As an attitude, interculturality can obviously be acquired. This is why its advocates are at work examining relevant personal and civic education programmes and preparing new programmes and regulations which would ensure a peaceful and harmonious, an enriched coexistence of the different ethnicities in any one location. Interculturality, as an attitude of ‘openness to otherness’, is thus revealed as an explicit dimension of human endeavour which can be found in politics, the law and religion, and indeed in education.

 

Interculturality can be transmitted and practised with a view to forging and improving links with different, close and more distant groupings occupying the same space, including a committed critical concern with one’s own identity, a position often forgotten when talking of different identities.

 

The aim of interculturality is not to adopt another cultural (national) identity but to get to know it well enough to help solve the problems increasing multiculturalism brings with it. The growing European Union, with its increasing mixture of old and new Europeans becoming ever more mobile, is a good example of an area to practise interculturality.

 

There are other fields in which to work, but education is a particularly suitable area to transmit the values of interculturality to young European citizens through carefully chosen school curriculum subjects such as civics (to be a citizen of Europe as well as of the United Kingdom), morals (to be aware of prejudice), history, geography and the media (bias), and indeed science (adopting a common approach to green and similar issues). In this respect, a critical language awareness becomes an important education ingredient, the ability to recognize deliberate and accidental misinformation and distortion in speaking and writing. All of the above, with problems arising being tackled together by means of discussion, in mixed in- and output groups, constitutes intercultural awareness and education.

 

Mixed groups, with different people coming and being together, has already made a start with interfaith services which have become a feature of religious meetings in many previously strictly single denomination university colleges and halls of residence and of mixed celebrations of religious and secular festivals in schools. In ensuing discussions the emphasis is on what binds us together rather than what keeps us separate.

 

For some years, the author of this piece has been involved in trial language teaching lessons in a number of primary schools in several European countries (a report published by Tulasiewicz and Longhurst, comments by Kron) , with language seen as an education rather than an acquisition of skills. Following the recommendations of the 1988 Kingman Report on the teaching of English one of the main aims of the pupils’ first language lessons, incorporating foreign language elements as appropriate, is to discover, analyse and compare the culture which is an integral part of each language or dialect used or studied. This approach to the subject ‘language’ has been found useful by educators practising interculturality’.

 

‘Language Breakfasts’, consisting of the preparation in school and consumption by pupils, guided by their teachers, of ‘European’ breakfasts may be cited as one of the teaching methods used. Pupils learn the names of the various national ingredients of the breakfasts, the time breakfasts are usually eaten in the countries involved, and the simple procedures required in preparing them in an approach using pupils’ first and/or  their second or foreign language. For example:  what are the language similarities and differences between English ‘breakfast’, French ‘petit déjeuner’, Polish ‘sniadanie’ German ‘Frühstück’ and Chinese ‘zao fan’, the last two explicitly referring to the early time of the meal, the Polish a simple reference to a meal eaten, with the first two languages emphasising the fasting period preceding.

 

The ensuing discussions uncovered practices concerning various eating cultures, leading to questions whether ‘muesli’ (Müsli) was an English or a German word, the entire meal creating interest in pupils’ own and foreign cultures and enhancing the motivation to pursue the language education involved. The headteacher of Parkinson Lane Primary School in Halifax introduced further educational elements by adding information about calories and nutritional value of the dishes eaten.

 

Pupils and teachers taking part in a variety of activities, such as cardboard building and naming of the houses constituting a neighbourhood or shops using specific language to advertise their wares proved an eminently exciting approach to interculturality in Stevenage, Mainz (Germany) and Bialystok (Poland). Staff in the higher education establishments, often concerned with teacher training, and teachers in the different schools linked with the centres selected were responsible for devising suitable syllabuses to fit with the work in progress in the schools involved. In the secondary schools the work included checking for and changing bias in textbooks used, for example, in a French lesson the teacher addressing an Arab pupil as ‘Hé - Toi, l’Arabe’, the same words being used by a policeman when demanding to see an Arab’s identity documents.

 

In its own way, interfaith practice can play a significant educational role in introducing ‘interculturality’ assisting school teachers and parents, especially when the origins and contexts of practices are compared and explained in a spirit of critical awareness as well as mutual understanding.

 

The year 2008 must be seen as the time to look around, to take stock of practice, and face the challenge to engage with in order to understand ‘otherness’ in as many different walks of life as reasonably possible, making an early start commensurate with pupils’ development and readiness.