Outline and justification:

Intercultural Education Congress presented by the research group HUM-665 "Research and Evaluation in Intercultural Education" aims to train and update the participants to achieve an intercultural society, involving people from different backgrounds and cultures.

The interest in interculturality in Spain becomes a relevant topic of study and concern since very recently. The intercultural approach to diversity coincides with the increasing presence of a high number of foreign immigrants and their children in schools over the last decades. Immigration and interculturality are two issues of growing interest in our society. Immigration, besides giving rise to numerous economic and political issues and social, also implicates to education professionals. We live in a world where cultural diversity is the rule. Diversity is the norm. Withdrawal or defend this diversity, experienced as pollution and conflict, or on the contrary to respect, accept and live with it, is the controversy and difficulty in which many developed societies are debating currently.

In Europe, education has to become an intercultural responsibility to consider the similarities and differences between cultures. Each culture is a deep diversity. Therefore it is important to respect differences and support the specifics of each particular culture. Accepting differences is a prerequisite for creating an intercultural awareness.

In that sense, the human sciences should include methods of objectification and self-referential and reflective methods. The existence and gradual increase in a culturally pluralistic society is requiring, among many others, an appropriate educational response, an education that goes beyond the school and connects with the surrounding social reality, since a growing number of people, not only or exclusively of school education, demand strategies to address the challenge of a more diverse society from the standpoint of ethnic and cultural diversity. The present circumstances are not those of the last century. We believe that rethinking interculturalism is an unavoidable challenge that we must address from the strategies of meeting in the civil society through education, because pluralism and migration form the framework from which to look for convergence between diversity, multiculturalism and identity. This meeting is promoted through education as intercultural education is the way to achieve real equality of opportunities in this multi-ethnic and pluralistic society. Interculturalism is a rights issue of will and commitment towards education which forces us to make proposals for territorial integration of the cultural differences and transnational proposals for inclusion of diversity.

Contact us

HUM 665 Research Group
"Research and Evaluation in Intercultural Education"
Universidad de Almería.

Disign Angel Valverde Guil

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