Multicultural citizenship and intercultural education

The essay provides general issues about intercultural education. It gives an idea of the main general problems faced by multicultural schools: creating intercultural communication, promoting social participation and giving effectiveness to integration. Further it explains the relevance of the management of these problems which can be based on children’s active participation as well as on a form of policy linking effectiveness to intercultural adaptation. Th essay attempts to connect the theme of intercultural education to a more general theory of intercultural communication. The starting points are that (i) education can be understood as constructed inside communication and (ii) intercultural settings concern confrontations between different voices and narratives in communication. The perspective is that multicultural citizenship means full acceptance of participation inside the various social contexts, including education, and I underline a theoretical perspective on dialogue arguing its relevance for promotion of intercultural participation in schools. This perspective leads to some observations about (1) the different forms of intercultural education and (2) the connections and differences between education and mediation in intercultural settings, which is one of the most debated topics in Italian schools and studies today.A