Teorie e pratiche dell’inclusione / Theories and practices of inclusion
Marta Milani
Assegnista di ricerca, Centro Studi Interculturali, Università degli Studi di Verona
Sommario
Una didattica inclusiva, che aspiri al contempo allo sviluppo di competenza interculturale degli studenti, non è rappresentata da un insieme di contenuti specifici, ma si caratterizza piuttosto da un orientamento metodologico e uno stile operativo da adottare nella prassi quotidiana; non si tratta, in altre parole, di dedicare uno spazio del curricolo ai temi cari all’educazione interculturale, ma di gestire tutti i curricola disciplinari con un approccio — e postura educativa — che faciliti la partecipazione di ogni alunno. Il presente articolo intende offrire un contributo alla riflessione rispetto all’enucleazione di un’idea di competenza interculturale che sia saldamente radicata nella pratica didattica. A tal fine, verrà attribuita alla natura dialogica e interattiva del Cooperative Learning la funzione di volano della stessa (della competenza interculturale).
Parole chiave
Apprendimento cooperativo, Competenza interculturale, Educazione interculturale.
Abstract
Inclusive education that also aims at the development of pupils’ intercultural competence is not represented by a set of specific contents, but conversely is characterised by a methodological orientation and an operating style that needs to be adopted on a day-to-day basis; in other words, it is not a matter of dedicating a space in the curriculum to themes that are dear to intercultural education, but dealing with all the subject curricula with an approach (and educational posture) that facilitates the participation of each pupil. This article intends to offer a contribution to reflection on the explanation of an idea of intercultural competence that is firmly rooted in classroom practice. To this end, the dialogical and interactive nature of Cooperative Learning will serve as a springboard for intercultural competence.
Keywords
Cooperative Learning, Intercultural competence, Intercultural education.
Introduction
Nowadays we are witnessing an unprecedented crisis in democracy. It is under threat everywhere in the world, and is incapable of responding adequately to the challenges posed by Neo-liberalism (Bauman, 2002; 2000; Portera e Dusi, 2016; Baldacci, 2018). This dyscrasia is ever deepening because there are so many topics such as global warming, job insecurity, the accelerating development of technology and waves of population movements that the institutions and political leaders are caught up in the need to provide immediate responses to these issues; but the answers cannot be provided in a short period of time. Democracy, however, takes time: time for elections (and managing relations), for debating and counter-powers.
Teachers and educators are therefore called upon to build a school that is up to the challenges of the present and that rests its foundations on the values of the Constitution and the inevitable political role of the word and actions (Dewey, 1964; Milani, 1967; Freire, 1974). Schools are in fact the main microsystem (Bronfenbrenner, 1986) where there are melting pots of different ethnicities and cultures; which is why they are an extraordinary social workshop where one can discover the potential and enrichment opportunities that can be gained from meeting the Other, as well as the inevitable difficulties of coexistence. In a more secluded fashion, we have to address in the classroom the same issues that incite political rhetoric in the media, but in a context that, if properly managed, can become a catalyst for intercultural competence rather than a springboard for racism. One of the main discriminating factors (in addition to the use of methods and methodologies that are based on cooperation) is time; a quality time, associated with the existence, that cannot be quantified but which, if properly tapped into, can weave together memories, knowledge and emotions. However, this only happens when you create a context where people are inclined to mutual listening, taking the utmost care to foster the art of dialogue and intercultural communication (Pinto Minerva, 2002; Castiglioni, 2005; Giaccardi, 2005; Portera, 2011); in short, when you manage to build a learning course capable of transforming every class into a small community. This can be achieved through the stimulation of mutual curiosity and when listening to opinions about a story, a theorem or a piece of music fosters critical thinking, causing uncharted semantic horizons to unfold.
In the halls of Italian schools that are still in some ways top-down, authoritarian institutions, it is therefore necessary to effectively convert individual and collective responsibility into work with the children and youngsters starting from the foundations of small school communities. The hypothesis on which we must work and commit ourselves to is that a multicultural class supports enrichment and promotes a kind of thinking that is «migrant», dialogical and not pigeon-holed according to preconceptions (Pinto Minerva, 2002; Lamberti, 2010a; Ongini, 2011; Fiorucci e Catarci, 2015). A diversity of viewpoints, in fact, helps to analyse each topic and issue with greater subtlety, depth and insight, even if achieving this is not easy. It involves preparation, dedication and a collaborative spirit that goes beyond the school walls (Milani, 2018).
Through the space allotted to dialogue and negotiation as essential elements in education, cooperative learning not only facilitates active learning strategies, but also the acquisition of intercultural competence. In other words, this method represents an extraordinary parallelism among social, emotional, relational and cognitive structures of learning and democracy, promoting ideas based on networking, horizontal communication and decentralisation of responsibilities.
Intercultural Competence
Intercultural competence consists of a dynamic set of knowledge, attitudes and skills, whose mastery allows you to act and react in an effective and appropriate manner[1] (Fantini e Tirmizi, 2007; Portera, 2013; Santerini, 2017). Its quid resides not so much in resources, but in their mobilisation, knowing how to act (or react) in a non-routine situation (Le Boterf, 1994; Trinchero, 2016). In other words, the knowing-how-to needs to be supported by the conditional knowledge (Damiano, 2008) which indicates how competence also involves knowing when and where one must exercise it in a relevant way. This must also include knowledge of the social roles that its activation involves, i.e. whose responsibility it is to put it into practice and with respect to which other stakeholders, within the framework of a group and/or of a more or less structured organisation, its nature and shared reference values.
Since such knowledge cannot be acquired once and for all, because external influences may compromise it and cause it to shift, one needs to appeal to ongoing training that acts on its three constituent elements, specifically:
Nevertheless, acting from a cognitive, affective and relational perspective does not necessarily lead to the development of intercultural competence if the context is not ideal to pursue this objective (Ciancio, 2014); direct meeting is only useful provided that it occurs in a situation of equal status and in a cooperative, relational framework where shared purposes are defined. The factors on which a condition of poor (or non-existent) intercultural competence depends are in fact an expression of the interaction between contextual (environmental) variables and the person. Actions aimed at environmental and personal optimisation can improve the quality of the operating levels of a person, generating growth opportunities, improving performance, eliminating or reducing the impact of internal obstacles, as well as material and/or social obstacles, that impede and/or slow down development. Therefore, following the logic of this approach, getting closer to the Other in an educational environment that is geared to collective wellbeing can positively alter the feelings of refusal and/or prejudice that had been fuelled previously; conversely, in unfavourable environmental conditions closure and hostility tend to be exacerbated.
Developing Intercultural Competence Through Cooperative Learning
In the previous paragraph we recalled that training and education for the development of intercultural competence can be performed effectively when one places a great deal of attention on the practical organisation of the players involved, working on the relationship in place. In this way knowledge, actions, and attitudes have a way of concretely unfolding in the ongoing search for solutions to problems that are never repeated in exactly the same form. Not only: competent knowledge is often also tacit and unconscious (Vermersh, 2005), managing to emerge in their area thanks to actual experimentation. However, group activities can be said to be effective in developing intercultural competence only if they promote cognitive, socio-emotional and relational activation in all members of the group, without any exception. The challenge comes from knowing how to combine unity with diversity, providing adequate responses to specific needs and to needs related to common learning, and also from identifying, on the one hand, the goals of informal and authentic communication and, on the other, those related to curriculum acquisition shared with one’s peers.
According to Cohen (1999), cooperative learning, building on the work and activities in which roles are not established once and for all, and in which contributions are required from each student, is particularly suitable for complying with that purpose. Cooperating for the achievement of a common goal, with the awareness of the unit primarily as a mental place of mutual and selfless help, becomes the best way to undermine prejudices and stereotypes and to ensure equality among pupils in taking part and learning. It can be defined as a «social mediation» method which, without excluding the possibility of individual work, recognises interaction among pupils as the main resource of the teaching/learning process, especially in order to tackle complex, challenging and reality-based situations and/or tasks, which require a variety of resources (attitudes, knowledges and skills; that is: competence) and higher-order cognitive processes. From an epistemological point of view, this method has its roots in the constructivist conception of learning (Vygotsky, 1978) and is based on a dynamic, procedural and interactive teaching-learning model, that is built in a strongly participatory social context, with dialogue in its broadest sense as its mainstay. By enabling students to perceive themselves as an active part of the learning process, cooperative learning turns the classroom into a powerful public space in which they are empowered to exercise their own voice (Damini, 2014; Pescarmona, 2014; Sharan, 2017). For this to happen, though, one needs to make sure that, in the activities proposed in the classroom, the five pillars of the method are organised in an intercultural perspective:
It follows that, in order to assess its successful acquisition, it is essential to organise challenging situations,[2] that can stimulate (albeit in simulated but realistic contexts) the pupil’s ability to formulate original, relevant and decisive answers. These can be recorded by the teacher through a dual, synergistic and complementary procedure (Johnson, Johnson e Holubec, 1992): monitoring, which refers to a set of actions aimed at observing the pupils as they work in groups to assess their changes and improvements in terms of learning and the use of social skills. The ongoing assessment work is thus a monitoring action that is particularly useful for understanding how the work is organised, which strategies are activated to cooperate fruitfully and how group discussions are conducted and how possible relationship difficulties are addressed; conversely, the processing is the review of the group work that is performed at the conclusion of the activity and can be done by taking into consideration the comments collected by the teacher and/or by one or more external observers, as well as by stimulating a group discussion.
What is important is to emphasise the fact that the assessment should always be carried out with a view to being constructive, i.e. the assessment tests should not be used only to assess the learning, but also to improve it (Domenici, 2003; Castoldi, 2016; Milani, 2019): they should facilitate the processing of experiences (in an autopoietic perspective), clarify the objectives, direct efforts in the desired direction and facilitate transfer. The keyword is self-regulation, which refers to gaining awareness about what one knows and what one can do through the use of historical and biographical self-assessment devices (both at an individual and group level), so that students learn to improve their preparation in overcoming obstacles that gradually reveal themselves; to promote the ability to foresee the consequences of their own actions; to facilitate the planning and monitoring of one’s own strategies. The underlying assumption is that the evaluations that pupils assign to themselves before a test are a significant forecast of the evaluations that they will have in the actual test.
Concluding Remarks
The complexity of the current school-educational landscape forces teachers and educators to put effort into the acquisition of appropriate tools to interpret reality and responsibility which, based on an analysis of the action contexts, is translated into strategies and projects that promote the development of intercultural competence for all the actors involved in the educational relationship and for the educational environment in a broad sense. The choice of teaching methods should therefore be made within a properly inclusive approach which fuels relationships as a social and intra-individual activity.
Cooperative learning, as a teaching-learning method towards social mediation in which human development is understood as an active, external and necessarily social process, can then serve as a springboard for intercultural competence. Through the organisation of the group, this competence manages to unfold as a process of problematisation, which corresponds to the ability to discuss and give an account of one’s own ideas, involving the recognition of the critical incident and/or of the situation-problem, identifying the details and conditions with respect to rules and principles and the provision of reasoned and shared solutions. It is precisely this discursive posture, which manifests itself to justify the chosen solution to conflicts, disputes or, in general, to situations of impasse, that substantiates intercultural competence and its potential applicability not only to a specific case, but to the family of situations in which it is placed for structural homology.
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[1] According to Barrett (2011, p. 23), the term appropriate «[...] means that interactions do not violate the cultural rules and norms which are valued by one’s objectives in the interactions».
[2] Problem-situations should thus be homologous on a structural level and significantly different as regards their circumstances and content compared to those already known and tried in school activities.
Autore per la corrispondenza
Marta Milani
Indirizzo e-mail: marta.milani@univr.it
Via Vipacco, 7, 37129 Verona, Italy
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