WORKSHOP 3
Common values, cultural diversity and education:
what and how to teach?

 

• Co-organization: Programa de Formación en Educación Intercultural Bilingüe para los Países Andinos [Intercultural Bilingual Education Training Programme for the Andean Countries] (PROEIB-ANDES)
• Co-funding: German National Commission for UNESCO
• Panel participants and moderator: list to be distributed during the ICE Drafting of the discussion paper: Mr Luis Enrique López (PROEIB-ANDES)
  
  

 

WORKSHOP 3 DISCUSSION PAPER

Introduction

To learn to live together in today’s increasingly globalized world, we need to develop the skills and values to live in a very diverse cultural and linguistic environment. Once we may have seen such diversity as a feature of far-off societies, but it has now become part of our own daily life. Right in our own homes our lives are being touched by otherness, by different cultures. The new information technologies that are becoming omnipresent put us in touch with people of different cultures and languages, while our home countries are welcoming immigrants and travellers from other regions and countries. So, to learn to live together in the twenty-first century, we need to recognize this new situation and accept our creative diversity, while also overcoming the last vestiges of colonialism.

This situation poses serious challenges for education, in particular because of its different focus, and these challenges are particularly significant when the time comes to decide what is to be taught and how.

Shaping curricula to suit more diverse environments

In speaking of learning and curricular contents, one thing that must be recognized is that there is no one true vision of the world and of things in general. Rather, our viewpoints are strongly imbued with the particular cultural traditions to which we belong and with the knowledge and experience we acquired in childhood when we learned to be part of our family and of our immediate local community, apprehending the world in the context of that belonging and learning to encode and decode it in a certain way and from a certain standpoint. Thus, an Aymara- speaking boy or girl from the South American Andes learns that any past action lies in front of him or her, since these are experiences already lived through and which are “visible” to the child; future events, in contrast, lie behind us, since they have yet to happen, and so are “invisible”. If schools ignore the Aymara child’s spatio-temporal perceptions when dealing with those aspects of the curriculum that pertain to time and space, that is, if teachers adhere strictly to the Western world’s traditional conception of time and space, they run the risk, in the first place, of a communication breakdown, since the two parties have different understandings of the same phenomena, and, in the second place, they reject a way of knowledge that is equally valid and just as much a product of human experience. Accordingly, the learners’ self-image and self-esteem, instead of being strengthened, are eroded.

The example of the Aymara children is only one of many we could cite, among rural people and city-dwellers alike, around the world.

• How can we reconcile, and/or forge links between, the interests and expectations of specific cultural communities and those of other communities which, for socio-historical reasons, have become national or mainstream cultures?
• How might the curricular present- ation of content from the Western tradition be combined or made compatible with content from other cultural traditions?

An openness to diversity

Just as the relevance of the school curriculum to children from minority groups, whether they are indigenous people or not, appears questionable, the curriculum also now needs to be rethought for the whole population. As was suggested at the beginning of this paper, there is a growing need to develop the necessary skills to learn to see one’s own knowledge as culturally conditioned, to discover that there are other ways of thinking and apprehending the world, different from one’s own, and that there is no longer any room for one absolute truth. Only in this way, by displaying openness and flexibility towards what is different and unknown, will the learners of the twenty-first century be able to discover the wealth in diversity and so become individuals with the ability to live in harmony with those of other origins. To that end, it will be necessary to provide the conditions for new, less hierarchical, more respectful relations between teachers and students, in particular when the teachers do not belong to the same cultural and linguistic community as their students.

In this new context, education will need to adopt an intercultural point of view in which, together with the reaffirmation of one’s own culture, openness, curiosity and understanding towards others is promoted, so that people will grow up with a variety of tools on which they can lay their hands at various times of their lives and for various purposes. In addition to the affirmation of one’s own knowledge, these tools should include the positive affirmation of the relations between persons, societies, cultures and languages.

• Can we conceive of diversity in school and in the curriculum in terms of complementarity rather than opposition?
• What might be the characteristics of a new school curriculum based on the knowledge of one’s own culture but providing the opportunity to discover and assimilate knowledge from other cultural traditions? Would such a formula be appropriate only for learners from minority or marginal groups, or would it also be of benefit to members of the majority culture?
• Would the suggested complementarity overcome ethnocentric tendencies of the curriculum and hence prepare learners to live in a world that is increasingly interconnected and interdependent?
• What difficulties or conflicts could arise as a result of possible differences in outlook, interests and expectations between older and younger students?
• What role should members of each minority community play in the management and development of the education programme? Should they be at the teacher’s side in the classroom to present local knowledge, thus bringing the community to the school, or should the school instead reach out to the community in search of knowledge that traditionally is not taught in school?

Diversity and the development of new shared values

An intercultural focus such as we propose would have to begin by promoting the development of values directly related to the issue dealt with here: the diversity we should be sharing with all human beings. A development of this type should ultimately lead us to conceive of diversity as wealth and the promise of harmonious relations between men and women of different cultures and languages. Among the values that all men and women of the twenty-first century should share are tolerance of what is different or unfamiliar, respect for others, and the will to seek unity in diversity. In the last analysis, what is needed is a change of attitude and disposition towards what is different, together with acceptance of plurality as something valuable in itself.

• What values could be considered common or shared if our goal is international understanding and respect between members of different societies and cultures?
• How could plurality be made intrinsically valuable? What can be done, in schools and in society, to achieve this goal?
• Can schools by themselves achieve these objectives, or must their efforts be supplemented by those of other stakeholders in society?

Interculturality and learning

This intercultural focus would include the realization that learning, to be meaningful, must build on learners’ existing skills, knowledge and experience, so that they can sensitively and intelligently build bridges between their own vision and knowledge and those of others, and seek complementarity rather than opposition. It should also be remembered, however, that there is not just one way of learning and that learning can also be influenced by specific cultural practices of the socio-historical group to which the learners belong. For that reason, various forms and styles of learning need to be identified and characterized.

Aspects such as those just mentioned are particularly pertinent to the pedagogical style chosen by teachers, and have far-reaching implications for initial and ongoing faculty training as well as for the standards governing the relationship between the school and the community in which it is located. Today more than ever this last aspect calls for special attention if what is sought is, on the one hand, a kind of learning that is rooted in its culture and society and, on the other, a school and kind of education that meet local communities’ specific and general needs.

New and more creative links must also be forged between the school and the community. For example, assistance networks need to be organized to provide support for teachers’ work and to enable the various members of the community to foster a more comprehen- sive education for their children. In this way, teachers could seek support from various professionals (artists, physicians, technicians, farmers, etc.) and get them involved in the learners’ education, whether the latter are children, young people or adults.

• How, using this same approach – taking creative advantage of diversity – could we go beyond curriculum content to deal with other aspects such as methodology and evaluation?
• Could one not also, for example, take advantage of the variety of situations and opportunities afforded by every classroom to foster cooperative learning and genuine evaluation?
• Starting today, what skills would teachers need to develop in order to bring forth a new type of education that would take account of our “creative diversity” and enable us “to learn to live together”?
• What new skills do school administrators, teachers, the com- munity and learners need to develop to manage the conflicts that will inevitably arise as we eagerly seek complementarity between visions that are often contradictory and historically separate?

Diversity in teaching and openness to the community

Finally, in order to make plurality a value and permanently instil curiosity and respect for otherness and difference in all members of the future society, we need to go beyond school as an institution. In that effort, we need to involve other stakeholders in society and embark on ways of learning and teaching which, in different spaces and from different points of view, will promote the development of values and skills such as we have described in this paper. People living today and future generations need to develop this attitude of openness to others and the ability to process new ways of interpreting and transforming reality. Only then will they be prepared to live in the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world that globalization has brought us. ?

• Will the school of the twenty-first century be able to make itself over into the meeting-point and forum for these different world visions, or will it be necessary to design alternative, non-school spaces where our creative diversity can be optimally processed?
• How can we overcome our societies’ arbitrariness and lack of values and build a world based on shared values, one such value being the diversity that has always characterized humankind?

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Last update:8-08-2001