Málfríður - 15.10.2009, Side 35

tional approaches? Why should a teacher think
about those intercultural teaching approaches
and why should they consider changing their
teaching style? How has the ideology around
intercultural education developed and changed?
What are the aims of intercultural education?
2. The second question is the how question. This is
the question that I have heard most often in my
work, giving lectures and training intercultural
education. How do we reach the aims of inter­
cultural education in our classrooms? How can
we organize our teaching in order to reach those
aims? Are some methods more likely to work
than others?
3. And then there is the what question. Which materi­
als do we use in order to reach those aims? What
do we need to consider when we develop intercul­
tural teaching material? Do we need special mate­
rials or can we use our old textbooks and tasks?
I will try to look closer at those three questions in
this article, even though the scope of this article will
not allow deep coverage of them all.
Why intercultural education?
This question is very important when we discuss
intercultural education with trainee teachers as
well as with in­service teachers. Why should teach­
ers change their way of teaching if they do not see
any obvious reason for changing it? We can prob­
ably introduce as many methods and materials as
we want, but if teachers do not see the advantage
of diversity or have prejudice against certain groups
of society – those methods will be useless in their
hands. Therefore the attitude of the teachers toward
the diversity in the classroom is vital in order for the
methods and materials to work.
The discussion about intercultural education first
started in connection with migration in Europe,
but Antonio Perotti asks an interesting question
in his book The Case for Intercultural Education;
“Was it really necessary to wait for the settlement
of millions of immigrants from other continents in
Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s to acknowl­
edge the multicultural nature of society? Did people
who were “different” not exist well before the recent
arrival and settlement of immigrants?”2 With his
question Perotti wants to emphasize the pluralism
in our society, not only connected with migration.
This pluralism is what we call multiculturalism.
The first question which we need to answer in this
context is “how do we define intercultural educa­
tion to day and how has it developed?” The term
has been defined by educationalists in various ways
since the 70s. The development described here refers
especially to the countries in Northern and Western
Europe.
In the years between the 1970s and the 1990s dif­
ferent ideas of educational approaches were devel­
oped in different European countries. The different
educational approaches introduced here did not nec­
essary replace each other but overlapped in many
ways. The most commonly used terms to describe
the different approaches are “immigrant education”
(Ausländerpedagogig in German), “multicultural
education” and “intercultural education”.
The origin of the thought given to pluralism in school
and in education, in the early 1970s, was the immigra­
tion which took place in Europe from the late 1960s
onwards. The emphasis in this first phase, immigrant
education, was kind of a deficit orientation, i.e. the
migrant students had some deficit that needed to be
improved.3 The emphasis was on assimilation, strip­
ping the children completely of their cultural iden­
tity and typical of this approach was its focus on lan­
guage learning. Official measures in many countries
were varieties of special education classes where the
pupils would spend a lot of time with other migrant
children, learning the new language but often falling
behind in the academic subjects. Immigrant educa­
tion was therefore a kind of a special education with
the aim of assimilation but was organised outside of
the majority group. It was soon obvious that this edu­
cational approach did not work very well. First of all
the fact that the focus was on separation i.e. separat­
ing migrant students from other students did not do
much to improve their academic, language­ or inter­
cultural skills nor did the students belonging to the
majority groups have any chance of improving their
intercultural competences through interaction.
Parallel to immigrant education, a new approach,
multi cultural education developed in many European
countries. I define this approach as the first steps
towards intercultural education. In the 80s and 90s
the discussion was still very much on special educa­
tion for migrant children but focusing less on assimi­
lation than integration, however still not mutual inte­
gration. Culture was still defined in the narrow way
of national culture but now the emphasis in many
schools was on “celebrating diversity” by offering
superficial cultural events to their students on special
theme days. This was characterised by an exclusive
focus on folkloristic cultural features a project based
approach where national stereotypes were enforced
and students from minority ethnicity groups pigeon­
holed into a national culture which often had nothing
MÁLFRÍÐUR 3