Intercultural Education

1. General approach
- practical supervision of cultural differences in the classroom and their pedagogic utility -

In the context of the project's general mission - Roma children' school situation improvement - the Intercultural Education component aim is to strengthen schools' and pilot-communities' capacity to broaden the educational offer that would call forth respect, tolerance and minority cultures' "visibility" within the framework of the multiethnic schools. Schools' representatives are invited to join our effort in providing solutions for the practical supervision of cultural differences in the classroom and their pedagogic utility, for overcoming the potential obstacles in the intercultural dialogue.

2. Description

Such "intercultural competencies" are meant to be functionally integrated in school's and community's daily activities, so that the Roma pupils and their families could find their place in the "school photograph", be accepted beyond any misconceptions or discriminatory attitudes, and benefit of equal opportunities for development. In order to acquire this standard, several imperatives should be adopted:

• learning environment improvement in the pilot schools, that will stimulate an adequate development of and involvement in each pupil's school life regardless of his/her cultural affiliation;
• curricular offer adjustment in order to create proper contexts for intercultural communication and acknowledgement;
• didactic methods improvement so that teachers are able to:
  • accurately recognize and valorize, in their daily activities, the cultural diversity through a rational evaluation beyond any misconceptions or categorizations;
  • mediate the cultural differences between various social contexts, between the school's culture and the one - slightly different sometimes - of the Roma community;
  • take maximum pedagogic profit of all the "pretexts" for intercultural development;
  • initiate intercultural dialogues in the classroom, by valorizing each pupil's particularity;
• pilot-schools' interest stimulating to make them creatively involve in elaborating documentary supports that can be practically experimented;
• shaping the abilities and strategies for establishing effective partnerships with the parents and the community.

3 Technical assistance

You may find here some activities through the agency of which schools are supported in promoting this component: formation activities, counseling activities in order to identify the vulnerable aspects in the school and aid granting to successfully implement the chosen solutions, activities addressing cooperative elaboration of support materials that will valorize the concrete experiences in the classroom, documentation and monitoring activities.

A great stress will be laid on systematic organization of the activities performed in each school, in order to maintain the structural configuration of the successful experiences and practices, the lessons already studied, the subsequent creative ideas, so as they can be valorized and expanded afterwards. Besides the two guides addressing the particular intercultural issue (1. "Education - a means to surmount misconceptions and cultural stereotypes"; 2. "Intercultural curriculum: development, implementation, evaluation") that are part of the project, each school has to elaborate its own resource materials and anthologies using didactic instruments or promoting the pupils' individual creations that encourage intercultural initiatives, and portfolios that will monitor each stage of the project's evolution.

4. Activities

A first example of concretizing the above mentioned intentions is the training Seminar "Education through and for cultural diversity", held in Ploiesti, December 7-8, 2001, that offered the participants a productive context for acquiring mutually shared knowledge, experience exchange, and suggestions for improvements.

One of the seminar's applications - "Our school - a nondiscriminatory environment" - that was positively ranked in the evaluation questionnaires filled in by the participants can be regarded as more than a finalized work theme. It lead to a salutary process of synthesizing an inventory of rules and principles to be followed by the participants. "Our school - a nondiscriminatory environment" represents an on-going provocation that the teachers should address not only in formation seminars, but also together with all the pupils and their parents, and permanently confront it with the daily school reality.