Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to show a training framework for intercultural education from the perspective of global competence for educational professionals in formal and non-formal settings. The theoretical background is education for critical intercultural citizenship in the framework of global competence and connectivism. The training framework is conceived through a community of professional practice models of intercultural education through web environments, social networks, and face-to-face workshops. The focus is on the critical and reflective practice and the perspective taking to explore beliefs about global and intercultural education, to become aware of the quality of interactions in educational contexts in cultural diversity, and to adopt didactic strategies for the implementation of a curriculum aimed at contributing to a global education that meets the needs and characteristics of the 21st century.
TopIntroduction
Cultural diversity is the plurality of ethnic groups, linguistic minorities, immigrants, social classes, and gender, among others. It is an essential characteristic of today's post-modern societies. The processes of globalization and the migratory crisis in different continents of the planet make the social dynamics more complex and uncover new challenges.
The most recent statistics highlight this fact (United Nations, 2019); the number of international migrants worldwide reached nearly 272 million, up from 153 million in 1990. More than half of these people who migrated went to Europe (82 million) or North America (59 million). North Africa and Western Asia hosted the third largest number of international migrants (49 million), followed by sub-Saharan Africa (24 million), Central and South Asia (20 million), East and South-East Asia (18 million), Latin America and the Caribbean (12 million), and Oceania (9 million).
Spain does not elude this reality. In addition to its own plural linguistic and ethnic existence, in the last 30 years, it has continued to be a country with an important percentage of foreign and very diverse population (Gómez et al., 2017). Currently, 11.43% of the total resident population in Spain (47,431,256) is foreign (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2020). This fact is reflected in schools as a micro social system, with 10.14% of students coming from different countries, from five continents (Ministerio de Educación y Formación Profesional, 2019), which represents a great cultural plurality.
In this context, the melting pot of cultures that coexist in schools becomes an emergent and unavoidable construction to make a practical and dynamic context of intercultural coexistence and interaction, in democracy and collaboration, with actions of welcome and critical and active participation, which require building bridges between the family and the community to learn to live together in plural, inclusive, diverse, and complex societies (Council of Europe, 2018; Escarbajal, 2015). But interculturality is not only the responsibility of foreigners, nor of children, nor of people who are culturally diverse, but of the entire population, and this global reality demands in all people a solid intercultural competence (Commission of European Communities, 2005). It implies aptitudes and attitudes of the citizens to facilitate the suitable relations in intercultural contexts, by means of the cultivation of values of respect, tolerance, empathy; overcoming of prejudices and stereotypes; and improvement of the personal and cultural self-concept of all (Deardorff, 2006).
However, pedagogical policies and approaches that are based on mere curricular uniformization or on the simple administration of a hegemonic curriculum, folkloric exaltation, or compensatory viewpoint in education do not resolve the necessary democratization of intercultural educational praxis (Ormaechea, 2014; Martínez-Usarralde et al., 2017), nor the equality of opportunities for students (Sánchez-Santamaría & Ballester, 2014).
International comparisons consistently show academic achievement gaps among children with immigrant/ethnic-minority background (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2019). An example of this is the high percentage of immigrant students in Spain (35.8%) who permanently quit school (INE, 2020. In the Netherlands, for example, the democratically chosen focus on classroom practice proved not to interest policymakers; in Slovenia, it was teacher participants themselves who expressed a desire for “recipes” or high-level strategies to guide inclusion, rather than wishing to explore their own autonomous capacity to implement change through reflective practice at a micro level (Kakos & Heinemeyer, 2019).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Training Framework for Intercultural Education: It is aimed at professionals in formal and non-conventional education, and it is based on global education, education for critical intercultural citizenship, the cultural dimension of global competition, and connectivism. It advocates the formation of professional communities of practice in intercultural education for critical and reflective practice and the taking of a perspective that allows professionals to contribute to a global education that responds to the needs and characteristics of the 21 st century.
Global and Intercultural Curricular Integration: It aims to guide an educational practice for the implementation of a curriculum from a global, intercultural, and interdisciplinary perspective, through the application of strategies and didactic resources that connect the contents with the local, national, and global reality.
Community of Professional Practice (CPP): A set of people grouped around a common concern, passion, or problem, who interact and collaborate with each other, with the aim of deepening their skills and knowledge of the subject in question, in order to create, recreate, and improve traditional ways of being, doing, feeling, and (con)living in community. CPP promotes a culture of collaboration and communication and encourages shared learning through the construction of a network of networks.
Intercultural Competence: A gradual process of acquiring and developing skills, values, knowledge, and understanding of other cultures, as well as sociolinguistic skills, which favor the acquisition of other superior skills: adaptability to multicultural contexts, critical and reflective thinking, cognitive flexibility, ethnorelative vision, empathy, behaviors, and appropriate and affective communication.
Critical and Reflective Practice: One of the axes on which the Training Framework for Intercultural Education is based, which favors the development of higher order cognitive skills to manage one's own learning and challenge misinformation and stereotypes about culture, countries, and people, and thus it counters intolerance and oversimplified representations of the world. It also allows professionals to recognize acquired intercultural knowledge, intercultural knowledge in the process of acquisition, and knowledge not yet achieved; to select appropriate cognitive strategies to develop, promote, or improve such knowledge; and to plan, control, and direct mental processes towards the achievement of personal and professional objectives for the development of global and intercultural competence that allows the implementation of a global, intercultural, and interdisciplinary curriculum that promotes students to recognize the richness that their origins and cultures bring to their classrooms, communities, and the world, so that they can think and think as members of a global community.
Intercultural Critical Citizenship Education: It is an articulation of the teaching and learning process for competence training in coexistence, tolerance, responsibility, and the consolidation of spaces for a democracy based on social and real justice. This approach favors opportunities for global and intercultural learning, offering a voice to students, and listening to students’ diverse experiences, for the development of cultural knowledge, the development of critical and reflective thinking skills, decision making, empowerment, the awareness of perspective, and citizen responsibility as key aspects for the sustainable education for society. To achieve this, educational practices are (re)constructed, through a curriculum that connects content with local, national, and global reality, through issues such as justice and social responsibility, equity, poor sustainability, migration, social exclusion, and racism, among others.
Virtual Professional Learning Environments: It is a set of virtual environments, public (virtual campus and online forums) and private (web space and RRSS), that promote opportunities for shared and distributed learning among the participants of the CPP, from the contribution of connectivism and rhizomatic learning. The virtual environments constitute meeting and interaction points, where proposals, tools, resources, and didactic strategies of an intercultural nature can be accessed and exchanged, as well as sharing and making intercultural educational practices visible in order to generate true intercultural dialogues without the limits of borders.
Taking of Perspective: Second axis on which the Formative Framework for the Intercultural Education is sustained, which favors in the professionals the development of abilities and dispositions of thought to explore their own intercultural beliefs, to take conscience of the quality of the interactions in the educational contexts in cultural diversity, and to incorporate didactic actions for the implementation of a curriculum.