Educazione interculturale

Presentation of the monographic issue. Kaleidoscopic views that problematise intercultural education from a decolonial perspective

Ester Caparrós Martín — 2023-11-30

With this brief text we would like to present the monograph that concerns us, entitled Thinking a postcolonial pedagogy to decolonise education. In this sense, several questions seem to us important today in relation to intercultural education: on the one hand, we problematise the sense in which this notion is still approached both in educational discourses and practices; on the other hand, we ask ourselves the following question: can we think today about intercultural pedagogy and education without first assuming the historical and political caesura constituted by colonialism? We will review and present in general terms the themes that the various authors participating in this monograph have sent us and which offer a kaleidoscopic view of the subject that concerns us: decolonising intercultural education.

Postcolonial education and comparative education

Michele Zedda — 2023-11-30

Postcolonial education gets theoretic benefit by holding a dialogue with comparative education, that can give it hints and suggestions of method and contents. Comparative education studied educative systems of ex-colonies, where it was quite normal to transfer school systems from motherland, without respect for uses, tradition and local context. Studies and researches about colonial past are very useful to realize present difficulties of multicultural community and, moreover, they offer new notions to postcolonial reflection.

Epistemology of consequences and intercultural pedagogy in the postcolonial perspective of Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Maria Federica Paolozzi — 2023-11-30

The article discusses the postcolonial perspective outlined in the works of Boaventura de Sousa Santos. In his Epistemologies of the South, he brings out the fundamental characteristic of modern Western thought in its hegemonic, dominant, monopolistic sense that, by producing disjunctions, dichotomies, and reductionisms, operates a kind of domination, not always clearly recognizable, in every sphere of life. On the terrain of justice, a close conjunction is delineated between the global cognitive model, cloaked and sustained by a form of universalism that is self-legitimizing, and that of social justice in which everything on the wrong side of the true/false demarcation line (behaviors, traditions, knowledge) is identified with that which is disqualified with respect to the validity of knowledge; it is considered illegal, excluded from law, transfiguring itself into a kind of universal one-sidedness. Although with due differences, Santos compares the logic behind the epistemology of colonial movements to that which characterizes the postcolonial and neoliberal globalized world. On the terrain of intercultural pedagogy, the perspective identified by Santos makes a paradigmatic contribution that has inevitable implications on the field of intercultural education.

Elements for a postcolonial pedagogy in Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism

Gabriele Borghese — 2023-11-30

The essay focuses on the pedagogical elements present in Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism on the genesis of the African American radical tradition. Robinson’s intent is to criticize the categories of classical Marxism, showing how racialization is an intrinsic element of the economic structure of Western societies, further deepening the category of racial capitalism and going so far as to deny some of the liberatory and progressive features of the rise of capitalism and the bourgeois class. He profoundly relates the development of capitalism from its origin with colonial missions that were aimed to develop education in colonial territories. When Robinson analyzes the function that education played in the formation of the early black intelligentsia the pedagogical importance of his analysis emerges. The colonial education system prepared the ground for the formation of a black middle class that in Africa and India served as an intermediary between enslaved workers and colonialists. Members of the native middle class showed complicity with the colonial state, yet at the same time experienced the condition of oppressed and oppressor. This contradiction gave rise to the formation of the first black radical intelligentsia during World War I.

Pedagogies in struggle: postcolonial openings from experiences of Popular Education in Bogotá, Colombia

Nabila Tavolieri — 2023-11-30

This essay first attempts to provide a brief description of what the Italian postcolonial condition is, by taking into consideration some critical points that should be addressed when thinking about decolonial pedagogy in multicultural contexts, such as colorblindness and the neoliberal management of interculturality. Then it follows some assumptions collected during 4 months of ethnographic collaborative-action research within popular and communitarian movements that provide Popular Education in some marginal areas of the city of Bogotá, Colombia. Finally, drawing on the same experiences I have been involved in, I will propose suggestions for imagining how the Italian understanding of intercultural education can be freed from coloniality. Eventually, the paper proposes the need to carry out a communitarian turn in pedagogy based on three orienting practices: memory as a dialogical and living praxis, territory as a hermeneutic tool and methodology, and politics of love and care. Given this, the paper also seeks to address interculturality as a dialogical methodology through which supporting the argument. Indeed, the postcolonial framework is considered in its resonances with Cultural Studies, Popular Studies, Popular and Critical Education, Black Studies, and The Latin American Decolonial Movement.

Intercultural experiences and women’s professional life stories for decolonial pedagogy

Isabella Pescarmona — 2023-11-30

Promoting decolonial educational practices assumes the determination to step outside of unique, stereotyped and majority narratives and constantly deconstruct patterns, cultural hierarchies, and relations of domination in which we are involved. In this perspective, the contribution discusses some issues emerged from the narratives collected within the research path Women’s voices, plural perspectives. Professional life stories in educational and intercultural contexts, recognising the contribution of women with a migration background as active constructors of generative actions and relationships in Italian socio-educational contexts. Through a series of meetings, dialogues and in-depth interviews, the project collected narratives and innovative and intercultural postures of twenty women activists and professionals. Listening to their stories challenges our educational contexts towards greater equity, denounces the persistence of intersectional discrimination and questions the ways of doing pedagogical research to develop a plural, shared and decolonial approach.

Classroom-world. Practices to decolonize the university training of professionals in educational and care work

Maria Livia Alga — 2023-11-30

This contribution proposes a reflection on the impact of decolonial theories and practices in social pedagogy courses for future professionals in educational and care work (educators, social workers, rehabilitation experts and doctors). In these areas, a decolonial conceptual framework questions the dichotomies that inform the asymmetric professional-user/patient relationships, marked by social inequalities and ethical dilemmas. How do decolonial theories and practices help reconfigure imaginaries and rethink professionalisms? In dialogue with Chicano and Caribbean literature (Anzaldua e Moraga, 2002; Glissant 1990, 1998, 2009), with the feminist theories of women of color (Mohanty Talpade, 2003; hooks, 2020, 2023), the article explores the idea of difference from a decolonial perspective, relating it to the issues of partiality of knowledge and oppression. Starting from an autoethnographic research carried out during the courses that I have been teaching since 2015 and from the journals of the students who attended them, the article explores methodologies and processes that favor becoming aware of the process of co-construction of knowledge situated and embodied during their academic education. Inspired by Glissant’s vision of the All-World (1990), a paradigmatic form of all creolization, we will therefore talk about the classroom-world, a meeting place that seeks to ward off the ghost of the universal and the globalized, in favor of a relationship with globality.

Educating in and for freedom. Notes to rethink educational identities from an intersectional and decolonial pedagogy perspective

Irene Martínez Martín — 2023-11-30

In this article, we aim to reflect on the essential elements involved in teacher training processes in order to rethink the predominantly technical and professionalizing vision, which stems from a capitalist, patriarchal, and neoliberal university. We understand that this vision restricts education, as it overlooks the actual experience of learning to be a teacher. Thus, we ask ourselves: How can we create educational spaces that promote diverse professional identities in education? How can we contribute to transforming hegemonic logics in teacher identity through the contributions of critical, decolonial, intersectional, and feminist pedagogies? What elements are essential in education to decolonize practices in university teaching? We start from an intersectional perspective, pursuing a dual objective: to analyze how we educate critical thinking in the university, and to propose transformative actions to decolonize and depatriarchalize education.

Colonisation of the imaginary in social ecosystem. An intersectional analysis of the representation of aesthetic-cultural differences in brand marketing policies

Fabio Bocci — 2023-11-30

As early as the 1970s, activists such as Assata Shakur addressed the issue of the imposition of white cultural and aesthetic models and the risk of these being uncritically acquired by the new generations of the African American community. Today, the space of social networks seems to allow greater freedom in the representation of the self and in the choice of contents to follow, enabling modes of self-representation and processes of empowerment. However, in the virtual dimension of the Web, the social, class, race, dis/ability and gender asymmetries that characterise onlife seem to be replicated. Assuming an intersectional perspective, the authors of this contribution propose the first results of an exploratory research aimed at investigating the degree of inclusiveness of companies operating on the Net and their effective capacity to offer, within the advertising campaigns, a representation of the multiform identity spectrum. Specifically, the Instagram profiles of well-known brands in the fields of cosmetics, make-up and fashion are analysed as case studies.

Child(ren) and childhood(s) in the processes of production of curriculum policies for early childhood education: an analysis from the three capitals of the southern region of Brazil

Angela Scalabrin Coutinho — 2023-11-30

This article’s theme is the meanings produced about child(ren) and childhood(s) in the processes of formulating curricular policies for the education of children aged 0 to 5 in Brazil. These processes are marked by colonizing perspectives based on the ideal of a global child and childhood and problematizing the norm by recognizing factors of heterogeneity that mark childhoods and children’s education. It starts with an empirical study that compares two mandatory national curricular policies in force, the National Curricular Guidelines for Early Childhood Education (2009) and the National Common Curricular Base (2017), and their impact on subnational policies in three cities in the South of Brazil, namely: Curitiba, Florianópolis and Porto Alegre. The analyses reverberate different local movements that confirm the idea of global children and childhood and oppose this perspective, revealing resistances and alignments, not without tensions, in formulating and implementing curricular policies for early childhood education. A common point is the absence of a decolonial perspective underpinning the educational projects in curricular documents.

Second Language between marginalization and social inclusion. Qualitative survey on SL training services and on the social inclusion needs of migrants, an intercultural and postcolonial reading

Aurora Bulgarelli — 2023-11-30

In the migrant’s path to social inclusion, learning the Second Language (SL) is a fundamental step and the educational environments can represent heterogeneous ideological spaces for the emergence of multivocal narratives (Chakrabarty, 2004). SL education can reproduce colonial relations, determining forms of subordinate integration based on the social structural asymmetries and that finds one of the regulatory principles in the category of race (Fanon, 1961). At the same time, SL education can promote an intercultural and problem posing education (Freire, 2018), committed to deconstructing these relationships with Otherness. This contribution deals with some aspects of broader doctoral research, relating to the topic of SL and the inclusiveness, or marginalisation, of educational action. The qualitative investigation was carried out in the city of Rome through 60 semi-structured interviews. What emerged is that the different perception of the SL influences the migrant’s path to social inclusion as learning can respond to social and emancipatory needs, but also to needs linked to the socio-economic dimension and the fulfillment of regulatory requirements, leading to a risk of social exclusion.

A case study: the description of colonialism in the Enciclopedia del Ragazzo italiano (1938-1949)

Domenico Francesco Antonio Elia — 2023-11-30

The paper investigates how the history of the colonial period was narrated in parascholastic materials that complemented school textbooks after the Second World War. The author focuses on the Enciclopedia del Ragazzo Italiano published in Milan by Giuseppe Latronico (1896-1981) with Labor publisher between 1938 and 1940. By analysing the paragraphs dealing with colonialism, the author delineates continuities and changes between the first edition, which appeared during the period of State-sponsored racism, and the 1949 one. The paper shows how Italian colonial imagery continued after the Second World War when Italians avoided any public reflection on African independence movements. The lack of public debate on colonialism resulted in the persistence of long-lasting cultural constructions that dated back to 19^th-century military operations conducted in Africa.

Decolonization of museums from the perspective of Art Education

Simón Sánchez Fernández — 2023-11-30

The article presents a theoretical-critical review of the process of decolonization of museums, starting from the new notion proposed by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) at the Kyoto conference (2019). From an epistemological perspective, it problematizes how the forms of acquisition, organization, and transmission of knowledge through collections and exhibitions are being influenced by heritage restitution policies that seek to eliminate the colonial past from European museums. For this reason, and considering that decolonization occupies a central position from which to reassess the social function of the museum, we understand that Art Education is key to breaking the asymmetric intercultural dialogue, addressing deliberate omissions, and amplifying invisibleized imaginaries. This transformation aims for museums to shift from being perceived as legitimizing instruments of hegemony to becoming critical cultural managers, promoters, simultaneously, of new educational proposals based on the knowledge and recognition of diverse epistemologies with which to create other forms of understanding and building culture.

Breaking roles in education among teachers: a theoretical framework for a sustainable and decolonial education

Greta Persico — 2023-11-30

The aim of this essay is to address the so-called male shortage in early education and teaching professions, through an interdisciplinary frame. Critical studies on masculinities and literature on role models in schools are here in dialogue with pedagogical perspectives on hidden curriculum studies and inclusive education theory. The paper describes a theoretical framework of a research proposal aimed at investigate whether a more diverse teaching staff may increase inclusion in education, understood as the never-ending commitment to developing better ways of responding to diversity. Although international literature is quite attentive to minority teachers, the Italian scenario does not look so rich of theory or empirical study. While reframing the male shortage definition in an intersectional framework, including gender identity and performance perspective, but also considering ethnicity, (dis)ability, religious back ground, I intend to investigate if a diverse teaching staff may challenge the mainstream curricula and increases the level of inclusiveness of schools in a diverse society.

Decolonizing racism in children’s representations: learn to unlearn

Silvia Carbone — 2023-11-30

Within schools, children are called to learn from school books but above all from experiences lived in the classroom in a perspective of mutual recognition. Learning through experience means recognizing the materiality of cognitive processes and grasping the symbolic violence that fuels discrimination. At the same time, children in school are called to unlearn the weight of racist and colonialist discourses. But what practices to implement within the classroom to decolonize school programs, the contents of school disciplines and teaching methods? We analyzed the results of an educational project tested in a comprehensive school, which involved 30 students and 8 teachers. To verify the impact we asked ourselves: what can happen where this project has not been launched? Carrying out a counterfactual research, through the use of qualitative (focus group with teachers) and quantitative (structured and standardised questionnaire to students) tools, we evaluated the variation of objective outcomes, comparing the pre-project and post-project situation. What emerged from the research, with respect to the indicators observed, is that the project has produced a variation in the expected direction, of considerable size and statistically significant.

Breaking out the box. Beyond deficit thinking in heterogeneous school settings

Paola Dusi — 2023-11-30

Drawing on authors working from a decolonial standpoint, Southern epistemologies, and prospectivism, the present contribution seeks to set out a theoretical explanation of the academic difficulties faced by students with different cultural background, by re-examining the theoretical underpinning of the deficit thinking. We hypothesise that the coloniality of knowledge provided fertile ground for its development and spread. According to coloniality theory, the domination of culture, subjective experience and knowledge was a key part of the European project of global domination. We argue that rationalist scientific absolutism continues to provide the epistemological foundation of school, education and teacher-training systems with significant repercussions in terms of both the marginal position assigned within the school institution to students presenting multiple forms of diversity, and their chances of academic success. Exploring approaches to knowledges such as the mestizo, transgressive, intercultural decolonial, can help us to find new ways of thinking, living and coexisting without inferiorizing the other. Epistemic decolonization represents a crucial step in the transformation of the school into an educational-didactic space of empowerment and emancipation, even from the deficit view.

Schooling experiences in a colonial school: the story of an experience in three voices

Alberto Moreno-Doña — 2023-11-30

The school institution works following some characteristic principles of a colonial epistemology. In this work we have related, in three voices, the experiences of a child (Lucas, 11 years old), an adolescent (Diego, 16 years old) and a father (Enrique, 44 years old) who moved from Chile to the city of Granada, Spain, and began the school experience in a public and traditional school. Based on qualitative methodological work with a narrative approach foundation and in which we have used testimonial narratives, we show the epistemological limitations of this Eurocentric school and the depoliticization of teaching work. The school narrated and experienced by Diego, Lucas and Enrique is a racialized institution characterized by: excessive homework, denial of differences, dichotomous epistemology, constant fears and adultcentrism. But in that same school there are also pedagogical spaces and times in which acknowledgement, sincerity and trust allow these institutions to be inhabited.

Culture della maternità e narrazioni generative, Maria Livia Alga e Rosanna Cima (a cura di), Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2022

Greta Torresani — 2023-11-30

Sangue del mio sangue. L’adozione come corpo estraneo nella società, Monya Ferritti, Pisa, Edizioni ETS, 2023

Anna Guerrieri — 2023-11-30

Conversazioni dal Sud. Pratiche politiche, educative e di cura, Mariateresa Muraca (a cura di), Roma, NeP Edizioni, 2021

Maria Silvia Lo Sardo — 2023-11-30

A day in favela. The role of narration in the field of the pedagogy of marginality

Camilla Boschi — 2023-11-30

The aim of this article is to share the obtained results by a field research in the favela of Curitiba (Brasile), in order to understand its characteristics, identifying and interpreting the relations that go through a context outside the center, on the edge (Contini, 2014), defining educational inter and transcultural practices (Gramigna 2022). The methodology is qualitative and it uses, (De Conti, 2018). The collection and analysis of data were carried out by a logbook, proponing a Narrative Pedagogy exercise, that promotes a metacognitive and self-hermeneutic process, fundamental to the construction of a dialogue in the epistemic difference. In the final part, dedicated to the discussion of the data, we will try, on one hand, to understand the role of the cooperatives of the catador de lixo (Angelin e Darchanchy, 2018; Marello e Helwege, 2014) in what Freire (1974) defines conscientization process, on the other the emancipatory value of the narration (Demetrio, 2003; Ciotti, 1994) in the retelling of one’s own history and in the construction of one’s own identity.