l) Formal intercultural education
Formal intercultural education includes the academic programmes and approaches that are developed within and from school education . After the family, school is the secondary socialisation group that influences the values of young people. Intercultural education places a number of demands on schools, involves an important process of opening up and renewal, changes in curricula and adaptation to changing societies. Intercultural education expects schools to recognise and respect cultural differences between individuals. As in society, both segments (majority and minority) must be involved. For minority groups, schools must be a place where they are accepted and where they can acquire skills that will help them to be accepted by society. Majority groups must learn to live positively and creatively with others.
School plays a very important role in this education, as it has a role in transmitting and promoting values in society, but at the same time it often reinforces and transmits negative stereotypes and prejudices. In order to achieve intercultural education within school walls, a number of structural changes are needed, e.g. teachers could be trained in other cultures, so that they could more easily pass on the idea of tolerance to their students if they had the opportunity to actively practice it. The other important change would be to allow children to learn about other perspectives, so that they can more easily accept them, e.g. textbooks, teaching aids should include different approaches to a given topic – how do textbooks from other countries describe the battle of Waterloo? Which country or territory is in the middle of the maps used in geography lessons?
Obviously, these changes pose a number of difficulties for the education system, but they also have significant benefits.
m) Informal cultural education
The aim of informal (out-of-school) education is the same as that of formal education. The main difference between them lies in the people who use them and the methods they use. Informal intercultural education has several important characteristics:
- optional
- those who use informal education have to make great efforts to keep the participants’ interest
- more direct and close contact with the participants
- content is adapted to their needs
- more choice to combine objectives and tasks
- the methods used contribute to active participation
The process of intercultural education is often likened to a journey consisting of several stages :
- Seeing oneself from the outside
- Understanding the world in which we live
- Learning about other realities
- Looking positively at difference
- Preferring a positive attitude
Through this process, the individual becomes more aware of his or her own culture and of the intercultural context, including respect for difference. They will also see their own culture from a broader perspective, which will allow them to empathise with others’ cultures. Understanding a concept requires not only a theoretical approach, but also a practical understanding, e.g. if we want to talk to young people about refugees, it is not enough to present some statistics about their situation, but it is also necessary to understand and empathise with the situation of these people. This will only be possible if we work on the basis of their knowledge, their feelings and their experiences. At the same time, we must not forget that the values developed in intercultural education – solidarity, respect, empathy – can only be acquired if we also try to develop their communication, cooperation and critical skills. The 3 guiding principles of intercultural education: think, feel and act.
In participatory work, we need to take some aspects into account: - we must always start from what the group members already know and are able to do, and encourage them to explore new ideas and experiences together.
- encourage young people to discuss so that they can learn as much as possible from each other. Encourage young people to learn from each other and to exchange ideas.
- we should concentrate on enabling them to apply their experience to simple, concrete situations.