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.