Insegnamento e intercultura. Pratiche, condizioni, valori: coordinate possibili

In the school of globalized society, considering each and every student as a ‘culture’, education and teaching cannot be but inter-cultural, so the focus of this work will be on the class and above all on those in charge of its management: the teachers. Specifically, the research was motivated by the following questions: what practical, gnoseological and axiological references can be useful for teachers (and future teachers) involved in today's 'global' classes? In order to answer these questions, the research project was divided into four parts. In the first part, through three experiences as examples, we highlighted the main features that make an inter-cultural scholastic training actually democratic. Offering to the students the opportunity to think about the sociopolitical issues and the conditions for civil and civic experiences that will be able to help them, as adults, to live and act responsibly in a world that will become sooner or later their own world, democratic education, according to Dewey’s meaning of democracy, adds value to the educational process of all levels. In the second part, following the constructivist paradigm, especially the socio-cultural constructivism, through Gardner and Bruner’s works, we proposed the need to develop a multi-centered and centripetal mind for teachers involved in multicultural classrooms, considering each and every student first of all as a unique human being and not as representative of a specific religion or affiliation. Furthermore, we supported the idea of identity as a process. Presenting three different types of learning spaces (closed space, why space, further space), characterized by a different degree of inter-cultural democracy, in the third chapter we introduced the concept of liberty-for. In educational terms, democracy needs responsibility but responsibility presupposes liberty-for learning, so the students should be given the chance to move within different educational settings in order to learn confronting themselves with the 'authority'. The last part is about the values. Considering Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, for multicultural educational contexts, we discussed about the idea of humanity as a situated possible a-priori: a moral/ethic horizon of meaning through which a teacher can express his/her professional humanity considering each learner as a given of lived life in need of being understood to understand him/herself.