Working With Young People
- A Continuous Process
No matter their age, people who
come face to face with the challenges and problems of multicultural
society cannot jump straight from ignorance to critical
consciousness and action. This may only be carried out through
an intercultural education process, informal in this case,
alongside which it is possible to carry out a variety of
activities and initiatives.
Intercultural education has to enable
young people to discover the origins and mechanisms of racism,
intolerance, xenophobia and anti-semitism. Personal discovery
can lead to collective action and it is up to us to facilitate
this process. Political and economic action is also required
to complete the picture: education has its limits but also
its responsibilities.
Others have attempted to describe the
crucial areas for consideration in planning programmes for
intercultural education, as you can see in the resources
section at the end of this pack. We have chosen, in a simplified
way, to compare the intercultural education process to a
road in which there are different stages that, simultaneously,
are centres of interest to work on.
These are:
i) To imagine yourself from the outside
ii) To understand the world we live in
iii) To be acquainted with other realities
iv) To see difference positively
v) To favour positive attitudes, values
and behaviour
You may decide that some stages
are more important than others, or that you need to take
a different route altogether. These stages may be combined
in different orders but, as this pack is not four-dimensional,
we will take them one by one - including suggested ideas
and contents to work with.
i) To imagine yourself from the outside
In intercultural education the
starting point of our work is to reflect upon ourselves
and our own reality.
Ideas and contents:
Our own social and cultural reality:
• To re-assess what we feel is positive
and what is negative within our reality.
• Our habits, ways of thought, styles
of life, etc. are only one possible response to the world:
there are other realities, which are neither better nor
worse, but different.
• Explaining our reality to others
who do not know it can be useful in helping us to gain a
different perspective.
Reactions to other social and cultural
realities with which we live:
• Prejudices and stereotypes within
our society toward other societies and cultures.
• Why do those prejudices and stereotypes
appear?
• Why are there some positive prejudices
and stereotypes and some other negative ones?
• The influence of prejudices and
stereotypes on our way of behaving towards other people.
Discrimination: An arbitrary phenomenon:
• Everyone may be discriminated
against on some occasion or other.
• Why does discrimination take place?
• What forms does it take?
ii) To understand the world we live in
Different societies, countries
or states cannot develop if they are isolated from one another.
Ideas and contents:
We live in an interdependent world:
• Societies are in need of each other.
• Europe is not a planet! (the slogan
taken from the Council of Europe's North-South Centre)
Shared responsibility:
• In great part, the forces that
oblige many people to leave their countries in order to
survive originate in the economic system our ways of life
are based upon.
As a complement to realising that
we live in an interdependent world, we need to be working
on our responses to the phenomenon of globalisation these
days. An investigation into the causes and effects is contained
in the Compass chapter on Globalisation.
iii) To be acquainted with other realities
Many of the negative attitudes
towards cultures, lifestyles or societies which are different
to our own, have their origin in the "fear of the unknown".
That is why an essential element in intercultural education
is encouraging acquaintance with and knowledge of other
cultures - not that of the tourist who keeps a safe distance,
but one which allows us to open up to the risks of encounter
and exchange. This acquaintance must be based on the effort
to understand realities different to our own.
Ideas and contents:
What do we know about other cultures or lifestyles?:
• How have we obtained the information
we possess about other cultures, societies, countries?
• How much of reality is there in
that knowledge, and how many preconceived thoughts reach
us by different ways?
• How much do we need to question
the information and images we receive through the mass media?
• How can we really find out what
it is like to "walk in someone else's shoes"?
There are neither superior nor inferior cultures:
• Each culture is the result of a
different reality.
• In each culture there are positive
aspects from which it is possible to learn, and negative
aspects we may criticise - how do we decide?
Different does not mean worse, but dissimilar:
• Which are the factors by which
the difference between human beings is seen as something
negative?
iv) To see difference positively
What are the bases of being able
to look at difference from a positive perspective?
Ideas and contents:
Our own culture is a mixture of differences:
• The social and cultural reality
we belong to is the result of a conglomeration of differences.
• We do not consider those differences
to be an overwhelming obstacle to living together.
The difference among different cultures is a positive
fact:
• The connections and relations between
different cultures are enriching not only for individuals
but also for societies. They can also be the sources of
great amusement and pleasure.
• Every society and culture has something
to learn from and something to teach to other societies.
• How do we learn to avoid making
immediate judgements about facets of other cultures or lifestyles
which are "strange" to us?
• How can we learn to live with the
feelings of (temporary) insecurity, which these processes
awaken in us?
• How do we take advantage of the
enormous opportunities such encounters give us to find out
new sides to our identities?
v) To favour positive attitudes, values
and behaviour
All of these stages are based
on the promotion of values: human rights, recognition, acceptance,
active tolerance, respect, peaceful conflict resolution
and solidarity.
• If we claim the right to solidarity
then, as Jean-Marie Bergeret summarises, we also have an
obligation to show solidarity. It is this type of conclusion
we are working towards in intercultural education. But young
people will only change their attitudes and conclusions
for themselves, we can only help to facilitate the process
by working through a variety of challenges with them over
time.
• If we work to favour these sorts
of attitudes it will be easier to encourage positive behaviour
toward people from other cultures. But we have to take into
consideration that these attitudes and behaviours are not
possible if they are not developed parallel to qualities
like honesty, cooperation, communication, critical thought
and organisation.
|