects. Studies in Higher Education, 36(7), 815-829. Thanh, P. T. H. (2011). Contrasting roles: Teacher and students in cooperative learning and Confucian heritage culture (CHC) classes. Experiments in Education, 39(3), 55-62. Tharp, R. & Gallimore, R. (1991). The instructional conversation: Teaching and learning in social activity (Research report 2). Santa Cruz, CA: The National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning. Thelen, H. (1981). The classroom society. London: Croom Helm. Ujam, F. & El-Fiki, S. (2006). Promoting an endogenous approach to education at the local community level. Intercultural Education, 17(3), 259-279. Watson, J. (2001). Social constructivism in the classroom. Support for Learning, 16(3), 140-146.

CHAPTER ELEVEN A SENSE OF BELONGING IN MULTICULTURAL SCHOOLS: OPINIONS OF FUTURE ITALIAN AND CANADIAN PRIMARY TEACHERS PAOLA DUSI AND MARILYN STEINBACH

Teachers say that in order to perform their job well, it is essential to be able to bring together the heterogeneous students of a class into a group, a community of learning. Students of different ages, personalities, social status, and gender meet in a space that they will have to share for days, months, and years, as public schools welcome individuals from very different worlds. Sylvia Plath writes: .

everybody went: the spry, the shy, the podge, the gangler, the future electronic scientist, the future cop… the poor, smelling of sour wools and the urinous baby at home and polyglot stew; the richer, with ratty fur collars, opal birthstone rings and daddies with cars…. There it was – Education – laid on free of charge for the lot of us. (Plath, 1977, p. 40)

School was founded with the mission to “teach young people how the world works” (Arendt 1999, p. 254). In this space, tailored to them, children are called upon to deal with the human world: a world of knowledge, thoughts, and experiences generated in dialogue with each other, inside and outside themselves (Vygotsky, 1992). The other and our relationship with the other is at the heart of learning, of knowing and becoming ourselves. In the processes of teaching and learning, affectiverelational and cognitive elements are intertwined with public, private and intimate aspects. A teacher cannot maintain a good teaching practice without a good network of relationships, as these are interdependent elements (Goldstein, 1999). If the what of learning is the content, curriculum, or topic, the where and how of learning are the situation and

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the context. A student cannot learn in a vacuum; therefore it is essential for the teacher to know how to build a network of relationships in which each student feels involved and engaged.

School as Community If feeling out of place is a Stimmung of the human condition (Heidegger, 2002), this disorientation takes place at the beginning of every school year. The classroom becomes a living space for several hours per day. There are new adults to rely on in this space where one goes in search of oneself and one’s place in the world, and new travelling companions with which to identify, to confront, to learn from, to contend with, and to form friendships (or enemies) that can last a lifetime. The teacher is asked to perform the task of weaving relations: a task which takes time, care, and educational skills. In the words of primary teachers:1 In first grade you realize that children are randomly placed next to each other. In first grade there are conflicts: they try, they struggle, that is they try to get along, try to fight, try to do everything, as they are getting to know each other. (P3/38) The class is not a previously established entity; it doesn’t have a settled physiognomy, already formed, but it builds and consolidates and changes over time. This makes us think of ways to expand, improve, and to stimulate relations. (P7/56) If a child does not feel well in school, all teaching will fail because the child ... first meet[s] basic needs, security, having a point of reference, feeling part of the group; then they can be open to discover everything about knowledge and skills. (P4/99)

Learning is a laborious task, in which one is exposed to the risk of being wrong, in which one is judged by other students, the teacher, and oneself. The ability of children to cope with the demands of the new world of education is, according to Judy Dunn, closely linked to the type of relationships that they have when they start going to school (2006, p. 6). In 1

These quotations of primary school teachers were collected in a research project on their teaching practice. The 40 teachers involved (with at least 5 years’ experience each) were identified through colleagues who referred to them as particularly good. The analysis of this data inspired us to investigate the perspectives of future teachers on the importance of a sense of belonging to the class group in the learning processes of primary school children.

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order for students to engage their energies in the action of learning, they have to feel accepted and recognized, a full-fledged member of a group, and part of a community. The term community carries complex meanings. The history of mankind is the history of a community to which we belong to or from which we are excluded. Each individual is defined by his or her membership or exclusion from a community. However, the literature on the concept of community is very broad and this term is used in various ways: common to many of these definitions is the concept of belongingness (Soloon, Watson, Battistich, Schaps, & Delucchi, 1996). While there are differences in opinion on specific characteristics of organizations that constitute communities, as Furman (1998) explains, community is not present until members experience feelings of belonging, trust in others, and safety. (Osterman, 2000, p. 323)

According to McMillan & Chavis (1986, p. 9), a sense of community means that members have a feeling of belonging, of being important to each other and to the group, and “a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together.” Being a member of a community means, among other things, feeling part of a group, and more specifically, the essence of a community is the sense of belongingness that connects its’ members with each other. “While social support and peer acceptance connote a passive engagement of the individual with the social network, a sense of belonging represents a more active engagement and an internal experience of a strong psychological connection to a group” (Baskin et al. 2010, p. 629).

A Sense of Belonging in Multicultural Schools Belonging is considered an ubiquitous need (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Connell & Wellborn, 1991; Ryan, 1995). As Maslow stated, human beings feel the need “to herd, to flock, to join, and to belong” (Maslow, 1987, p. 20). When students experience a feeling of belonging in the school community, relatedness (one of their fundamental needs, along with competence and autonomy) is met: in ways that affect their attitudes and their behavior. They like school and are more engaged in learning. They have more positive attitudes toward themselves and others and are more likely to interact with others, peers and adults, in positive and supportive ways. They are more accepting of authority and more empathetic toward others. Conversely, a sense of

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However, recognizing oneself and being recognized as a member of the class is not a natural path, at least not for everyone. Even among children, difference, combined with a lack of knowledge of the other, often results in distance. In multicultural schools, the process of constructing a community of living and learning becomes more difficult because of the high degree of heterogeneity that characterizes the group of children. This heterogeneity can be rooted in different cultural universes, evident through colours, smells, and sounds; it is a heterogeneity of people who do not have a shared language in which to recognize themselves in a history, a culture, or a common membership. It is particularly difficult for students from migrant families to feel part of their school community (Baskin et al., 2010; EUMC, 2004; Willms, 2003). The migration experience, being placed into a new reality, is one of the most stressful events a family and a person can undergo. It carries with it both opportunities and risks. Among the negative factors of life experiences in multicultural contexts we find marginalization, stigmatization, isolation, and exclusion from various contexts of their new life (Portera 2007, p. 152). The experiences of marginalization and exclusion are not only due to cultural difference, but are also connected with belonging to a migrant family, often with a lower social status. This membership carries with it a risk of a social exclusion. Bynner (1999) explains that children are affected by their parents’ social exclusion, and the processes of social exclusion are carried on from generation to generation. As a result, immigrant children experience a very high level of a sense of non-belonging, often for linguistic, cultural or socioeconomic reasons: The deleterious effects on students’ engagement associated with living in a family of low socio-economic status (bottom quartile within the country) are considerably greater. The odds of having a low sense of belonging are about 38 per cent greater for students living in low socio-economic status families than for those living in average socio-economic status families. Low socio-economic status is also a risk factor for low participation; the odds ratio is 1.26. Students who were foreign-born are also at greater risk of having low sense of belonging or low participation. The odds ratios are comparable to those associated with low socio-economic status: 1.37 for low sense of belonging and 1.30 for low participation. (Willms, 2003, pp. 37-38)

Although it is difficult to create a sense of belonging at school for immigrant children, it can be possible with a high socioeconomic level,

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family involvement in the child’s schooling, a positive school environment, and welcoming attitudes on the part of their schoolmates (Pong et al., 2010). A teacher is in the position of being able to have a positive influence on the family involvement in the child’s education, on the attitudes classmates assume towards each other, and on the classroom environment. In multicultural schools, the teacher’s role in building a learning community is crucial and requires much attention and investment. The quality of the relationship that teachers develop with their students has the most direct affect on students’ sense of belonging in the classroom and their subsequent engagement (Osterman, 2010, p. 240). Are prospective teachers aware of the difficult task to which they are called? Are they aware of the crucial role of a sense of belonging to the class for the psycho-emotional well-being, processes of social integration, and educational outcomes of the children who will be entrusted to them?

Our Study on Sense of Belonging In order to understand the ideas of future teachers on the importance of a sense of belonging for students, our research involved future teachers in Italy and in Canada. In 2011/2012, our research participants were in their third year of a four year teacher education program, and they participated on a volunteer basis. The data collection involved focus group discussions (Short, 2006) and a questionnaire which was developed on the basis of our analysis of the focus group data. For the focus group verbatim, we used the method of conversation analysis, in which verbal interactions are explored as a site where intersubjective understandings about the participants’ attitudes and experiences are created (Peräkylä, 2005). To analyse the questionnaire data, we proceeded with a thematic content analysis (Krippendorff, 2012). In Italy, the study was conducted at two universities, Verona and Brescia, with students in primary teacher education programs. These participants were following a course in intercultural education. There were 56 participants in Verona and 57 participants in Brescia. The sample consisted of 4 males and 109 females, and 111 of these participants had Italian as a mother tongue, while one had Portuguese and one had Urdu. Most of the participants were from small towns (n=95), with a few from the larger centres of Brescia (n=11) and Verona (n=7). The average age of the 113 participants was 22.7, while the average age of the five participants in the preliminary focus group discussion was 21. In Canada, the study was conducted at the University of Sherbrooke. 116 questionnaires were administered to 7 males and 109 females who

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were also in a primary teacher education program. These students had not completed a course in intercultural education, but they were following a course on pedagogical differentiation. They were all mother tongue French speakers. Most also originated from small towns (n=102), with one from Niger, one from the Canadian capital of Ottawa, and 12 from the metropolitan centre of Montreal or its suburbs. Their average age was 22.4, while the average age of the five participants in the focus group discussion was 31.

A Sense of Belonging According to Future Teachers Here we focus on our thematic analysis of the two questions from the questionnaire data that we consider most essential to describe these teacher candidates’ understandings of sense of belonging, its importance, and how teachers can foster it. These two questions were: (1) How would you define a sense of belonging? and (2) Is it important for primary teachers to foster a sense of belonging? Why? As these questions were open-ended, we coded larger units of meaning and subthemes from the data (Miles & Huberman, 1994), comparing themes from the Italian and the Quebec data. When asked to define a sense of belonging, the majority of the Italian participants gave answers describing a positive feeling (to feel accepted, to feel important or useful, to feel respected or appreciated), about 13 per cent spoke of actively participating, and a few participants mentioned developing relations with others, not feeling excluded, or feeling protected. The majority of the Quebec responses were very similar to the Italian responses, describing a positive feeling, although in order of frequency they spoke of feeling well, feeling accepted, feeling appreciated, and feeling important. About 25 per cent described it as feeling comfortable or in an appropriate space, 12 per cent spoke of actively participating, and a few participants mentioned developing relations or collaboration with others, and feeling supported. The idea of feeling accepted and appreciated by one’s peers stands out as a dominant theme in all the participants’ descriptions of a sense of belonging. The notion of well-being, feeling comfortable, feeling at home, or feeling in one’s place (better described in French as sentir à sa place) was the next most important theme in the Quebec data, whereas feeling important or useful was the next more important theme in the Italian data. Finally, the concept of active participation and collaboration was a more minor theme in both sets of definitions of a sense of belonging. It is interesting to note that this minor theme is one that teachers could more easily control in a classroom situation, whereas the first major theme

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would be the most difficult for teachers to influence. When asked whether it was important for primary teachers to foster a sense of belonging in their students, the responses were unanimously positive. Participants’ responses to the question of why this was important were the focus of our second thematic content analysis. Here Italian participants primarily spoke of fostering students’ learning, with the next most important categories of responses concerning motivating students and promoting a sense of well-being and comfort for students. The Quebec responses were very similar in the categories of motivating students and promoting a sense of well being, but the theme of fostering students’ learning came in as the third most important focus in the Quebec data rather than as the most important as in the Italian data. These three themes cover almost all of the responses to this question, but one minor theme concerning students’ self esteem was also expressed in both sets of questionnaires. There is great similarity between the responses of the two groups despite the different sociocultural contexts, and both sets of data reveal the importance that a sense of belonging can contribute to the school life of children. These future teachers are all conscious of the importance of a sense of belonging for children, and of the significant role that teachers can play in order to allow their students to satisfy this basic human need. They all described the importance of their task as teachers to foster a sense of belonging for their students in their class group. Among their teaching tasks, the participants place particular significance on dealing with students with difficulties (Attention-Deficit Disorder for the Quebec participants and immigrant students for the Italian participants). It is likely that the Italian participants placed more emphasis on immigrant students in part because they filled out the questionnaire in their course on intercultural education, whereas the Quebec participants completed the questionnaire in their course on pedagogical differentiation, therefore focusing more on children with difficulties such as AttentionDeficit Disorder (ADD). Italian participants did not mention ADD because Italian schools have specific policies on the integration of ADD students, well established since the 1970s in Italian law. In Quebec these students have also been integrated into regular classes for a long time, but in the context of their pedagogical differentiation course, the participants in Quebec still showed concern for their integration. The Italian participants’ focus on the students of migrant parents can be better understood if we consider the fact that the situation of students who are not Italian citizens has become an educational issue since the 1990s. These students must learn to master the Italian language, yet the teachers are not trained in

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second language teaching during their primary teacher education program at university. In the case of Quebec, primary teachers may be less concerned with language learning for newcomer students as they usually attend classe d’accueil (welcome class for language learning) before joining regular stream classrooms. Students of immigrant origins, particularly the foreign-born, have a tendency to have a weaker sense of belonging than host society students (Holland, 2012; Moro, 2010). These students are “more likely than other youths to have a low sense of belonging. This finding points to the importance of classroom and school policies and practices that teachers and principals can implement to promote social inclusion” (Willms, 2003, p. 48).

Conclusions According to future teachers in Italy and Quebec, fostering a sense of belonging means helping the students to feel accepted, comfortable, useful, and supported, and helping them to develop relations and collaborations with others. These future teachers believe they must encourage a sense of belonging in their students in order to foster their learning, motivation, and well-being. Creating a sense of belonging at school allows students to feel important, needed, and respected. As human relations play a central role in everyone’s life, these teachers recognize that relations with others require active participation in the life of a classroom. The relational aspects emphasized by the participants in this study are essential for feelings of competence and efficiency. One’s self and one’s capacities must be recognized (Ricoeur, 2005) and put into action (Sen, 1993; Bandura, 1995; Nussbaum, 2006) to ensure the process of developing autonomy and social inclusion, and this is true beyond the context of school, especially in multicultural societies where the causes of ethnic conflict and social inequalities are on the rise. Both groups of participants recognize that teachers play a crucial role in the development of a sense of belonging for their students, as this permits teachers to respond to students’ fundamental needs. These needs are interwoven for students, as the satisfaction of one affects the satisfaction of the other (belonging, reconciliation, competence, and autonomy) (Osterman, 2000, 2010). According to John Dewey, the quality of education “is realized in the degree in which individuals form a group” (1958, p. 65), and in classrooms, a heterogeneous group of children becomes a community of living and learning through the efforts of the teacher.

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References Arendt, H. (1999). Tra passato e futuro. Milano: Garzanti. Bandura, A. (1995). Self-Efficacy in changing society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baskin, T. W., Wampold, B. E., Quintana, S. M., & Enright, R. D. (2010). Belongingness as a protective factor against loneliness and potential depression in a multicultural middle school. The Counseling Psychologist, 38(5), 626-51. Baumeister, R. F. & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529. Bynner, J. (1999). Risk and outcomes of social exclusion: Insights from longitudinal data. Paris: OECD/Mimeo. Connell, J. P. & Wellborn, J. G. (1991). Competence, autonomy, and relatedness: A motivational analysis of self-system processes. In M. R. Gunnar & L. A. Sroufe (Eds.) Self processes and development (Vol. 23, pp. 43-77). Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Dewey, J. (1958). Experience and education. New York: Macmillan. Dunn, J. (2006). L’amicizia tra bambini: La nascita dell’intimità. Milano: Raffaello Cortina. European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenofophobia (EUMC). (2004). Migrants, minorities and education: Documenting discrimination and integration in 15 member states of the European Union. Vienna: EUMC. Goldstein, L. S. (1999). The relational zone: The role of caring relationships in the co-construction of mind. American Educational Research Journal, 36(3), 647-673. Heidegger, M. (2002). Segnavia. Milano: Adelphi. Holland, M. M. (2012). Only Here for the Day: The social integration of minority students at a majority white high school. Sociology of Education, 85(8), 101-120. Krippendorff, K. (2012). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Maslow, A. H. (1987). Motivation and personality (3rd ed.) New York: Addison-Wesley Longman. McMillan, D. W. & Chavis, D. M. (1986). Sense of community: A definition and theory. Journal of Community Psychology, 14(1), 6-23. Miles, M. & Huberman, A. (1994). Qualitative data analysis. An expanded sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Moro, M. R. (2010). I nostri bambini domani. Milano: Franco Angeli.

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Nussbaum, M. C. (2006). Frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species memberships. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Osterman, K. F. (2000). Students’ need for belonging in the school community. Review of Educational Research, 70(3), 323-367. —. (2010). Teacher practice and students’ sense of belonging. In T. Lovatt, R. Toomey, & N. Clement (Eds.), International research handbook on values, education, and student wellbeing (pp. 239-260). Dodrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Peräkylä, A. (2005). Analyzing talk and text. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Plath, S. (1977). Johnny Panic and the bible of dreams. London: Faber and Faber. Pong, S. L., Chiu, M. M., & Mori, I. (2010, May). Immigrant students’ sense of belonging at school in 41 countries: Country, family, school, and student factors. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the 54th annual conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, Chicago, IL. Portera, A. (2007). Tesori sommersi. Milano: Franco Angeli. Ricoeur, P. (2005). Percorsi del riconoscimento. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore. Ryan, R. M. (1995). Psychological needs and the facilitation of integrative processes. Journal of Personaliy, 63(3), 397-427. Sen, A. (1993). Capabilities and well-being. In M. Nussbaum & A. K. Sen (Eds.), The quality of life (pp. 30-53). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Short, S. (2006). Focus group interviews. In E. Perecman & S. Curran (Eds.) A handbook for social science field research (pp. 103-115). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Vygotsky, L. S. (1992). Pensiero e Linguaggio. Roma: Laterza. Willms, J. D. (2003). Student engagement at school: A sense of belonging and participation: Results from Pisa 2000. Bruxelles: OECD.

CHAPTER TWELVE FROM BIASES TO SOCIO-COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY: A TRAINING PROGRAM FOR TEACHING IN INTERCULTURAL SCHOOL SETTINGS MARGARITA SANCHEZ-MAZAS AND ANETA MECHI

The progress of globalization and professional mobility, as well as the coexistence of various generations of migration, have contributed to the formation of a heterogeneous school population in western societies. The promotion of multicultural education is one of the frequent responses to this increasing diversity. This perspective is not only aimed at enabling young people to work in culturally diverse environments, but also at building socially cohesive communities and giving all pupils the highest chance for success. However, the implementation of this policy often takes place in contexts marked by tensions around the immigration issue which may be obscured by a multicultural frame of reference which values heterogeneity, plurality, and diversity. The rhetoric of cultural diversity thus overlooks the issues of inequality and power relationships that characterize majority-minority divisions in contemporary societies. In public opinion, and sometimes also among education professionals, the issues such as unruly behaviour, low performance, or dropping out of school are conflated with problems related to contact between cultures and cultural integration. Within this context, it becomes necessary to develop new approaches able to provide teachers with useful tools in order to deal with various problematic educational situations. The present chapter will first present a social psychological approach to understanding the biases and shortcomings that are likely to affect teachers’ perceptions of, interpretations of, and responses to the problematic situations they have to deal with in multicultural school settings. We then

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propose a conceptualization of socio-cognitive flexibility as the central tool that may allow teachers to overcome some of these biases and, as such, as a professional competence that should be acquired through an appropriate training program. Our contribution to the construction of such a program will then be detailed and some results of its effectiveness within the context of a professional training course will be presented in order to illustrate its beneficial effects in the field of education.

Shortcomings in Teachers’ Practices Considering the large variability of cross-domain educational situations (CDES), we set up an encompassing training program which would allow teachers to overcome hasty interpretations and biases in perception when confronted with problematic situations in terms of school behaviour, motivation to work, or academic performance. Empirical social psychological research shows how teachers may explain these phenomena using information such as the social and cultural background (Darley & Gross, 1983) or the immigrant status (Chryssochoou, Picard, & Pronine, 1998) of students. Jones and McGillis (1976, p. 393) have called this kind of interpretation the category-based expectancies that “derive from the perceiver’s knowledge of the target person’s class, category, or reference group.… From this knowledge the perceiver can generate at least crude expectancies about attribute-effect linkages”. The problem is that expectations about other individuals can induce those individuals to adopt behaviours consistent with these expectations (Klein & Snyder, 2003). One type of behavioural confirmation process derives from the activation of social stereotypes associated with the individual’s category membership (Jussim & Fleming, 1996). A teacher could influence minority group pupils into providing evidence of incompetence, and then use these behaviours as evidence that they are at fault for their disadvantaged position. This is an instance of the famous self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1968), a vicious circle through which the target is placed unambiguously into a specific category and assigned all the traits associated with this social category. The implementation of multicultural education should thus be addressed in connection with research on stereotype formation and its impact on behaviour (Biernat & Dovidio, 2000). Although it is almost impossible for the individual to analyze the social reality in-depth and permanently or to avoid categorizing altogether, it is essential to make future professionals aware of the automatic activation of stereotypes (Devine, 1989), especially in certain stressful situations encountered in

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praxis. Even if teachers attempt to avoid categorizing automatically, they risk relapsing with ever greater intensity not only at the level of stereotype (“rebound effect”, Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994), but also at the level of behaviour (Follenfant & Ric, 2010). One solution seems to be the development of capacities that allow one to readjust expectations systematically, despite the high cognitive load and temporal pressure. In other words, if suppressing categorizations is impossible, the competence of searching for information in order to render the categorization processes more flexible seems to be a promising alternative. Current understanding of the traits and behaviour of pupils across educational contexts is complex. Indeed, such knowledge is often a priori and there are few proven solutions to the related challenges. Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, and Coulson (1992) argued that domains in which knowledge is complex and poorly structured (history, medicine, law, literature, or teacher training, etc.) need to be treated differently than those that are well-structured, mainly because in the former the learners are asked to apply their knowledge in new and often unique situations. Thus, methods for developing teachers’ awareness of the existence of several explanations of the material (Dennis & Vander Wal 2010), that is, of the fact that there are multiple interpretations of the same situation and that interpretations may vary according to how the material is represented, can help teachers (and therefore students) embrace complexity. Such methods can lead teachers to develop an association network, that is interconnections between various possible explanations, thus avoiding oversimplification as well as rigid and linear reasoning. The construction of methods designed to promote socio-cognitive flexibility, however, is far from being an easy task. The training program should be built while taking into account major impediments in information processing as identified in socio-cognitive research. Tracing back to Piaget (1956) and his analysis of the individual tendency to focalize on one aspect of one’s reality (perceptive centration) and to form a unique interpretation (representative centration), the idea that many biases and blockages characterize current information processing has been more recently addressed in lay epistemic theory (Kruglanski & Freund, 1983; Kruglanski, 2012), which specifies how they impact the formation of subjective knowledge. Of particular interest for our purpose is the notion that people tend to validate their first hypothesis by searching for consonant evidence, thus resulting in a freezing of the epistemic sequence, instead of searching for disconfirming evidence that would allow unfreezing and the pursuit of cognitive exploration. Also of interest is the contention that categorical information is often privileged in lay thinking

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over individualized information (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). Given the possible implications of such biases at the behavioural level, as stated above, these shortcomings should be addressed in a training program designed to induce socio-cognitive flexibility.

A Cross-Field Competence The concept of flexibility is defined in neuroscience as the capacity of the brain to alter a strategy in order to adapt to novel or complex situations, especially when routines or automatic responses prove to be insufficient or inadequate (Shallice, 1982). This concept is also applied in cognitive psychology to refer to the ability to change one’s point-of-view or approach when they appear to be inadequate for solving a problem (Clément, 2009). Drawing upon these concepts, we propose a definition of flexibility specifically related to social objects (individuals, situations, behaviours, and opinions) which we call social cognitive flexibility (SCF). Designed to promote the pursuit of cognitive exploration through hypothesis generation, SFC emphasizes the fluidity of passing through multiple possible categorizations, thus preventing the crystallization of a single and readily accessible one. This definition stresses the reversibility of interpretations over time and promotes the development of a cognitive competence which is to aid the practitioner in becoming operationally effective across diverse educational situations. The specific training course in our context, which sought to develop SCF in its professional version (i.e., specific to teaching), aims to guide the professional in the development of his/her teaching approach on the basis of two fundamental requirements: doubt (reflecting before accepting) and a plurality of viewpoints. Every situation is marked by ambiguity and may be perceived and interpreted differently according to the information which attracts the perceiver’s attention due to a number of factors, such as one’s own professional/ideological frame of reference, personal concern, emotional load, etc. This particular skill requires one to accept the very notion of uncertainty and to overcome its negative connotation in terms of a lack of information triggering cognitive imbalance and psychological discomfort (Heider, 1958). In contrast, we contend that uncertainty can become a driving force in the pursuit of reflection (Tiedens & Linton, 2001). Likewise, the ambiguity of information contributes to the prevention of hasty reductions and the promotion of one’s receptivity to new information (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). In sum, doubt and an awareness of multiple points-of-view comprised the key operational concepts of the training program, because they foster the continuous

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formation of multiple perceptive centrations and representative centrations (Piaget, 1956). In other words, the goal is to pay attention to details when we perceive a phenomenon and to take all details into account when we interpret and judge. The concepts of doubt and multiple points-of-view underline the two core dimensions of SCF (Mechi, 2012): (1) flexible anticipation of others’ attitudes and behaviours, and (2) flexible explanation of others’ attitudes and behaviours. After a brief definition of these dimensions and their specificity in the field of education, we will briefly present how they were integrated as competences to be acquired in our training program.

Flexible Anticipation of Human Attitude and Behaviour There is a common belief that human behaviour is predictable (Singelis, Hubbard, Her & An, 2003). Based on this belief, people tend to anticipate the personality traits, behaviour and abilities of others during the process of impression formation (Asch, 1946; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990), often with support of the individual’s reputation (stereotype consensualisation, Collins, Biernat & Eidelman, 2009). This can lead to an inaccurate anticipation of others’ attitudes and behaviours. Flexible anticipation in the context of teaching, therefore, implies flexibility in the prediction of pupils’ attitudes and behaviours at both the epistemic and the relational levels, that is, with respect to pupils’ knowledge as well as classroom interaction.

Flexible Explanation of Human Attitude and Behaviour Flexible explanation refers to the ability to suspend one’s judgment of others, either others’ based on their personality traits, psychological and intellectual characteristics, qualities, and defects, or as a function of their membership in a social or ethnic group (Pansu, Dompnier, & Bressoux, 2004). The former, conceptualized by Ross (1977) as a fundamental attribution error, is one’s tendency to generalize internal explanations of behaviour, while the latter, according to Pettigrew (1979), is an ultimate attribution error, or the tendency to explain others’ behaviour according to group membership (e.g., a person is perceived as lazy because of his/her belonging to a “black” minority). Flexible explanation in education is thus concerned with flexibility in the explanation of pupil’s attitudes and behaviours at both an epistemic and a relational level, a skill that rests on the capacity to suspend expeditious judgments about the reasons for pupils’ school performances and behaviours.

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The Training Program Following a preliminary session designed to equip teachers with essential tools and techniques that can be used to establish a supportive classroom setting (i.e., managing the pupils’ entering the classroom, initiating learning tasks, and the teacher’s use of space and nonverbal behaviour), the program begins with a sensitization device aimed at raising awareness of the shortcomings of individual perception and the existence of a plurality of points-of-view (Nicolini & Pojaghi, 2000). More precisely, trainees are presented with a brief film sequence and are asked to simply write down in their own words what they have seen and afterwards to exchange their account with their neighbour. The discussion that follows this exercise regularly results in many different observations which reveal different perspectives among the trainees. This discussion is followed by a theoretical presentation of two contrasting approaches to perceiving social reality, namely a spontaneous approach and a critical approach. Contrary to the inferences and interpretations that are found in the former, the latter focuses on objectively observable items and involves the use of linguistic markers which indicate a more critically distant viewpoint (i.e., adverbs such as: maybe, perhaps, possibly; the use of the conditional; indirect language such as “the protagonist says that…”). Supported by many examples of student responses collected from previous training courses, this lesson is meant to enhance openness to the plurality of viewpoints and to expose the difference between an objective description and a subjective interpretation. This crucial distinction is necessary for the completion of the first assignment given to trainees in the program, which is the description of an educational situation, either personally experienced or witnessed/reported. All descriptions, most often completed in pairs, are collected in order to be reused during a capstone assignment at the conclusion of the course: an indepth analysis of the same educational situation in light of all theories and methods taught during the course. At different stages, the effectiveness of the program is appraised by means of a questionnaire which trainees are asked to complete. Since the implementation of the program is closely related to a research project, the aim of this questionnaire is twofold: It assesses both the efficacy of the training at improving participants’ SCF as well as the robustness of our conceptualizations and hypotheses on the basis of empirical evidence. Regarding the latter, both quantitative and qualitative data are collected with an emphasis on the relevance of this course for teaching in multicultural contexts. This combination of qualitative and quantitative

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data contributes to a more profound understanding of teachers’ responses, concerns and suggestions (through the collection of data on these dimensions) and of the type and level of competence that should be attained (through the analysis and discussion of exemplary sets of descriptions/accounts of educational situations). In addition, it improves the likelihood that participants will appreciate both the possibility to analyse their real-life problematic situations in schools by applying the psychosociological concepts learned in class as well as the potential benefit of such analysis.

Empirical Evidence The quantitative data offers insights into the effectiveness of the program through the computation of several indicators of professional SCF that reflect – here in an educational context – the use of category and traitbased expectations (i.e., awareness of the relative unpredictability of human behaviour, e.g., “Generally, when a teacher asks his/her colleagues about one pupil, he/she can anticipate the behaviour of this pupil”) and explanations (i.e., openness to the plurality of viewpoints, e.g., “If a pupil has unruly behaviour, he/she certainly comes from a disadvantaged background”). This construal, which has been tested for reliability (Į > .86), appears to correlate positively with relevant “flexibility” variables (r > .25). The analysis of its evolution from the beginning to the end of the program (via repeated measures ANOVA) reveals that teachers’ social cognitive flexibility seemed to have increase during the training course offered in 2011 (F (1, 46) = 6.82, p < .01, Ș²=.13) and in 2012 (F(1, 103) = 6.44, p < .01, Ș²=.06), regardless of teachers’ professional level of experience or gender. Together with these quantitative results, a series of qualitative data was derived from the corpus of teachers’ accounts of cross-domain educational situations (CDES). More precisely, this data includes samples of descriptions and analyses of CDESes produced during pre- and posttraining, respectively. The analysis of these texts offers insight into the evolution of the trainees based on their own reports of the processes at work as they are coping with their chosen CDESes. In one example, the description reported the case of the same teacher working in two contrasting school environments, one more demanding and prestigious (a grammar/college preparatory school which served as a gateway to higher education) than the other (a vocational school). In the participant’s initial account, the two populations were perceived very differently according to the type of school they attended, especially in

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terms of the pupils’ ability to understand and appreciate literature, which was the teacher’s domain: pupils at the more grammar school were seen as motivated and engaging whereas vocational school students were perceived as indifferent, or even hostile towards the texts, so much so that the teacher came to question the very relevance of this subject for these students, asking whether it was not hypocritical to try to introduce them to this “bourgeois” culture, so distant from their interests, before their insertion into their professional lives. While completing the training program, the teacher started questioning this initial viewpoint due to her increased receptivity to certain contextual clues (such as the social composition of students’ parents, who in the context of a meeting with all parents proved to be more heterogeneous than she had expected in terms of social class). Moreover, she realized that she was attributing her teaching difficulties to the restructuring of the school rather than to her own teaching methods. Finally, she discovered that in her proposed study of poetry – which involved free associations and the generation of images rather than technical tools – vocational school students felt more confident, pleased and creative than grammar school students, who lost their interest in poetry when told that it would not been evaluated. Clearly, in this example, the concepts learned in the training program, such as stereotypes, attribution, and hypothesis generation, together with more refined notions such as the distinction between performance and mastery goals (Dweck, 1986; Mechi & Sanchez-Mazas, 2012), seem to have been crucial tools in the reappraisal of the educational situation and the adaptation of professional practice. Moreover, the findings provided by the qualitative data by means of open-ended survey questions demonstrate an increase of about 30% in the number of responses reflecting a switch from pupils’ responsibility to teachers’ responsibility for the resolution of problems encountered at school.

Conclusion The present chapter was intended to give an overview of a current training program aimed at better equipping young teachers working in school contexts characterised by social and cultural diversity. Unlike other perspectives in the realm of multicultural education, this program does not target particular categories of pupils, and thus attempts to overcome the risk of reintroducing stereotyping modes of thinking (Ogay & Edelmann, 2011). By addressing problematic issues rather than problematic pupils, it opens the way to an approach to challenging educational situations

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through the lens of general concepts that explain certain underlying psychosocial mechanisms that pervade the manifestation of similar problems across unique contexts. This approach calls upon the practitioners’ reflexivity, which, according to Schön (1987), entails a dialogue between thought and action which enables both activities to cope with the complex problems associated with their tasks. Due to its grounding in a theoretical framework, it also offers new insights and research results which in turn invite a constant renewal of conceptualisation and application (Steele, Scarisbrick-Hauser, & Hauser, 1999). Indeed, social psychology seems to offer very promising perspectives for addressing complex educational situations due to its analytical perspective, which helps to avoid the double trap of social determinism and psychological reductionism (Sanchez-Mazas, 2014). The research project associated with the training program is therefore emblematic of the pragmatic turn in the social sciences, which aims to better serve future practitioners and take on a more active role in social institutions (Finkelstein, 2005).

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centered sociology: Addressing problems through applied sociology. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Tiedens, L. Z. & Linton, S. (2001). Judgment under emotional certainty and uncertainty: The effects of specific emotions on information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 973988.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN SCHOOL EXPERIENCES OF CANADIAN ADOLESCENTS WITH LESBIAN, GAY, AND BISEXUAL PARENTS KENNETH D. MCNEILLY AND MICHEL FERRARI

Estimates suggest that between 1 and 12 percent of all children under age 20 have a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered (LGBT) parent (Stacey & Biblarz, 2001). Literature reviews all agree that children of LGBT-identified parents fare just as well as their peers raised in heterosexual-led families (Herek, 2006). Associations of psychologists, psychiatrists, paediatricians, and other child advocacy groups support such conclusions, but one might ask what life is like at school for the children of LGBT-led families. To answer that question requires understanding their family experience through narrative. For Allport (1968), narratives of personal identity broaden our understanding of individual meaning making. For McAdams (2008), narratives of meaning making show how individuals make sense of their own experiences and construct a coherent life story. McNeilly (2012) investigated the lives of adolescents with queeridentified parents by asking them to reflect upon their own lived experiences. He then analyzed their responses using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), an inductive approach for investigating how individuals make sense of their experiences (Reid, Flowers, & Larkin, 2005). According to IPA researchers Smith and Osborn (2003), semistructured interviews are the “best” and most common choice for IPA because they allow the researcher to modify initial questions, probe responses, and explore topics that might not have been considered prior to the interview. Each participant in McNeilly’s study had at least one parent who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. (Since none of the participants

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had a transgendered parent, we will refer to their experiences with LGBidentified parents.) See Table 1 for further demographic data. IPA analysis of interview transcripts coded participants’ responses into three domains: family themes, queer identity themes, and school themes. See Table 2 for the full list of themes uncovered in the study. This paper considers only school-related themes.

School Experiences of Canadian Youth with LGBidentified Parents School Theme 1: Disclosure Decisions and Practices After author Abigail Garner learned, as a child, that her father identified as gay, she quickly deduced the need to be careful whom she told. “From that moment on,” she recalled, “I began a lifetime of seeking out allies and avoiding people I perceived as homophobic and therefore threats to my family” (Garner, 2004, p. 39). Several participants hinted at similarly cautious behaviours and of various stages of openness at school regarding how their family identity differed from the heteronormative. Nineteen-year-old Julia’s candid response provided the clearest indication of these various stages: When I was very young, I’d be like, “I have a mom only.” And then I started to get bullied so I would—I would, when people would ask if my mom was gay, I’d say no. If they’d ask where my father was, I’d make up stories. “Oh, he died,” or “I don’t know,” or whatever. [Then] I got older, and I started making different friends who just didn’t care.

Julia’s lies to friends during elementary school were motivated by counsel from one of her peers. “I had a friend who was like, ‘Just lie.’ And I did that. And that was bad advice.... I shouldn’t have to lie.” This was a feeling shared by the lesbian-identified mothers in Dundas and Kaufman’s (2000) study, who felt that when their children were truthful about their family identity, their children were psychologically healthier. Sixteen-year-old Christie articulated a view that there is no value in withholding a parent’s sexual identity from one’s friends, and several other participants shared this preference for transparency, like 16-year-old Owen. “Don’t try to cover it up,” he said, when asked for words of advice for other youth with LGB-identified parents. “Just, like, tell the truth ‘cause if you try to hide something, in my opinion it won’t feel nearly as good as if you go and tell the truth to someone.” Owen also revealed that he chose his friends on the basis of their general level of acceptance for

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diversity. “I wouldn’t have friends that wouldn’t accept gay people,” he stated, showing that, in a school setting, his story was constructed for a particular purpose, and he actively negotiated between several possible ways of responding to his peers. “If you can’t tell your friends straight up that you have gay parents ‘cause you think that they’re going to judge you, then you should realize that they’re not actually your friends,” Owen asserted.

School Theme 2: Repercussions of Disclosure We identified five possible repercussions of participants’ decisions to disclose their parents’ sexual identity to others: neutrality, connection, humour, hostility, and curiosity. Brief examples of each are provided below. Denise described neutrality as the ideal, almost a non-response. “The best reaction is just nothing. Because it’s sort of like, okay. That’s it. You know? You’re just as average as the next person, right? So there’s no reason to react.” Many other participants appreciated the “no big deal” responses, because they themselves saw their families as “average” or “normal.” The participants’ frequent use of the word “normal” reveals some understanding that their situations do not smoothly align with the master narrative of heteronormativity. And yet, they too want themselves and their families to be regarded as “normal.” “I hate thinking of us as being different,” remarked 17-year-old Anna, “I just don’t feel any different just because my mom is gay.” Much like Hammack and Windell (2011), Anna hopes society will redefine “normal.” Sometimes, a disclosure to others led peers to establish a personal connection. “When I told my friend, Bobby, who’s gay,” recalled Anna, “he was pleasantly surprised.... We bonded in that way because we could, um, relate to each other through our experiences.” These bonding moments demonstrate that there can be considerable comfort and affirmation when others’ narratives overlap one’s own, even when the person to whom one discloses did not personally identify as LGB but had an extended family member who did so. Another pattern of responses from peers was through humour—but not all participants appreciated jokes about their family configuration. For Denise, there was nothing worse: [The worst reactions are] when people think that they’re being funny. And they make a joke. It’s always hurtful. Because it feels like, um, I’m trying to let you in here, and you are—even if I know this person’s like, a bully

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or just trying to be funny, and I know you’re just uncomfortable. That’s why you’re making a joke. It still hurts, right?... Like, this is my family.

Nineteen-year-old Ellie was irritated by her older brother’s university peers, who “would laugh at the fact that [our] mom was once straight, like, and then decided to, like, come out being a lesbian.” She recalled telling them, “This is ridiculous, you guys. I don’t ask if your dad is super hot or if he’s bang-able. Or what your parents do in bed.” Nick seemed slightly more at ease with his peers’ use of humour, saying that some of his male friends sometimes made sexual jokes when he outed his mother to peers. “There are two girls?” he recalled one friend asking. “Can I come over for a sleepover?” Unfortunately, some peers are purposefully hostile and engage in behaviours that include teasing, ongoing bullying, or complete termination of friendships. Ellie, a heterosexual-identified participant, changed high schools to escape bullying by her ex-boyfriend and other members of her school community. She chose to do so because her boyfriend and other peers often used their knowledge of her lesbian-identified mother against Ellie, as if it were an Achilles’ heel, even when the dispute had nothing to do with her mother’s lesbianism. Finally, some peers were simply curious, never having been exposed to alternative family narratives, nor having imagined how LGB families are created, leading them to ask what 13-year-old Shane called “stupid questions” such as, “How were you born, then?” Victoria, too, had often been asked this question. She tried to explain the boldness of some people when it came to their open curiosity about LGB-led families: People just feel, I guess, ‘cause like when you’re different they feel they can ask all these personal questions about you. So, I guess, try to flip it around to make people think. Like, “Were you born in a bottle?” “Hmm, do you think that’s possible?” Like, I don’t know, just flip it around to make them question their own intelligence.

As these examples show, some participants viewed questions by peers as invasive and/or irritating, but some felt that peers’ questions were genuine efforts to become educated about non-traditional family configurations. All nine participants strongly believed that if their classmates had more frequent exposure to diverse family configurations, they would be less ignorant in their reactions to queer-identified families.

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School Theme 3: Education About Alternative Family Narratives Julia made the most direct argument that the root problem is ignorance and that sex-education to increase all Ontario students’ exposure to alternative family configurations would be beneficial. “It’s ignorance,” she said, “It’s literally all ignorance. It’s because people do not understand. They don’t realize how people that aren’t straight can have families. They don’t realize that they can be totally normal. It’s all—I feel like it always can break down to ignorance.” She went on to encourage other youth with queer-identified parents to continue their ongoing efforts to break down societal ignorance: F*ck the people who judge you. Like, stand up for yourself. Don’t, don’t—it can be very hard, but there are—you’re not alone. There are other people with families like that. Educate them, teach them, show them that your family is just as normal as theirs. Maybe even more normal.

School Theme 4: Best and Worst Practices in Schools “Teachers have a big-ass impact that I don’t really think they understand,” remarked Julia, underscoring the strong influence of teachers’ stories on the development of students’ personal identity narratives. School climate surveys in Canada, the U.S., and Australia (e.g., Taylor et al., 2008; GLSEN, 2009; Ray & Gregory, 2001) show that teachers hear homophobic slurs such as “fag,” “dyke,” or “that’s so gay” almost daily, underscoring the pervasiveness of the master narrative of heteronormativity. Likewise, the collective experiences of our nine participants show that homophobic comments and bullying were mirrored in their own school experience. “I think bullying is always going to be there,” said Ellie, although she still thought things could have been better if her high school teachers had been willing to intervene: I had a pretty bad high school experience.... Whenever I was bullied, teachers would never, like, step in or anything. Like, I remember that a girl called—like, she called me a dyke, and it was in the middle of a class, and the teacher was just—all she said to the girl was, like, “Sit down.” Like, okay [laughs]. You just let that slide [chuckles].

Victoria agreed that school staff did not do enough on a day-to-day basis. “I think the biggest thing is that teachers just let it go by,” she observed, “You know, like, every time someone says, ‘Oh, that’s so gay.’ No! That’s not okay, you know? Or like, if they’re making fun of someone

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who’s gay [punches fist into opposite palm twice]. Every time you hear it, you need to be vigilant in acknowledging it.” On the issue of educational staff support for students with queeridentified parents, one of Julia’s stories may top the list of “worst practices”: I had a teacher ask me if I was born in a bottle, in front of my whole class.... Because I was, like, we were doing family trees in grade two, and I was, like, “What if you don’t have a father?” [My teacher] asked in front of the whole class, “What? Were you born in a bottle?” [Either she didn’t understand] or she’s a bitch.

As was the case for Julia, Denise had experienced a problematic response from a teacher during her early elementary years, when asked to create a family tree. “[My teacher] said something about families can't have two moms or something, and it was like just not the reality for me so I was kind of scared in that, if families can’t have two moms, why does my family have two moms?” Such negative experiences should serve as a lesson to teachers. Denise asserted that, “Teachers need to put aside their own opinions. A lot of the time, I feel like teachers are sort of turning a blind eye to what they don’t believe in, and just letting things happen.... They’re not standing up for, you know, what you know should be happening, right?” According to Walton (2010), pre-service teachers should be trained to prevent and manage homophobia through required courses on equity and social justice. Victoria made this very point herself when she said, “Everyone should have sensitivity training and anti-oppressive training.” Still, some participants considered rainbow stickers, positive space posters, and other resources to be small gestures that sometimes made a big difference. Denise suggested that posters in her school were a way of “promoting positive space” and a means of being “supportive in a more subtle way.” Beyond posters and stickers, participants considered other resources and services helpful and as ideal practices for schools when dealing with those from LGB-led families. Denise asserted: [Youth with LGB-identified parents] need to be more actively given the resources that apply to them. There’s a hesitancy to seek out help for ‘queer spawn’ because... there’s this feeling of, well, it’s not my issue, it’s my parents’....

Sometimes peers prefer the support of other peers to that of adults (Fleming, 2012). Walton (2010) recommended policy development to

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support student-led initiatives such as gay-straight alliances (or queerstraight alliances, also called GSAs and QSAs). But Victoria, Denise, Owen, and Anna were ambivalent about GSAs. “There are, like, gaystraight alliance groups in school,” says Anna, “but no one really knows what they are, or like where they are, or what they even do. So, I mean, they’re—the school has put the effort into making that group, but then no one even utilized it to, to understand.” While the GSA in Anna’s school was somewhat ineffective, Fleming (2012) asserts that the presence of a GSA can potentially help students feel safer and less harassed in their schools, citing anecdotal reports from one high school to argue that teachers and students notice a change when GSAs are there, and that the hard work of social justice clubs yields positive results in schools. Indeed, according to the 2009 National School Climate Survey, “GSAs can provide safe, affirming spaces and critical support for LGBT students and also contribute to creating a more welcoming school environment” (GLSEN, 2009, p. xvii). As a heterosexual-identified student with queer-identified parents, Denise considered a GSA “very good to have,” but sometimes found it difficult to be a member. “I want to be there,” she said, “but at the same time there are people who are sort of like [pause] trying to ‘out LGBTQ’ me. They’re trying to be more LGBTQ than me. And so it’s like, in that sense there’s an isolation.” Note the tension Denise experienced between the desire to be part of her school’s GSA and the ostracism she experienced there from students who perceived themselves to have a greater degree of queerness than her. Amsterdam and Bruner speak of “the messiness that results when institutionalized canonicity and imagined possibility are locked in a local dialectic,” (Amsterdam & Bruner, 2000, p. 229), maintaining that despite the messiness, all cultures necessarily negotiate compromises between that which is established and that which is imagined. While a growing number of Ontarians are able to imagine the value of a school support system that would protect students from bullying and harassment, some institutionalized canons remain in place such as in Ontario’s publicly funded Catholic schools. Strategies for improving the accessibility, efficacy, and inclusiveness of GSAs need to be developed if they are to have their desired impact. The final category of participant responses concerned school curricula. In Canada, provincial governments mandate education, and the current government of Canada’s largest province, Ontario, recently announced sex education curriculum revisions. Many educators and political pundits agreed that the changes were long overdue. “It’s about time,” wrote

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Toronto Star columnist Martin Cohn. “The Liberal government is finally modernizing our embarrassingly outdated sex-ed curriculum,” a document he acknowledged had last been revised in 1998 (Toronto Star, 2015, February 21, para. 2). If our participants’ experiences are an accurate indication, Ontario education does not yet provide consistent and widespread support for students of queer-identified parents. Julia advocated for changes to curricula “as young as kindergarten,” feeling that establishing early best practices would expose all Canadians to diverse family configurations, thereby increasing general social acceptance of family diversity. It remains to be seen whether the proposed changes to the Ontario sexual education curriculum will have the positive impact hoped for by our participants.

Conclusion Our participants’ stories of their experiences are subjective and personal accounts of their thoughts and beliefs about having queeridentified parents and may or may not represent the majority opinion. Their voices are nonetheless valid, and the lessons we learn from them have broad applicability for all queer-led families, or those working with adolescents of LGB-identified parents (Smith, 1996). The home-life realities of young children with LGB-identified parents are sometimes very different from their first school experiences. Their experiences show that, when some youth with LGB-identified parents initially decide to come out, peer responses may demonstrate neutrality, connection, humour, curiosity, or hostility. By anticipating these responses, counsellors and educators can help queer-identified families prepare for them, both emotionally and practically, thus minimizing their possible negative effects—or creating a positive outcome. According to Bruner (2004), individuals’ narratives centre around “trouble,” without which there is no story. If the experiences of youth with LGB-identified parents generate family narratives that conflict with the master narrative of heteronormativity, this suggests stories of struggle that offer rich resources for personal identity narratives of tolerance and acceptance. Participants believe strongly in education’s potential to reduce ignorant peer responses, promote accepting attitudes, and debunk heteronormative stereotypes. Often, they feel burdened with the responsibility for educating Ontario students about diverse family configurations. As Julia said, “We can’t go into all those parents’ houses of those kids, but if those kids have... education, they can make their own decisions.” Furthermore, when children are exposed to narratives that challenge heteronormativity, the

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children might then influence their parents’ attitudes, allowing a still a broader societal shift in our definition of normality. Insofar as participants’ narratives instruct us about the realities for Canadian youth with LGB-identified parents, their stories invite counsellors, teachers, administrators, and policymakers to consider how support for them can be ameliorated. “Teachers have a big-ass impact that I don’t think they really understand,” claimed Julia. School officials, from classroom teachers to directors of education, should strive to create safe, inclusive environments that permit a myriad of student identities, providing all students with access to non-heterosexual narratives via literature, history, law, media, guest speakers, etc., connecting others’ stories to one’s own narrative. GSAs are an important source of such alternative narratives, and all schools should encourage vibrant, inclusive GSAs, actively supported by school personnel, allowing all students— including the children of LGB-led parents—to feel safer at school and more secure in articulating their personal identity, without fear of reprisal.

References Allport, G. W. (1968). The person in psychology: Selected essays by Gordon W. Allport. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Amsterdam, A. G. & Bruner, J. (2000). Minding the Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. S. (2004). Life as narrative. Social Research, 71(1), 691-711. Dundas, S. & Kaufman, M. (2000). The Toronto lesbian family study. Journal of Homosexuality, 40(2), 65-79. Fleming, J. (2012). Bullying & bias: making schools safe for gay students: students on campuses with Gay Straight Alliances are more likely to report feeling safe at school, and less likely to be exposed to biasrelated harassment. Leadership, 41(4), 12-13. Garner, A. (2004). Families like mine: Children of gay parents tell it like it is. New York: Harper. Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). (2009). The National Climate Survey. Retrieved from http://www.glsen.org/binarydata/GLSEN_ATTACHMENTS/file/000/001/1675-2.pdf Hammack, P. L. & Windell, E. P. (2011). Psychology and the politics of same-sex desire in the United States: An analysis of three cases. History of Psychology, 14(3), 220-248. Herek, G. M. (2006). Legal recognition of same-sex relationships in the United States: a social science perspective. American Psychologist, 61(6), 607-621.

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McAdams, D. P. (2008). The life story interview. Retrieved from http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/foley/instruments/interview/ McNeilly, K. D. (2012). Beyond the ‘bedrooms of the nation’: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of Canadian adolescents with lesbian, gay, or bisexual-identified parents. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1807/34808. Ray, V. & Gregory, R. (2001). School experiences of the children of lesbian and gay parents. Family Matters, 59(1), 28-34. Reid, K., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2005). Exploring lived experience: An introduction to interpretative phenomenological analysis. Psychologist, 18(1), 20-23. Smith, J. A. (1996). Beyond the divide between cognition and discourse: Using interpretative phenomenological analysis in health psychology. Psychology and Health, 11(2), 261-271. Smith, J. A. & Osborn, M. (2003). Interpretative phenomenological analysis. In J. A. Smith (Ed.), Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods. London: Sage. Stacey, J. & Biblarz, T. J. (2001). (How) Does the sexual orientation of parents matter? American Sociological Review, 66(2), 159-183. Taylor, C., Peter, T., Schachter, K., Paquin, S., Beldom, S., Gross, Z., & McMinn, T. L. (2008). Youth speak up about homophobia and transphobia: The first national climate survey on homophobia in Canadian schools: Phase one report. Toronto ON: Egale Canada Human Rights Trust. Toronto Star (2015, February 21). Revealed: The sex-ed update Ontario badly needs. The Toronto Star. Retrieved from http://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2015/02/21/revealed-thesex-ed-update-ontario-badly-needs-cohn.html# Walton, G. (2010). Forging safer learning environments: Addressing homophobic bullying in schools. Retrieved from http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/W W_safe_learning_environments.pdf

CHAPTER FOURTEEN ENSURING QUALITY AND EQUITY IN AN ITALIAN MULTICULTURAL PRIMARY SCHOOL GIOVANNA MALUSÀ AND MASSIMILIANO TAROZZI1

Developing a quality school that is capable of ensuring equal educational opportunities and promoting equity and social cohesion seems to be the main challenge facing education policy in the European Union. This challenge is outlined in the coherent political strategy which guides the goals set in the Lisbon Agenda in 2000 (Council of the European Union, 2000), which were translated into strategic goals for education systems in Barcelona in 2002 (Council of the European Union, 2002) and subsequently reaffirmed by the Council of Europe in 2010 (Council of the European Union, 2010), particularly in the five “headline targets” and seven “flagship initiatives” of the Europe 2020 Agenda. The main purpose of the EU strategy has been to establish education systems that can become international points of reference for quality, efficacy, and equity among European states. Within this strategy education plays a major role in guaranteeing economic development by increasing competitiveness within a global context marked by social complexity, cultural pluralism, growing inequalities, and social exclusion. Whereas improving education is one of its five headline targets, Europe 2020 seems more concerned with closing the gap between education and labour by defining the most relevant qualifications and competences required by various professions so as to promote youth exchange, strengthen the use of digital technologies among schools, and 1

We would like thank all the teachers, parents, and children included in this study for their contribution to the data collection and their active participation in the research process.

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make school systems more efficient and competitive, rather than reducing inequalities and social asymmetries, which are becoming more and more evident through an unequal distribution of income and increasing rates of poverty (OECD, 2008). At present, inequality is a tangible sign of the social asymmetry of complex societies as well as the incapacity of education systems to promote a real process of social equity; this is true in Europe as well (Demeuse, Frandji, Greger, & Rochex, 2012), as extensively identified in the literature (Freire, 1985; Bhatti, Gaine, Gobbo, & Leeman, 2007; Gundara & Portera, 2008; Tarozzi, 2012a, 2015). An emblem of such inequalities in schools is the increasing cultural diversity amongst students, especially those coming from an immigrant background (OECD, 2012). For example, the presence of pupils of foreign origin is now a reality in the Italian school system (Italian Ministry of Education, 2012a, 2014a) that emphasises the need to promote democratic, equitable, and quality schools – schools that are able to welcome, accept, and support different cultural identities in a widespread process of learning, thereby “avoiding turning diversity into inequality” (Italian Ministry of Education, 2012b, p. 5), a sentiment which has recently been reaffirmed by the Italian Ministry of Education in its guidelines for the integration of foreign students (2014b). In general, international surveys show that students with an immigrant background tend to perform at lower levels (OECD, 2009, 2013; European Commission, 2008; International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2007). Even international standardized tests, for example, the PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study in primary school) survey on literacy, show migrant pupils scoring below their non-migrant peers by the end of primary school. The OECD PISA survey on the standard academic skills of 15-year-olds confirms that migrant pupils in this age group tend to systematically perform below the host country pupils in every tested subject area, particularly in reading (OECD-PISA, 2010; Dronkers, 2014). In addition, national indicators confirm that in almost all European countries there is an increasing incidence of early school leaving among immigrant pupils. A 2013 report by the Italian Ministry of Education pointed out that, despite the official policy of “inclusion and education for all” expressed in public education policies, underachievement, dropouts, and ineffective schools are unresolved problems in Italy (Italian Ministry of Education, 2013), as well as for many other European countries. Unsurprisingly, school success and social justice education have emerged as very important issues in Italian and European schools.

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In view of the impasse in education policy, to what extent can school practices provide effective responses toward ensuring both equality and quality in multicultural contexts? The political challenge of combining educational quality and social equality is the contextual backdrop of this chapter, which reports selected results of a longitudinal study of a multicultural class from the first grade of primary school to the first grade of middle school in the Province of Trento in Italy, with the purpose of identifying current directions in quality education in multicultural contexts (for a complete report of the findings, see Malusà, 2011). After presenting the research setting, we describe the methodological approach adopted for the study – which was based on a critical grounded theory oriented toward social justice (Charmaz, 2005) – and detail the data collection and analysis procedures – both of which were progressively created by the relationship with participants. We then briefly sketch the categories that emerged in the constructed model by defining their essential features as steps toward an effective way to promote quality schooling for all. We conclude by highlighting possible elements that may be theoretically transferable to other school contexts. The two peculiarities of this study are the particular position of one of the researchers, who is also a teacher involved in the educational context studied, and the length of the project, as the study was conducted over 4 years, thus providing a diachronic and longitudinal overview of the process under analysis. The present study initially intended to explore elements of effectiveness that might enhance learning in a class with a high percentage of pupils with an immigrant background (6 of 18 students), by progressively implementing the emergent best practices in the field. The peculiar historical context in which the research was conducted is marked by profound reform in the political-institutional framework at both the national and the local level (Vannini, 2009) toward a public disinvestment in the school system, as well as a growing pressure to increase quality, academic performance, and competitiveness. These trends highlight the discrepancies between the choices that are publicly declared and the choices that are actually made in school systems (Allemann-Ghionda, 2008; Eurydice, 2009) as well as the need to increase political awareness about the role of teachers in the creation of a more equitable, inclusive, and democratic school. From this critical perspective, our study sought to identify which process might enable quality learning for all in difficult contexts, and we ambitiously aimed to construct a social justice education model that addresses, in particular, the inclusion of students of foreign origin.

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Methods A qualitative research method consistent with the sociopolitical dimensions of social justice education was necessary for a project “fitting” the educational context and progressively “built up” through the relationship with the participants (Charmaz, 2005). Therefore, we chose a constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006, 2014) in order to overcome the mere descriptive level of analysis and critically elaborate a possible pedagogical model that might be translatable into practices for social change (Torres & Noguera, 2008; Gorski, 2009; Tarozzi, 2011b). The study did not focus on the learning of specific academic subjects but rather on cross-cutting activities that involved the whole team of teachers. In particular, we examined interdisciplinary cooperative activities – according to the Learning Together model (Johnson & Johnson, 1994) – aimed at building social skills directly related to learning within the framework of intercultural education projects, which sometimes involved parents. The study included 19 students, 36 parents, 22 teachers, and 4 external experts at a primary and middle school in the Province of Trento. The students consisted of 11 females and 8 males. Regarding ethnicity, 6 students came from a migrant background (1 from Algeria, 2 from Morocco, 2 from Tunisia, and 1 from India). Ten teachers were from primary school, and 12 from secondary school, all of which had different teaching techniques, as well as varying ethical and political views. The participants were selected according to the theoretical sampling technique in the second and third steps of the analysis (Morse, 2007); however, they all unavoidably belonged to the same scholastic institution. The observed class in the first grade was highly heterogeneous and multi-problematic regarding learning abilities: one pupil was certified as cognitively disabled, a female Moroccan child had specific learning difficulties (SLD), two pupils presumably had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and two others were at high risk for SLD, as revealed by a screening of the entire class conducted to identify students at the earliest signs of difficulty. The class was characterized by a climate of conflict, with hard-tomanage relational problems between pupils, aggravated by bitter conflict between natives and migrant parents.

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Data Collection The longitudinal research consisted of three phases: 1. 2007-2008: Data were collected in a third-grade class of a primary school, and post hoc descriptive reconstruction of the first and second grades was conducted; 2. 2008-2010: Data were collected in the same class in the fourth and fifth grades; 3. 2010-2011: Data were collected in four first-year middle school classes, into which the students observed in the previous years had been subdivided. Following the requirements of the Ethical Code of the Italian Association of Psychology (AIP, 1997), we collected verbal, observational, and visual data. These were organized as follows: archival records and gray documents (from 2005 to 2011); participant observations over four school years; 43 focused interviews (Charmaz, 2001; Tierney & Dilley, 2001) of key informants (14 teachers, 25 parents, and 4 experts) transcribed verbatim; 19 audio-recorded small group interviews of pupils (Eder & Fingerson, 2001) of a total duration of 36 hours; 10 individual questionnaires completed by pupils; analyses of student work; and research memos.

Analytical Process All transcribed data (from 405 sources) were coded according to the initial coding procedures of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Tarozzi, 2008); this was initially done by two independent coders using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo 9. From this first coding step emerged 742 codes and 3193 occurrences (see Table 1). During the focused coding step, conceptual labels gradually decreased, according to the more frequent or more meaningful occurrences, and we inductively identified 20 themes, grouped into 9 categories. These categories were better defined by their properties and relationships within the theoretical coding and were then reduced to 7 before finally being integrated into an interpretative scheme or general model (Fig. 1).

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2

3

1

I II III

IV V

References

Nodes

Sources

2

Case study

Cases

3

What are the elements of effectiveness of cooperative learning in intercultural education? Which process supports effective strategies toward quality learning for all in multicultural contexts? What is the transfer process in the context of a new school?

68

145

148 405 136

735 1.680 331

19 13 8

175

635

2.746

40

320

65 42

253 194

85

742

3.193

Middle school

1

PROGRESSIVE PURPOSES

Data Collection (stages)

Time (years)

Coding Phases

Table 1. Code sizes after initial coding

405

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Figure 1. Theoretical coding: the general model

The Emerging Model of Inclusive and Equitable Education The constructed model (Fig. 1) cannot be generalized as representative of all contexts, but due to its theoretical value it offers a conceptualization grounded in the particular sociocultural and historical context in which it was created. We use here the notion of an empirically constructed model within a critical paradigm in which research contributes to providing operational tools for social change (Denzin, 2007). Seven main categories, characterized by specific properties, emerged from the data (the number of occurrences is shown within parentheses):

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1. Teachers’ ethical choices (127), as declared in educational goals and acted in educational practice; 2. Teachers’ strategies and effective skills (393), including skills, active methodologies, and educational planning of their practice and interaction with parents; 3. Creating multicultural experiences (159), which are experienced as positive and skilfully mediated by teachers; 4. Construction of social skills in the students (1163), in relation to management of the self and group, communication skills, socioemotional aspects, and mediation; 5. Quality learning for all (555), described as relational wellbeing (everybody feels “well” in school) and school success; 6. Experience of difficulties (589), as experienced by teachers, parents, and pupils in their mutual relationships and interactions within particular contexts; and 7. Local and global sociopolitical contexts (156), the different political demands that the public school had to meet in the last four years, which form a comprehensive background that influences policies in the local school, where these policies are characterized by autonomy and the currently prevalent teaching methodologies. In awareness of the fact that the process under investigation is by definition systemic and influenced by social dynamics and collective behaviour, we have organized the relations between these seven categories around a core category “construction of social skills,” and we identified four successive phases in the process that, in a progressive and temporal circularity, define and enhance the system from within by means of the development of effective ways to ensure quality and equitable learning for all.

Phases of an Effective Teaching/Learning Process Phase 1: Taking Sides Ethically The first phase in the process is dependent on the ethics of the educators and forms the axiological foundation that pervades all subsequent phases. It includes choices in educational practice which are based upon the pedagogical and political beliefs of the teachers, that is the value they place on: the academic achievement of all students, the necessity for social cohesion, and the development of critical and creative thinking skills that maintain respect for individuality, all of which with the

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goal of promoting inclusive education, even in an empathic mental space in which diversity and divergent sociocultural needs can cohabit. The Italian national curriculum of primary schools frequently refers to values by inviting teachers to pay attention to “the child as a person, promoting a positive climate, mediating conflict and cooperative learning,”2 and considering the “student’s well-being as a condition of his academic success.” However, this phase was made relevant mainly by the claims of the teachers involved in the process, which sometimes stand in contrast to certain local and global education policy decisions. It was endorsed by some teachers who personally felt a responsibility to ensure effective educational practices, especially for the most disadvantaged students, in order to promote concrete learning opportunities through active learning methodologies. Nowadays I’d highly criticize the public school[,]… the [idea of a] school for all, because I do believe that our society is going more and more… towards an exclusive and excluding school! (Teacher13, 2011) In the last five years I’ve felt the big responsibility to efficiently manage the class[,…] the big challenge to be able to offer concrete opportunities for learning for all. (Teacher4, 2011)

These respondents go on to stress the need for both a teacher’s “educative passion” for social justice education and the effectiveness of “at least one teacher” as the leader amongst peers who creates an environment consistent with the principles of social justice education.

Phase 2: Facilitating the Experience with Effective Strategies The line between the ethical choices declared, designed, and implemented by the teachers is blurred. In fact, the second phase of the model embraces consistency between the theoretical (planning), emotional (motivation), and concrete (activities) levels. This concept can be defined as facilitating intercultural experience through the use of effective strategies which are managed with competence and match the needs expressed by the group. This category encompasses five interrelated properties: 1) the presence of social competences amongst teachers, 2) collaborative projects involving teachers across disciplines 3) the use of active learning methodologies, and 4) the involvement of parents in school in order to offer them opportunity 2

Some occurrences between double quotation marks have been coded in vivo.

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for direct dialogue (Malusà, 2015). Several codes from different interlocutors highlight the necessity for each of these elements as conditions for the viability of the process, which takes place in the complex setting of a multicultural classroom where relationships between pupils, teachers, and parents are often knotty. Therefore, the mode in which experiences are lived (creating multicultural experiences) becomes a key factor in promoting an effective educational path: it is the “constructive vision” of the experience of heterogeneity in the class, which allows teachers to enhance and facilitate inclusion and success for all through effective methodologies – “thought and shared” –within the team and adapted with flexibility and creativity (Malusà, 2014).

Phase 3: Constructing Social Skills The third step in the process, the construction of social skills in pupils and parents, is the densest thematic centre of the analysis. It is the central hub of the process, which is produced by the interaction between ethical choices, teachers’ effective strategies, and a constructively lived multicultural experience, and which is directly related to educational success for all. At the core of this category are pupils’ social skills. At different levels of awareness, pupils, parents, and teachers recognize and observe the acquisition of relational skills in different thematic areas related to the self and group management, including socio-affective growth and the development of communication, mediation, and decision-making skills (critical thinking and social skills). Both native and migrant pupils experience these skills directly in their daily school activities: based on the analysis, they are aware of how to support each other, how to work as a team, how to cooperate, how to respect roles and people, and how to accept conflict as an integral part of friendship, by using or even inventing mediation strategies.

Phase 4: Quality Learning for All Quality learning for all is the ultimate goal of the teaching/learning process –not of teaching only –which, if missing, would possibly show “a lack of responsibility of the school and the teachers for those students who, for various reasons, have difficulty” (Vannini 2009, p. 74). In this fourth and final phase, two conceptually dense and related properties emerge: everybody feeling well in school and academic success

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both result from the initial ethical choices that pervade every phase in the process. “Everybody feeling well in school” and “feeling included” are experienced and declared by all children, including pupils of foreign origin and their parents. The analysis reveals a situation characterized by joyous and affective relationships between children, with a sense of belonging to the class (“feeling like brothers and sisters”), in which being classmates and friends often coincide. “Doing things together” pleasantly enhances the knowledge needed for conflict resolution, often autonomously, through experiences that provide creative ways of mediation. At the end of primary school, we submitted sociograms that revealed a cohesive class, with internal relationships which were sometimes dysfunctional, but which included all pupils, without distinction based on national origin, in an “integrated variety” in which everyone could express his or her true self. Such a climate of relational well-being and the construction of social skills enhances the pupils’ cognitive learning, creating room for an active and critical approach to the teaching of subjects in accordance with all students’ needs, including immigrants and students with learning difficulties. Moreover, those parents who are involved in many school activities experience new ways of encountering the school, which permits the creation of effective relationships. Taking into account the difference in achievement between native and foreign pupils (Fig. 2), the comparison of results at the end of the second year of primary school with those at the end of the fifth year (Fig. 3) shows that all children improved considerably in their school performance in all subjects. Figure 2. Student performance in the fifth class

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Figure 3. Performance of students of foreign origin

In sum, the widespread academic success confirms the validity of the circular and thoughtful teaching/learning process implemented in this context and reinforces both the effectiveness of the process and the values in which it is rooted.

Final Remarks A review of EU education policies reveals that the declared goal of reducing inequalities and social asymmetries remains in many regards unachieved or underestimated. On the one hand, EU and Italian policies consider the “quality” of school systems to be more concerned with efficiency, competitiveness, and the provision of human capital for the labour market. On the other hand, traditional and naïve intercultural education practices seem to focus more on the dialogue between cultural diversities than on reducing social inequalities (Amselle, 2003). In this chapter, we have reported results of a longitudinal study that followed a multicultural group for four years, with the aim of closing the gap between quality education and social equity, which seem to be conflicting goals in current school practices. The inquiry intended to explore some of the most effective practices to enhance learning in a multi-problematic and culturally diverse class, by progressively implementing the best practices that emerged in this context. The effectiveness of the pedagogical process examined in this chapter explicitly assumes the ethical level of the model as its starting point (Tarozzi, 2014). Therefore, promoting educational success for all becomes closely connected to the goal of social justice and guaranteeing the equal

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right to quality education and the “exercise of active citizenship” (Tarozzi, Rapanà, & Ghirotto, 2013) through the intentional construction of social skills. The research reveals with particular conceptual density seven categories and four phases that may be transferable to other contexts, due to the theoretical generalizability (Glaser 2006) of grounded theory, which implies that these results may be relevant beyond the context in which they were generated and may therefore inspire greater awareness in education policy decision-making. We would like to conclude by listing some key points revealed by the study, which can be represented here metaphorically by bread, a timeless symbol of culture and community in all societies.

Social Equity as an Ethical Choice The prevalence of ethics over techniques significantly pervades the entire study, manifesting itself in the different levels of reality considered: mental (planning), emotional (motivation), and concrete (praxis). Metaphorically, it is the yeast that can ferment appropriate actions and social choices. In fact, the value choices are made autonomously, in contrast to the experienced difficulties, and become preconditions that allow the intended realization of a project, which is first conceived at an ethical level. However, the emerging ethos (Tarozzi, 2011a, 2012b, 2014) in this case was not characterized by a superficial sense of solidarity, as is often the case with intercultural education projects (Gorski, 2006), but was infused with an explicit pedagogical goal of promoting equitable educational opportunities, providing more resources to those who have less, and bridging the gap created by inequalities.

Congruent political Contexts The greater political context is represented by water within our metaphor and plays a fundamental role in supporting and enhancing choices made in education. For example, according to the claims of the participants and the analysis of the data, this specific context is rich in resources. Despite national cuts to public funding for schools, relevant investments in the school system still persist in the Province of Trento. The governance of the education system in Trento tries to match the needs of the users through sufficient financing, providing adequate spaces, and supporting and facilitating teachers’ projects. Therefore, we argue that the

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success of the pedagogical model presented here was dependent upon congruent education policies.

Teachers’ Competences and Effective Strategies Teachers apply their professional and relational competences in complex contexts on a daily basis. This particular context presented various phenomena which represented an educational challenge for the teachers involved. The skills required in this setting, to continue our metaphor, can be represented by the flour that is essential for baking bread; it includes a balanced mixture of different ingredients, such as sound interpersonal skills, the capability to plan together, and open-mindedness, so as to stimulate the participation of parents, particularly those who are of foreign origin. These elements, however, must be formed and facilitated: pedagogical planning requires adequate time for an exchange of ideas among teachers. This should be officially recognized and budgeted in the teachers’ contracts and not done exclusively on an individual, voluntary basis. Competences should also be developed through experiential training which is systematically provided in the form of professional development courses organized by public universities, and not just personally cultivated by means of independent study and informal and therefore unstructured self training. In addition, parental participation should be encouraged through the creation of a school environment that is open to intercultural dialogue, in which cultural diversity is recognized and respected and no one is forced to assimilate to a cultural mainstream. Under these conditions, the complex reality of the school may become an effective learning experience for everyone which promotes, through the fostering of specific competences, the development of the citizens of tomorrow. Investing in these choices, also financially, promotes inclusiveness and strong social bonds in multicultural contexts, whereby such inclusion can be transformed into real interaction between multiple solid and active identities within the context of the participatory process of the construction of knowledge.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN STUDENT PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING IN FACULTY-LED INTERNATIONAL MULTICULTURAL COURSES DOROTA CELINSKA AND ROBERTO SWAZO

In recent decades, programs in counseling, psychology, and education have widely integrated multicultural training into their curricula (Estrada, Durlak, & Juarez, 2002; Kerl, 2002). However, despite the accord in the literature and accreditation standards as to the critical importance of multicultural training for the development of counselors, psychologists, and educators, the effectiveness of multicultural training pedagogy remains a challenge. The traditional on-campus course has been embraced as a predominant format to increase multicultural competencies in trainees and to meet the standards of accrediting agencies. Yet, because of the complexities of the multicultural content that transcends the academic setting into societal and personal realms, there is a consensus that even though it meets all the professional criteria, this course design has serious limitations (Coleman, 2006; Collins & Pieterse, 2007). Most importantly, the on-campus course format restrains opportunities for experiential learning, which has been established as one of the most beneficial approaches to maximizing learning outcomes through student engagement (Alexander, Krucek, & Ponterotto, 2005). The community service learning (CSL) approach has been regarded as a valuable alternative to traditional on-campus courses, especially as a vehicle for increasing student personal cultural growth and for promoting empathy towards diverse populations (Collins & Pieterse, 2007). Along with expanding multicultural knowledge, skills, and awareness, students’ own personal and professional growth is emphasized (Arthur & Achenbach, 2002; Rowell & Benshoff, 2008). Similarly, the international service learning (ISL) approach combines personal multicultural growth and traditional academic instruction with the community-based services in

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an international context. Programs offering such opportunities have proliferated across the U.S. in the last decade across academic disciplines (Annette, 2003; Bringle & Tonkin, 2004; Krely, 2011). In particular, ISL seeks to connect international travel, education, and community service with the objectives of augmenting the students’ global awareness, creating intercultural empathy, and improving civic awareness and skills (Crabtree & Sapp, 2009). Congruent with these aims, ISL experiences have been shown to increase global awareness, intercultural empathy, and civic awareness in the short-term (Parker & Dautoff, 2007). These outcomes may be due to the fact that well-designed ISL activities encompass powerful psychological, emotional, ideological, and cultural-self disruptions, reflective of the long-standing assumption that mere intercultural contact results in increased cross-cultural awareness and reduced ethnocentrism (Amir, 1969). Noteworthy, research has indicated that the effectiveness of ISL encounters in fostering such outcomes depends on a variety of variables including student gender, country of origin, and individual predispositions and attitudes, along with the unique characteristics of the host country (Amir & Garti, 1977; Baty & Dold, 1977; Ibrahim, 2012; Kim, 1995).

Pedagogy and Curriculum of Faculty-Led International Courses Because the faculty-led international course (FLIC) design is based on the principle of extensive and intentional culture immersion, academic programs must have a well-articulated theoretical and pedagogical foundation to guide their multicultural instructional initiatives. The authors postulate that in a well-designed multicultural participatory model accompanied by international service learning activities, both the students and community members are empowered and benefit through reciprocal relationships. The following are the pedagogical premises that served as the foundation of the present study’s faculty-led international courses: 1. Dialoguing, reading, and lecturing promote intellectual understanding but may not translate into personal and/or professional transformation. Emotional and behavioral transformation must be pursued in addition to the acquisition of skills and knowledge, preferably in the context of guided experiential learning. 2. Cultural and personal growth are intertwined since all humans are cultural beings regardless of whether or not one has an ethnic memory connected to ancestors.

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3. Students’ limited second language and cultural competencies are highlighted to parallel the experience of immigrants with the intention of promoting empathy. Furthermore, linguistic and cultural discomfort is strategically provoked, with the aim of increasing self-reflection and empathy towards others. 4. The “us” versus “them” paradigm is discouraged and replaced with the creation of a knowledge bridge between students and members of the local community so that both parties benefit equally as a result of their exchanges. 5. The prevention of the imposition of culture in interactions within local communities is imperative. The “missionary” or “peace corps” approach is replaced with the utilization of students’ expertise as a vital resource and vehicle of empowerment within local communities. 6. The “guilt trip” concept of feeling responsible for the maladies experienced by the less privileged individuals from traditionally oppressed groups is avoided. Rather, a model of collective consciousness is instilled where by one feels part of a wealthier country and perceives an individual responsibility to transform and empower others. 7. Full immersion in a novel cultural and linguistic context allows students to experience cultural discomfort that is conducive to cultural self-awareness, while the “luxury hotel” model is circumvented by providing room and board to the students in local establishments and family homes.

Methods The Pedagogy applied during the Faculty-Led International Courses The faculty-led international courses in this study delivered the curriculum of the on-campus multicultural course prior to the international experience in the host country using the same learning activities (i.e., inclass lectures, presentations, discussions) and assignments (i.e., formative and summative assessments). The aforementioned curricular components were designed to facilitate the acquisition of cultural self-awareness, understanding of others, and foundational multicultural concepts and skills. Subsequently, the international course components were delivered in the host country, with the aim of promoting emotional and behavioral changes consistent with the pedagogical premises described above. In

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order to achieve these changes, the following components were integrated into the curriculum: (1) international service learning activities to empower both the students and local communities, (2) visits to native cultural communities and events, and (3) semi-structured interactions in local communities that followed a set of pre-determined guidelines based on the local social contexts.

Purpose This study was designed to qualitatively analyze student perceptions of their multicultural learning in the context of a FLIC. The study attempted to identify the multicultural concepts and skills associated with the most self-reported growth, along with the mechanisms associated with the learning of these concepts and skills. Further, the study aimed at exploring the ways in which particular curricular and instructional components of the course contributed to student multicultural learning outcomes.

Participants, Procedure, and Instrument The participants consisted of 21 graduate students who attended the urban or suburban campus of a private university located in a Midwest metropolitan area of the USA. The participants were recruited on a voluntary basis from students enrolled in faculty-led international courses taught by the second author across two semesters, and included students in counseling (n=10), psychology (n=9), and teacher preparation (n=2) programs. The participants represented diverse ages (ranging from young to mature adult), ethnicity (predominantly White, African-American, and Asian) and cultural backgrounds (e.g., five were bi/multi-lingual immigrants to the USA). Among the participants, 16 were monolingual speakers of English and only one visited the host country of the course prior to enrolling in the course. The participants were asked to respond individually to the Post-Trip Reflection and Evaluation Questionnaire, a written semi-structured response instrument designed by the authors. The questionnaire required the participants to respond to the items first by rank ordering them according to a specific criterion (e.g., from most to least important) and then by writing short answers to the questions. The responses were anonymous, and the questionnaire was administered during the post-trip sessions by the first author. All questionnaire responses were read separately by the first author and a graduate assistant (advanced graduate student in mental health counseling). The two readers discussed the

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content of the responses to come up with a system of codes for each item utilizing the inductive analysis and thematic representation methods (Aurebach & Silverstein, 2003). Upon establishing codes, each response was classified into one of the codes independently by each reader. Interrater agreement was established at 100 per cent through discussions and revisions.

Results Students’ Learning of Multicultural Concepts The participants were asked to rank order five concepts related to cultural self-awareness and understanding of others targeted in the course with regard to the amount of their learning (from most to least). Next, the participants were asked to provide a short description of the process (mechanism) by which they achieved the reported outcomes. In the domain of Respect Towards Others Who Differ from Me (Rank #1), 46 per cent of responses indicated an unspecific overall increase in learning while the remaining responses pointed to one of the two specific mechanisms of increasing respect towards others: becoming more openminded (31 per cent) (e.g., “I learned to think about what the experience is in their reality”), or relating respect to the ethics of care (23 per cent) (e.g., “we showed respect towards others because we care”). In the domain of Understanding and Challenging Own Cultural Worldview (Rank # 2), 44 per cent of responses were indicative of a generally enhanced awareness of the participants’ own worldviews (e.g., “I didn’t really know my own world view [sic.] before this trip”), in contrast to 39 per cent of responses which attributed self-growth to the mechanism of exploring their own worldviews (e.g., “I didn’t realize that I have biases and prejudices of my own”) and 17 per cent which attributed self-growth to their gaining new insights about their own worldviews (e.g., “I have never looked at myself in that light before”). In the domain of Understanding Human Diversity (Rank # 3), 45 per cent of responses fell in the category of relating learning to gains in the overall acceptance of and/or respect for an individual’s uniqueness (e.g., “seeing that each person is unique”) and 55 per cent fell in the category of acquiring insights into diversity within cultures (e.g., “we have a lot of differences, but also similarities”). In the domain of Understanding the Characteristics of Diverse Groups (Rank # 4), in 44 per cent of responses students linked their learning to gains in understanding the complexity of diversity (e.g., “I gained knowledge, understanding of the complexity of culture and people”) and 19 per cent to

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gains in the specifics of intragroup diversity (e.g., “compared groups and compared challenges amongst them”), whereas 38 per cent of the responses indicated increased understandings without specifying an underlying mechanism. In the domain of Understanding Social Advocacy (Rank #5), 31 per cent of responses indicated unspecific overall increase in learning while the remaining responses pointed to one of the two specific mechanisms of learning: assuming personal responsibility (38 per cent) (e.g., “taking an active role to change things to create a more harmonious world”) or acknowledging the importance of social advocacy (31 per cent) (e.g., “this concept must be imbedded into one’s mind” [sic.]).

Students’ Learning of Multicultural Skills The participants were asked to rank order nine multicultural skills targeted in the course relative to the amount of learning (from most to least) and later to describe the learning mechanism(s) that enabled their reported learning outcomes. Only responses to four of the targeted skills were included in the subsequent analysis because of the requirement of an item having a minimum of two codes, each code with at least two responses. In the domain of Capacity to Comprehend the Multicultural Reality of Diverse Clients (Rank #1), 50 per cent responses pointed to the overall increase in awareness of diversity in clients’ realities (e.g., “realized it’s important and needed”) and 50 per cent related such learning to the enhanced appreciation of the importance of gaining an understanding of a diverse client’s reality (e.g., “learned that culture can really create a different reality”). In the domain of Ability to Self-Assess Biases and Prejudices (Rank #2), in 37 per cent of responses students linked their learning to gains in opportunities to challenge their own biases (e.g., “learning to challenge my preconceived ideas”) and 37 per cent to gains acquired through reflection and new self-knowledge (e.g., “I am now constantly reflecting on myself”), whereas 25 per cent of the responses indicated increased understandings due to a newly gained understanding of the importance of self-reflection (e.g., “recognition of my own prejudices or biases that I am not even aware of is important”). In the domain of Ability to Assess Clients in a Non-biased Manner (Rank #4), 43 per cent of responses related growth to the increased knowledge of their own biases (e.g., “my decreased self-bias”) while 57 per cent responses attributed growth to the opportunities to overcome their own biases relevant to the assessment process (e.g., “biases must be left at the door when counseling any client”). In the domain of Understanding of Immigrant Clients (Rank #6), responses pointed to an increase in the overall awareness of

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immigration as a cultural factor (33 per cent) (e.g., “I’m more aware”) or gains in specific knowledge of immigrants (66 per cent) (e.g., “the experiences, emotions, thoughts, and reactions differ greatly from those that have been born and raised in North America”).

Students’ Perceptions of the Contributions of the Course Components to their Learning In addition to assessing student learning of multicultural concepts and skills, the Post-Trip Reflection and Evaluation Questionnaire evaluated the contribution of the curricular and instructional components of the course to students’ multicultural learning outcomes. These components were divided into two groups: (1) general multicultural course content and (2) international-specific multicultural course content. The general multicultural course content constituted the curriculum implemented in multicultural courses taught by the second author in both the traditional on-campus and the FLIC formats. In contrast, the international-specific multicultural course content was implemented exclusively in multicultural courses taught abroad (i.e., FLIC). For each group of course content components, the participants were asked to rank order the listed components with regard to the amount of contribution to their learning (from most to least) and to follow up with a short description of the process (mechanism) by which each component contributed to the reported outcomes. With regard to the general multicultural course content, five of the six components listed met the requirement of having at least two codes containing a minimum of two responses. In the domain of In-Class Lectures, Presentations, and Discussions (Rank #1), 47 per cent of responses related the contribution of this component to its conceptual depth (e.g., “the lectures were absolutely insightful”), 32 per cent to its connection to personal experience (e.g., “I think each lecture/movie was really important in my self-assessment”), and 21 per cent to its openminded nature (e.g., “opportunity to be open”). In the domain of Culture Genogram (Rank #2), the contribution was attributed to the opportunities to learn about self (53 per cent) (e.g., “really helped me see myself”), learn about others (18 per cent) (e.g., “learned how diverse our class was ”), draw connections to the pre-trip self-image (18 per cent) (e.g., “way we knew ourselves before experience”), and gain conceptual multicultural insights (12 per cent) (e.g., ”meaningful, thought provoking”). In the domain of Out-of-Class Discussions with Classmates (Rank #3), 44 per cent of the responses linked this component with the context of the rehearsal of class content (e.g., “strengthen learning and reinforced”), 39

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per cent with establishing interpersonal relations with classmates (e.g., “bonding, learning never stopped”), and 17 per cent with the nonjudgmental nature of self-expressions (e.g., “ability to speak freely without judgment”). In the domain of Journaling (Rank #4), 43 per cent of responses related this component to the format that allowed an extension of in-class learning (e.g., “help push thinking and reflection”), 36 per cent to an opportunity to reflect on themselves (e.g., “projecting my thoughts out onto paper was very therapeutic”), and 21 per cent to an opportunity to reflect on the on-going experience (e.g., “kept me thinking plus reacting to entire trip”). In the domain of Cultural Activity Reaction Paper (Rank #5), 50 per cent of responses attributed its contribution to learning about other cultures (e.g., “another chance to experience another culture”), 25 per cent to the application of knowledge in community settings (e.g., “tied trip to current learning”), and 25 per cent to an opportunity to extend their own worldviews (e.g. “I would never have thought to leave my own comfort zone”). With regard to the faculty-led international course, course content, the participants rank ordered and reflected on the contributions of four components. In the domain of Interactions/Experiences within Local Communities (Rank #1), 50 per cent of responses related its contribution to the experiential nature of learning (e.g., “seeing how others live”), 25 per cent to its connection to self-reflection (e.g., “learned how chaotic my way of life was”), and 25 per cent to the outcome of increased comfort with diversity (e.g., “felt good to feel like a minority”). In the domain of Immersion in Non-English Speaking Country (Rank #2), its contribution was attributed either to the opportunities to gain understandings of the cultural adaptation process (64 per cent) (e.g., “having to conform to another culture’s ways and language”) or to the experiential nature of learning (36 per cent) (e.g., “imperiled experiential learning”). In the domain of Service Learning Activities (Rank #3), 50 per cent of the responses linked this component with the exposure to other cultures (e.g., “learned a bit about their daily lives”), 30 per cent with the acknowledgment of universality across cultures (e.g., “share awareness and the realities of being a human being with another group”), and 20 per cent with gaining new multicultural insights (e.g., “forced me to think”). In the domain of Field Trips and Tourist Destinations (Rank #4), 44 per cent of responses related this component to the opportunities to acquire new multicultural insights (e.g., “learned so much about how much my life differs from theirs”), 33 per cent to the experiential nature of learning (e.g., “visiting different towns created more of the awareness of the different values, lifestyles”), and 22 per cent to the fact that field trips

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provided a less intellectually demanding learning context (e.g., “great breaks from intense study”).

Conclusions and Recommendations The present analysis of student self-reported learning experiences in faculty-led international courses suggests that this multicultural training format may provide a valuable alternative to its traditional on-campus counterpart. In particular, FLIC design creates unique opportunities for experiential multicultural learning in novel cultural contexts that are not accessible within the on-campus course format. Based on the student perspectives on multicultural learning in the FLIC format, several conclusions and recommendations may be offered with the hope of assisting faculty with the preparation of an effective and meaningful FLIC: 1. The participants self-reported growth in the acquisition of foundational multicultural concepts as well as specific skills necessary to work with multicultural populations. Consequently, an effective FLIC design should implement a balanced curriculum in which conceptual knowledge and culturally sensitive interventions are equally emphasized. This can be achieved, for instance, by providing pre- and/or post-trip instruction that optimizes the application of foundational multicultural concepts into culturespecific interventions. 2. Most participants indicated increased understanding of multicultural concepts without specifying an underlying mechanism of these gains or attributing overall increased awareness to specific understandings. Clearly, students in a FLIC may benefit from extensive and explicit faculty guidance to facilitate self-reflection on their acquisition of multicultural concepts. For example, faculty may prepare a list of journaling questions/prompts to serve as a reflection compass and/or utilize the framework of focus groups for class discussions. 3. When specifying the mechanisms underlying their learning, the participants predominantly point to: (a) exploring and challenging their own pre-conceptions, (b) gaining new experiences that expended their knowledge and awareness of diversity, (c) acquiring understandings of the complexity and contingencies of diversity, and (d) understanding an appreciation of the importance of multicultural competence and personal growth. Thus, to support student multicultural learning, an effective FLIC should maximize

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the use of these learning processes, most notably within the context of unfamiliar culture. 4. Among a variety of the general multicultural content components (i.e., components taught in both on-campus and international formats), the participants designated the contributions of in-class structured activities (e.g., lectures, presentations, and discussions) as most important to their multicultural learning. They attributed the importance of these activities to their intellectual rigor and nonjudgmental nature. Noteworthy, in the FLIC format, these activities should serve as a platform for extended, out-of-class learning and reflection. The extensive and meaningful exchanges with classmates within the context of off-campus shared living and experiences are likely to allow students opportunities to deepen their understanding of multicultural concepts. Thus, it is critical that faculty maintain the rigor of in-class activities and promote them as a framework for out-of-class, peer mediated learning activities (e.g., discussion groups). 5. Among the international course content components (i.e., components taught exclusively in the international format), the participants most valued the contributions of direct interactions within local communities and language immersion experiences. Given the experiential nature of these experiences, it is imperative that faculty design them consistently with the learning-by-doing and service learning frameworks. 6. To increase student multicultural learning outcomes, faculty should hold pre-trip and post-trip sessions that include guest lectures, group activities, interaction within local communities, virtual tours, and/or service learning activities. Such activities may facilitate a generalization of multicultural concepts and skills across cultural settings and increase student awareness of their own and others’ assumptions, values, and biases. As a result, students may become more competent in utilizing their newly acquired multicultural competencies to design culturally appropriate services and interventions.

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References Auerbach, C. F. & Silverstein, L. B. (2003). Qualitative data: An introduction to coding and analysis. New York: New York University Press. Alexander, C. M., Krucek, T., & Ponterotto, J. G. (2005). Building multicultural competencies in school counselor trainees: An international immersion experience. Counselor Education and Supervision, 44(4), 255-266. Amir, Y. (1969). Contact hypothesis in ethnic relations. Psychological Bulletin, 71(5), 319-342. Amir, Y. & Garti, C. (1977). Situational and personal influence on attitude change following ethnic contact. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 1(2), 58-75. Annette, J. (2003). Service-learning internationally: Developing a global civil society. In S. Billig & J. Eyler (Eds.), Deconstructing servicelearning: Research exploring context, participation, and impacts (pp. 241-249). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Arthur, N. & Achenbach, K. (2002). Developing multicultural counseling competencies through experiential learning. Counselor Education and Supervision, 42(1), 2-14. Baty, R. M. & Dold, E. (1977). Cross-cultural homestays: An analysis of college students’ responses after living in an unfamiliar culture. International Journal of Intercultural Relation, 1(1), 61-75. Bringle, R. G. & Tonkin, H. (2004). International service-learning: A research agenda. In H. Tonkin, S. J. Deeley, M. Pusch, D. Quiroga, M. J. Siegel, J. Whiteley, & R. G. Bringle (Eds.), Service-learning across cultures: Promise and achievement (pp. 365-374). New York: International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership. Coleman, M. N. (2006). Critical incidents in multicultural training: An examination of student experiences. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 34(3), 168-182. Collins, N. M. & Pieterse, A. L. (2007). Critical incidents in multicultural training: An approach for developing active racial/cultural awareness. Journal of Counseling and Development, 85(1), 14-23. Crabtree, R. D. & Sapp, D. A. (2008). Realizing the university mission in partnership with Nicaragua: Internationalization, diversity, and social justice. In D. Starke-Meyerring & H. Duin (Eds.) Designing global learning environments: Visionary partnerships, policies, and pedagogies (pp. 87-107). Rotterdam: Sense Publications.

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Estrada, A. U., Durlak, J. A., & Juarez, S. C. (2002). Developing multicultural counseling competencies in undergraduate students. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 30(2), 110-123. Ibrahim, B. L. (2012). International service-learning as a path to global citizenship. In J. A. Hatcher, R. G. Bringle, J. A. Hatcher, & R. G. Bringle (Eds.), Understanding service-learning and community engagement: Crossing boundaries through research (pp. 11-24). Charlotte, NC: IAP Information Age Publishing. Kerl, S. B. (2002). Using narrative approaches to teach multicultural counseling. Multicultural Counseling and Development, 30(2), 143171. Kiely, R. (2011). What international service learning research can learn from research on international learning. In R. G. Bringle, J. A. Hatcher, & S. G. Jones (Eds.), International service learning: Conceptual frameworks and research, (IUPUI Series on Service Learning Research, Vol. 1, pp. 243-274). Sterling, VA: Stylus. Kim, Y. Y. (1995). Cross-cultural adaptation: An integrative theory. In: R. L. Wiseman (Ed.), Intercultural communication theory (pp. 170-194). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Parker, B. & Dautof, D. A. (2007). Service-learning and study abroad: Synergistic learning opportunities. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 13(2), 40-52. Rowell, P. C. & Benshoff, J. M. (2008). Using personal growth groups in multicultural counseling courses to foster students’ ethnic identity development. Counselor Education and Supervision, 48(1), 2-15.

CONTRIBUTORS

Martyn Barrett is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Surrey, UK. He obtained his degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and Sussex. He is a developmental and social psychologist but has a strong commitment to multidisciplinary research. His primary research interests are focused on young people, race, ethnicity and nation and the societal challenges that arise from cultural diversity. He is currently leading a flagship project for the Council of Europe entitled “Competences for Democratic Culture”. Zygmunt Bauman is a Polish sociologist. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, Bauman is one of the world’s most eminent social theorists writing on issues as diverse as modernity and postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity. Marco Catarci is Associate Professor of Social and Intercultural Education at the Department of Education, Roma Tre University. He holds a PhD in Education and collaborates with the Research Centre on Intercultural and Development Education at Roma Tre University. He is member of the PhD School in Educational Research and Theory and has been a member of the Board of the Italian Society for Pedagogy and of the Italian National University Council. He has taken part in many national and European research projects in the field of education and has presented several papers at international conferences. His major research interests include intercultural education, cultural mediation and inclusion of refugees and is the author of books, articles and research reports on these topics. Dorota Celinska, PhD is an Associate Professor of Special Education at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Her research pertains to the intersection of the socio-cultural and psycho-linguistic aspects of narrative discourse of diverse learners as well as the effectiveness of multicultural training approaches. Dr. Celinska has extensive experiences in Poland and U.S.A. as a psychologist, teacher educator, bilingual evaluator, and school improvement coach.

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Paola Dusi is an associate professor with the Department of Humanities and a member of the Intercultural Studies Centre at the University of Verona. She has been conducting research into the integration of migrant families and their children since 2000. Since 2010, she has published two solo works and three collaborative volumes, in addition to 35 articles and book chapters, both within Italy and internationally. In recent years, her research has explored the following issues in greater depth: the integration of second-generation migrants; the sense of responsibility in younger generations; the ethics of recognition. Michel Ferrari is a Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology & Human Development at OISE University of Toronto and head of the Wisdom and Identity Lab, which explores understandings and teaching of personal wisdom in people of different ages (from children to the elderly) in different countries around the world. He is currently leading an international study of personal wisdom and, in applied practice, he and his students are studying the experience of wisdom and personal identity in marginalized populations. Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo holds a degree in Philosophy (Torino 1997), a Ph.D. in Science of Culture (Modena 2005), and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Torino 2011). He served as Post-Doc Research Fellow in Political Philosophy at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa) and as Contract Professor at the University of Torino. He is currently FNRS Post-doc Researcher at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). Among his research interests: ethics and politics of responsibility (esp. Hans Jonas), landscape ethics, philosophy for children/community, intercultural education. Carl A. Grant is Hoefs-Bascom Professor in the Department of Curriculum, and former Chair of the Afro Studies Department at the University Wisconsin-Madison. He was President of the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) from 1993-1999. He has authored or edited more than fifty-five books and has written more than one hundred journal publications. Chiara Greco studied European Languages and Cultures and Management of cultural activities in Italy and Spain. She graduated with a thesis on solidarity economy networks. Then she lived and worked in Marseilles and Santiago de Chile. Coming back in Italy, she improved her expertise in Project managent and Interculturalism through a regional training

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course in Bologna. In 2009 she worked as youth worker with unaccompanied non-UE minors (Cooperativa Dimora D'Abramo). From 2010 to 2012 she worked at Ceis Immigrants Office. Since 2011 she is part of Mondinsieme's staff. Marwa Mahmoud is responsible for intercultural education projects Foundation Mondinsieme the Municipality of Reggio Emilia. Graduated in Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Bologna, with a thesis dedicated to the Egyptian writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature Naguib Mahfouz. She began working in the Intercultural Centre Mondinsieme in 2004 as an educator in schools and an editor of journalistic projects. In 2008 she worked in the editorial staff of La Gazzetta di Reggio. Giovanna Malusà, freelance psychologist, qualified in Strategic Clinical Psychology in Education, is currently PhD student in Psychological Science and Education at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Italy. Adjunct Professor, teaching on refresher courses for teachers, she is also the editor assistant of Encyclopaideia – Journal of Phenomenology and Education. She worked as a primary school teacher for 30 years, promoting active methodologies in intercultural paths. Giuseppe Mantovani is full professor of social psychology in the University of Padua, Italy and coordinator of national and european projects on cultural psychology and intercultural education. Papers on journals such as Cultural Psychology; Cognitive Science; Human Relations; Mind, Culture and Activity. Among his Books: Intercultura, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2004; Analisi del discorso, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2008 (in English: Exploring Borders, Routledge, London, 2000. Diana Moehrke-Rasul (Kingston University, UK) is research-active in the field of intercultural learning and the internationalisation of higher education. Diana takes a keen interest in the pedagogies that inform such learning, specifically through lived experiences research and praxis with students and educators. Diana currently resides in the United Arab Emirates. Kenneth McNeilly is a lecturer and Practicum Coordinator within the Master of Teaching program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Ken's teaching interests include

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Contributors

Child & Adolescent Development, Educational Psychology, and Mental Health in the Classroom. Ken is pursuing narrative approaches to studying identity development, focusing particularly on the identity development of children and adolescents with LGBTQ-identified parents. Aneta Mechi is a Teacher Assistant in social psychology of teaching at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational sciences of the University of Geneva. She is interested in the social cognitive mechanisms underlying teachers' raisoning and practice in classroom settings and in teachers' training. Victoria Perselli is an associate professor at Kingston University, UK. Her research interests include the internationalisation of higher education, intercultural learning and critical pedagogy in HE. Victoria has published in the fields of the performing and visual arts, identity politics and feminist research methodologies. She is particularly interested in how professionals in various disciplinary fields theorise and apply theory in professional practice, and the resultant pedagogies of change developed by practitioners in response to the social and political challenges of our times. Agostino Portera professor of Intercultural Education and director of the Centre for Intercultural Studies, University of Verona (Italy), visiting professor at several universities, and author of many publications in the eld of Intercultural Education and Intercultural Competence. His most recent publications include: Manuale di pedagogia interculturale (Handbook of Intercultural education), Laterza, Roma (2013) and Intercultural and Multicultural Education: Enhancing Global Interconnectedness (2011; with C.A. Grant), Routledge New York. Margarita Sanchez-Mazas is social psychologist, professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational sciences of the University of Geneva. She adresses intercultural issues in connexion with migration and asylum within the field of education and teachers' training. She is the author of several articles and books, in particular Racisme et xénophobie (PUF, 2004), La construction de l'invisibilité. Suppression de l'aide sociale dans le domaine de l'asile (ies éditions Genève, 2011), and the editor of collective volumes. Yael Sharan conducts cooperative learning workshops for teachers, teacher trainers, and educational consultants. She has authored and coauthored articles and chapters on cooperative learning. Her book Expanding

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Cooperative Learning through Group Investigation (with Shlomo Sharan) was published by Teachers College Press and translated into Italian and Japanese. Yael is a board member of the International Association for the Study of Cooperation in Education and a member of the International Association for Intercultural Education. Marilyn Steinbach is full professor in the faculty of education, University of Sherbrooke, in Quebec, Canada. She has a PhD in Comparative, International, and Development Education from the University of Toronto, and teaches intercultural education and second language education. Her research interests are the integration of immigrant youth, intercultural relations, and the development of intercultural competencies in preservice teachers. Roberto Swazo holds a Ph.D. in Counselor Education from Oregon State University, a Masters in School Counseling, and a Bachelor’s degree in general sciences (biology, chemistry, and physics) from the University of Puerto Rico. He is a Professor and Division Chair of the School and Clinical Mental Health Counseling program at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI), Cedar Falls. He has published 3 books, 3 book chapters, 20 articles, and presented in Europe, U.S., and Latin America. Alessio Surian works at the University of Padova (Italy) where he teaches Transformative Learning, Group Dynamics, and Education Technologies. He conducts research about social and intercultural competences. He is also part of the University of Buenos Aires research team on Urban knowledge co-production. He collaborates with the Council of Europe's Intercultural Cities programme. He is the author of several training packs and studies on issues of Intercultural Learning and Citizenship. Massimiliano Tarozzi is Associate Professor of Education at the Department Life Quality Studies, University of Bologna, Italy, and was Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), USA. He is the editor of Encyclopedia: Journal of Phenomenology and Education. He ha extensively written about Intercultural and social justice education. His last book is Global citizenship education and the crises of multiculturalism (Bloomsbury, 2016) with C.A. Torres. Gretchen Wilbur is Associate Professor and Assessment Director at the School for New Learning. She received her EdD from Vanderbilt University in Educational Leadership. She has worked in teacher education at the

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Contributors

university level and in K-12 schools in urban, rural, and international settings during the past 25 years. Her scholarship and expertise are in equity education, school-community partnerships, teacher preparation, and program design and evaluation.

INDEX

A Adult Student Inquiry, 153 Anti-oppressive intercultural education, 169 Assimilationist approaches 140; practices, 140 B Biases, 208, 257 Bilingual, 105 Biographical Experience, 76 C Chakra and Tao, 34, 37 Civil Rights, 93, 95, 113 Community building 186; interpreter, 70 Competences for Democratic Culture 50 for Inclusion, 54 Constructivist, 234 Cooper, 209 Cooperation skills, 57, 60 Cooperative learning, 172, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 237, 240, 249, 250 Cosmopolitan citizenship 62 education, 46 Critical approach, 213, 242 Cross-cultural communication 142 mediator 70 Cultural barriers 141, 167 diversity 25, 56, 58, 62, 63, 70, 135, 145, 161, 178, 190, 208, 216, 232, 246

culturally diverse education 143; practices 145 societies 51 D Democratic citizenship 55, 56, 57 culture 50, 51, 52, 61, 64, 65 Discrimination., 12 E Education for all, 106, 232; in urban space 90 system 78, 96, 125, 246 inequality 69 Educational opportunity 104; skills 198 Elusive Identity, 6 Empirical social psychological research, 209 Ethical Choice, 245 Ethnocentrism, 168 European perspectives, 166 Exclusive identities, 130 G Global citizenship perspective, 61; economic crisis 101, 122; migration 124 village 24; world 1 Globalization, 24, 46, 108, 123, 130, 131, 135, 148, 175, 208 Glocal world, 26 Grounded theory, 233, 234, 236, 245, 248, 250, 251

258 H Hermeneutical, 129 Higher education, 52, 63, 141, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 215 Human rights, 26, 28, 41, 50, 51, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63 I Immigrant children 193, 200, 201 children experience 200 Immigration, 69, 71, 79, 81, 84, 167, 187, 208, 258 Inclusion of immigrants, 70 Indian perspectives, 166 Individualism, 28, 93, 130, 161 Integration, 72, 74, 123, 201, 204, 206, 208, 232 Intercultural classroom 181, 185, 187, 194; communication 27, 46, 47, 48, 84, 156, 162 competence 27, 28, 45, 47, 52, 54, 61, 125, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163 competence at school 123; competences 24, 26, 32, 165; dialogue 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 65, 66, 132, 246 education 1, 24, 25, 26, 45, 46, 48, 49, 86, 89, 125, 131, 132, 133, 162, 166, 168, 169, 171, 178, 179, 182, 185, 192, 193, 194, 195, 202, 203, 234, 237, 244, 245, 248, 249, 251; interactions 140, 157; learning 136, 142 mediation, 69, 73, 86 mediator, 70, 71, 72, 74, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87; pedagogy, 128, 130; perspective, 37, 68, 70, 85, 135

Index positioning system, 154, 160, 161; school 208 Interculturalism, 68, 69, 150 International students, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 184 Interpretative phenomenological analysis, 220, 230 L Learning Process, 239 Lesbian, Gay, 220 Life-Long Education, 19 Liquid-modern, 3, 5, 6, 7, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20 Lower secondary, 52 M Marginalization, 69, 194, 200 Migration experience, 200 Model of Inclusive, 238 Multicultural concepts 256; context 42; education 28, 46, 47, 48, 86, 87, 96, 133, 134, 149, 179, 208, 210, 216, 251;schools 197, 199, 200, 201; skills, 257 Multiculturalism, 26, 46, 66, 68, 122, 134, 135 Muslim pupil, 176 Muslim student, 177 N Nationalism, 25, 124 Neoliberalism, 91, 92, 98, 103, 108, 111, 112, 113, 147 P Paidea, 13 Peaceful co-existence, 167 Philosophical Inquiry, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131 Plural Society, 68 Pointillist life, 3, 4 Post-capitalist, 144

Intercultural Education and Competences Poverty argument, 100, 101 Preschool, 52, 63 Primary School, 231 Q Qualitative research, 234 Quality research studies, 107 Quantitative research, 33 R Race and Cultural Argument, 108 Racism, 71, 90, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 117, 118, 120, 173 Relativism, 25, 26, 130 Religious diversities, 122, 131 diversity, 122 S Semi-structured interviews, 28, 34, 220

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Social cognitive flexibility, 211, 214, 218; equity 245; exclusion, 200, 206, 231 justice 91, 93, 95, 112, 113, 115, 226, 227, 232, 233, 234, 240, 245, 248, 249, 251, 262; stereotypes 209, 217 South American perspectives, 166 Stigmatization, 200 Student Perspectives, 252 T Teachers’ competences, 246 practices, 209 Theories of the Person, 29 Transcultural approaches, 28 perspective, 25 U Universalism, 25 Upper primary, 52 V Vocational School Students, 175