Page 30 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
also a process that should redefine the role of teachers because empowered teachers are able to create learning environments that will also empower students.
The above description shows that we want to get to know, understand, and support the Other and provide them with equal educational opportunities. However, it does not say that we are focused on the mutual enrichment of our cultures and the individuals who create these cultures, which in turn is the core of intercultural education, which is by definition a model of social, cultural, and educational activity. The aim of intercultural education is to develop the ability to make a variety of decisions and to act socially. An intercultural approach fosters diversity and encourages critical thinking, reflection, and action on the way to a better understanding of self and others (Szahaj, 2010, p. 27). The result of intercultural education is supposed to be integration and sociocultural dynamization. Intercultural education takes into account and respects the internal ethnic, racial, and cultural differences of a society (Grzybowski, 2008, p. 60). In the case of intercultural education, we speak less about the integration of cultures as about the interaction between cultures, the dialogue between them and their participants, which is supposed to lead to integration and mutual tolerance. So, what is the implication of this? Interaction is not a closed system; it is an open, dynamic system that aims to integrate the cultural code of one culture with another.
Nikitorowicz defines intercultural education as:
the totality of mutual influences and interactions of individuals and groups, institutions [...] conducive to such human development that it becomes a fully conscious and creative member of the family, local, regional, religious, national, continental, cultural and global – planetary community and is capable of active self-realisation of its own unique and permanent identity and distinctiveness. (1995, p. 87)
Intercultural education requires recognition and respect for the differences that exist between individuals. It allows us to cross boundaries, norms, and cultural patterns, but it is not an easy model for everyone to accept. In the age of globalisation, too much focus on the individual and individual problems may lead to educational pathologies, resulting from too much listening to oneself and demanding recognition and respect at all costs, while forgetting about the traditional values of the communities in which socialisation takes place (Grzybowski, 2008, p. 72).
Xavier Cuillard (1981) gave an optimal model of intercultural education. According to his perspective, it should:
• lead the child's school and extracurricular environment to acknowledge the child's existence and to take into account not so much the child's difference as the potential richness, both linguistically and culturally, that flows from the child's culture of origin;
• allow the child to feel noticed and to be able to say for him/herself who he/she is in relation to the class and the school, in the eyes of all the pupils and teachers, in his/her relations with them, and in the wider context of the whole environment, in a continuous process of exchange and sharing;
• be based on the effect of opening up the school or other institution to the environment in which it is located; the interdependence of the school and its educational environment, i.e. the parents in the different ethnic groups, the formal and informal organisations of the ethnic communities, the sociocultural animators, and the social workers.
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