Málfríður - 15.10.2009, Blaðsíða 34

Goals identified by the International Commission on
Education for the Twenty­first Century
The Commission identified four key objectives:
Learning to learn, learning to be, learning to do, and
learning to live together.
Learning to live together, learning to live with others.
This type of learning is probably one of the major issues
in education today.1
When we look at the goals which have been identi­
fied by the International Commission on Education
for the Twenty first Century, many teachers might
probably ask themselves if it is really their job to
teach students to learn to live together. Isn’t it our
job as teachers to teach our subjects, shouldn’t the
socialisation be in the hands of the families or some
other institutions?
Some educationalists argue that 21st century edu­
cation should be more about learning new skills and
competences rather than collecting information and
remembering facts.
After discussing those questions with teachers
from all over Europe in our courses, I am convinced
that most teachers see their profession more in the
light of educating their students in the broadest way.
Their role is to prepare students for life, not just feed
them with information, which some of them may
remember for a while but most of them will forget.
The question that those teachers still ask in my train­
ing is: “but how do I do it? I will be busy delivering
my syllabus and following the curriculum, I can’t take
any time to train the student’s social competences or
prepare them for life in an intercultural society”.
In this article I will examine this dilemma and try
to give some answers and ideas, both from research­
es and from my own experience as teacher at differ­
ent school levels.
In our schools we continue to find students for
whom the traditional teaching approach doesn’t
work and who need new teaching approaches in
order to have an equal chance to learn. In this context
we don’t necessarily mean students with any learn­
ing disabilities but students who have competences
and skills in many different areas, they may have
academic skills but still have difficulties with the tra­
ditional method, where the teacher talks and they
are supposed to sit still, listen and remember. The
traditional way of teaching therefore only reaches a
small part of our diverse, multicultural classrooms.
Our classrooms are multicultural, even where
there are no students from minority ethnic back­
grounds. Our students have different cultures. Their
backgrounds differ in terms of parents’ education,
religion, socio economic status, households and fam­
ily forms. Additionally they differ in values and atti­
tudes, lifestyles, abilities/disabilities, and ethnicity or
nationality. Ethnicity or nationality is therefore only
one of the factors that make our classrooms diverse
and thus influence our student’s culture. The settle­
ment of immigrants has added new “minorities” to
the community in Europe and accentuated the social
and cultural pluralism which already existed.
The aims of Intercultural education are to deal with
this diversity in a positive way and see the advan­
tages of it instead of seeing it as a problem i.e. not
only tolerate it but directly take advantage of all the
possibilities and richness that a diverse classroom
offers our students as learners and us as teachers.
When we talk about intercultural education we need
to take at least three questions into consideration;
1. First we need to consider the why question. Why
do we need intercultural education? What in our
society has changed to call for different educa­
Guðrún Pétursdóttir
er félagsfræðingur hjá
InterCultural Íslands.
Eftirfarandi grein er úr bók­
inni Histoire, epistémologie,
pédagogie et didactque de
l’éducation au développement
durable, pour une approche
transdisciplinaire“ (ritstj.
SupAgro Florac) sem kemur út
í Frakklandi í febrúar 2010.
34 MÁLFRÍÐUR
Guðrún Pétursdóttir.
Intercultural education
– better education for everyone?