Multiculturalism, Interculturality and Diversity in Education

Intercultural education is understood as the claim of ‘interculturalizing’ and ‘diversifying’ the school curriculum and the educational praxis in Western societies. However, school and educational systems do not merely adapt to a ‘multiculturalization’ of these societies. Instead, multiculturalism is part of a broader and deeper process of re-defining and re-imagining the nation-state as well as the relations which articulate state and society. By providing a comprehensive overview of the contemporary debate, this book starts from the thesis that the diverse models and practices of intercultural education first of all have to be traced back to the origins of multiculturalism as a social movement and its process of institutionalization, academization and transnationalization, in the course of which it entered the pedagogical field. Accordingly, the author critically and comparatively analyzes the different educational ‘solutions’ implemented in the last fifty years to cope with the challenge of ethno-cultural diversity. This analysis is realized from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective – based on the contrasting study of inter-cultural vs. intra-cultural dimensions of educational practices and institutional structures. Finally a ‘heuristic model’ is developed, which aims to analyze and to evaluate multicultural strategies in education from a multidimensional and cross-disciplinary approach.