Intercultural Education

What is it?

Before starting to talk about intercultural education is needed to know what being intercultural is.
Being intercultural is to accept the cultural diversity. Being intercultural means to recognize that all cultures have the same value. No culture has more value than others.

Nowadays society is not the same than last century's society. The increase in the population have changed the context where people grow up. So the education had to change as well.

The growth of diversity in societies, the increase in cultural heterogeneity of educational settings, the learning of languages to a greater extent, living and working with people from different cultures lead us to consider the need for intercultural competence. The teachers must revise the curricula and the students have to improve their skills according to multicultural reality. The contacts between people with different cultural backgrounds give the new global context for education (Palfreyman & McBride, 2010).

Intercultural education is education which respects, celebrates and recognises the normality of diversity in all areas of human life. It sensitises the learner to the idea that humans have naturally developed a range of different ways of life, customs and worldviews, and that this breadth of human life enriches all of us. It is education, which promotes equality and human rights, challenges unfair discrimination, and promotes the values upon which equality is built. (National Council for Curriculum and Assessment [NCCA], 2005)

Approaches and Methodologies

As the NCCA experts in the book “Intercultural education in the primary school” (2005) say: Since the Intercultural Education is based in primary school curriculum, the best methodologies and strategies are the ones based on the curriculum, the ones that use active learning.
No "specially made" strategies are needed to teach in a cultural diverse classroom. 

          Active learning

• engages children physically, cognitively, and emotionally
• promotes action, as children learn to recognize their own capacity and self-efficacy
• places children at the centre of the learning process through ensuring that the content is relevant to their own lives and is engaging for them
• requires an atmosphere of trust and support in order to ensure that children do engage and feel secure in expressing their own views or in trying out new skills.

 Strategies based in active learning can be used to help develop understanding of intercultural concepts such as diversity and bias. Lessons structured for children interaction is the most optimal way for students to acquire useful knowledge that they can put into practise in real life, therefore it propitiates a "responsible citizen" attitude development.
             
                   Discussion

Kids are not simply listening, discussion can contribute to the development of a range of attitudes and skills that need to be learned:

• co-operative skills, such as asking questions and listening actively and positively.
• taking turns to contribute.
• recognising the value of different views and dealing with conflicts of opinion in a nonpersonal way.

"Discussion has a key role in intercultural education. It provides a basis for children to talk about their feelings and ideas and can enable children to develop or change their ideas or feelings. It can also provide children with language that helps them make sense of and understand their world" (NCCA, 2005)

With this stategy, students exchange ideas within the group, they also learn to analyse different points of view that allow them to know different cultures and their values.

                    Work group skills


With active learning strategies some special group work skills are developed like: children get faster to response in a respectful way to other classmates ideas, and they will want to learn with and from their classmates. They learn to tolerate everyone differences: ethnic, racial, nationalities, intelectual, etc.


What happens in Ecuador?

In Ecuador intercultural education (IE) is an educational system designed to provide answers to the different needs of socially displaced sectors. Intercultural education in Ecuador has its foundation in the development and recovery of ancestral knowledge through critical analysis and social context where being educated. This form of social pedagogy wants to introduce a system of formal academic training and quality standards for communities and indigenous people in Ecuador.

Since 1992 educational reforms designed to multiculturalism and bilingualism is given way to an intercultural education, however, this had no quality standards nor relevant methodologies. In 1996 education reform intercultural education is considered only in Kichwa, which makes lose sense for other people and nationalities of Ecuador. It is in 2006 that the last educational reform, so far, has considere intercultural education as a comprehensive educational system that meets the needs of the context in which this will develop, be it in their ancestral territory, native language and learning that revalues ancestral wisdom.

Intercultural education is an organized system since 1964 to address regulatory and curriculum but only in Quichua language, is now with the latest reform is considered that IE is an educational model designed in the revaluation of ancestral knowledge and indigenous language, without leaving aside formal knowledge of basic general education.

Beyond the intercultural education laws in Ecuador continues standing on paper, many institutions take the names of intercultural and bilingual by the presence of indigenous or native Quichua-speaking students. One can also observe that there is a process integrated into the curriculum with ancestral knowledge, just as the mother language (Quichua, Zapara, cofano, etc.) are treated as a second language and the study of Spanish is prioritized and in some cases English also. These problems are just some of the many in the Intercultural Education in Ecuador, despite all this struggle for social claim for the payment of the social debt we have with the people and native communities.

Now we are not belittling the fact of change in the educational system where everyone has the right to a quality education and warmth, giving priority to cultural and ancestral knowledge to appreciation of people and nationalities rescue. Significantly, the path that has been traveled if we consider that the first intercultural schools were clandestine under a social context of oppression and segregation to indigenous and other ethnic groups, but it is still looking for the way to integrate everyone in education, which respects the mother language, and ancestral knowledge are part of a formal study, not only for people and communities but for the whole Ecuador.

The change in education in Ecuador is a process of slow transition, which seeks to integrate all knowledge, languages ​​and people for a comprehensive and intercultural training process, where knowledge is the reconstruction of formal and ancestral knowledge, and the interaction is in the mother tongue and be exported into other languages. Even today everything still seems a utopia but there is a path already marked by where you can begin to move to find pedagogies, methodologies and teaching resources that integrate knowledge, experience, science and art for an intercultural, interdisciplinary, respectful education with ancestral knowledge and especially must be bilingual.

For future teachers of multiculturalism it represents change and transformation of the educational system but: What needs to be done to achieve intercultural classroom? When multiculturalism will be present in the curriculum?

We must position ourselves in the classroom with a critical pedagogy and contextualized questioning: How to make our classroom a suitable space for intercultural learning? Knowing How to face the vicissitudes that occur in the intercultural classroom dynamics as to the relationships among students?

But then we thought is it the problem of multiculturalism in school something that can help solve the culture or society? It is still hard the way to go but we should not forget that there is no space that multiculturalism is not present and it is our duty to rescue, valorize and preserve his position.

Introduction

Evidence of effective teaching

To assure about the effectiveness of a teaching-learning process evidences have to be shown.

In this part of the blog , we will show some evidence of the effectiveness of some pedagogical models.

Mujis and Reynolds in "Effective teaching: evidence and practice" (2011) propose that any pedagogical model can be effective if the teachers know the correct behaviors at the class needed for it

Direct Instruction:

Many studies have been made to prove direct instruction (or whole-class teaching) effective. LIke the oe in 1994 that proved it vs individual approaching. THe students that were taught with direct instruction obteined positive outcomes in 4 out of 29 studies and it didint get any negative, meanwhile the ones with differentited lass got  3 negative outcomes out of 29 and none positive.

Experts in the field said that direct instruction became effective in these cases because its easer to keep it up wih the whole group behavior and control it if teacher notice any student is not attending the lesson or he is invaded of boredom. As for the information they recibe, its easier to relate the old one in their long-term memory with the new one in the short-term memory and since the whole-class teaching is the most rapid way of attaining  new knowledge, we will need to train or learning ability.

The main elelmentes to make this possible are:

• Clearly structured lessons: Lessons must be well structured so students wll be able to unsterstand the topic correctly and how it is related to what they already know.
• Clear, structured presentations: Content should be presented step by step and each step should be feeded back before going forward.
• Use of conceptual maping: A well structured conceptoal schema helps students to relate and order every subtopic of the lesson correctly. It will help them specially in very complex topics. 
• Interactive questioning: Direct instruction wont be an effective method if here is not a practice element, and the interactive questioning serve for this.
• Preparing seatwork: the seatwork must tie with the objetives of the lesson.  It must take place after the questioning.
• Use workbooks/textbooks: Attactively looking books can mtivate the students during the lesson and it will help them to make the seatwork faster.
• Organizing seatwork:Teachers need to make clear the objetive of the seatwork so students understand how is it related to the lesson and the topics they are learing.
• Feedback on seatwork: An effective way to do this is at the final part of the lesson, where the teacher will ask about students's answers and correct them  if needed.

Interactive Teaching

Mortimore et al. found positive results of a frenquent cuestiong in primary schools.(1988)
The interaction in class is needed for an effective teaching. The use of high order questions and a good communication with pupils showed to be effective. American researchers have made a detail study  on what constitute effective interacioning and questioning (1976).

Questioning:

• When and how often to use questioning: Questioning should take up a large part of the lesson. It can be used to check students retention of previous topics. Questioning is positive to make it explain themselves.
• Eliciting a pupil response: To make students answer the questions is difficult on older or shy students or if the whle class is made to this kind of work. Teacher has to make pupils feel confortable in teh classroom so they don't feel that a wrong answer will carry something bad to them.
• The cognitive level of questions: Research has shown that teachers prefer to use high order questions since it make students think about the answer longer than low level questions.
• Open and close questions: Effectiver teahcers use open question more often since it requier the student to think it longer and closed question. How ever the frecuency of closed or open question will depend on the topic.
• Process and product questions: Product questions are mean to find the answer to a particual problem while process questions will find the procedure to solve the problem.
• What to do when a pupil answers aquestion correctly but hesitantly?: It is essential to give a positive feedback and it has to be explcit so the student that gave the answer notices that the answer was effectively correct.
• What to do when pupil answers a question incorrectly?: Teacher must break the question into many little steps so the student is able to anliza it in a simplified way.
• What to do when a pupil answers a question partially correctlly?: It is important to give a positive feedback but clearifying which part was the correct one and which wasn't so no confusing will appear. 
• Prompting: Prompting can be given in for of tips instruccions, clues so student will have to analize and find the corret answer himself.
• What is a correct wait-time?: The wait-time depends on the type of question, if its a low order, closed question 3-4 seconds will be enough, while with open, high order questions 12-15 seconds is the optimal wait-time.
• Classroom discussion and its relationship to questioning: Depending in the lesson's objective questining will be or not appropiate. In the case it is not, classroom discussion will be the best option. It can be done in the whole class or small groups. The whole class discussion will help the students to envolve and engage into the topic allowing stdents to develop a better understanding of the lesson.

What is effective teaching?

We define effective teaching as that which leads to improved student's achievement using outcomes that matter to their future success.
Student progress is the yardstick by which teacher's effectiveness should be assessed. For a judgement about whether teaching is effective or no,  it must be checked against the progress being made by students.

Philosophy of teaching

The history of the world always has passed between oppressors and oppressed people;  the group who has the power and the group who doesn’t have, the group who has the money and the group who haven’t, the group who has the knowledge and the group who hasn’t. 

This continue class struggle has created many ways to see and perceive the world, and made many thinkers, people who try to explain the world and try to change the world with their own theory.  

A world in conflict creates critical people, creates ideas and solutions for the problems that we have. 

Around the world we have: political problems, poverty, discrimination, racism, even and obviously we have educational problems.  One of the problems who involves the education is the poverty, the poverty people around the world can’t access to education.  

La calidad de la educación que la mayoría de los niños recibe en América Latina es deficiente. Es particularmente el caso de las escuelas públicas que reúnen a la mayoría de los estudiantes de primaria y secundaria y virtualmente todos los sectores pobres. El énfasis puesto en la expansión ha significado reducir la atención en los procesos y los resultados del aprendizaje. (Puryear, 2007) 

This spanish part say that the public education is deficient, because the governments focus on building more school, but the education quality is poor. I need to add something more, the group who has the economic and political power doesn’t have any intention to give a good education to poor people, because it means, if there are educated people there are less chances to still have the power and dominate the people. 

I’ll like to add something that Mariategui, a Peruvian journalist, political philosopher, and activist, said: “the problem of teaching cannot be well understood, if this problem is not considerate like an economic and social problem.” (Mariategui, 1970) . 

 I want to start from these problematics, I think that, us as a teachers, have a powerful tool to change the world, and is we can create a critical awareness in our students about the world.  

My philosophy of teaching is give a political vision to the education, give to my students an education who gives them the opportunity to do critical reflection and not memorize the knowledge. 

I want that my students debate, think, use the dialectic to build a powerful argument to defend their ideals. I want to share with my students that our ideas can be put in practice. I want that they know about the praxis. 

I want to let they know that we can change the things, we can change our reality, we can do a better world, a fairer world where all of us live with dignity. 

Paulo Freire said: When the oppressed would attain his/her freedom, he/she will be a “new man”, and the wish and the goal is to have a society in harmony and social justice, where the people welfare is not based y the domination and exploitation. 

I take this quote because I think the education has the solution to the problems in the world. If there are critical thinkers around the world the things can chance. I think that if the people know the reality, think about their situation, the people would not be exploited. 

I also think that the teachers must to create dialogue channels between our students, to share their ideas and socialize: I don’t believe in an individual education as the traditional education does.  

I think that all of us can learn something about the others, we always learn from other people. 

We can’t be individualists, we need all the knowledge as be possible to understand the world and its reality. 

I think that the teaching must to be solidarity and humanistic, because we need build a new society based in respect and love. 

I’ll like to teach all of this in my class. 

I believe in an education where we are the principal actors, like a teachers or students, I believe in education that make us: think, reflect, share, change. 

I say not to the indoctrination, I say yes to the critical reflection that allow us overthrow the old world.  

I believe in education that allow us to build a better society, a better people, who take care about other people, who isn’t individualist. 

I believe these and I want to teach these.