Multiculturalism in Educational Practices: The Italian Case

The anthropological lens suggests a deconstruction of multicultural education: it cannot be pursued if we do not critically unpack the meaning of culture. Drawing on some ethnographic cases in the Italian context, we identify three potential pitfalls associated with a naive misconception of culture: generating excesses of culture, reifying culture, and overlooking differences within cultures.
Policy discourse in continental Europe has recognised the need for a dynamic and constructivist conceptualisation of culture to replace the “multicultural” educational model with the “intercultural” one. Italian school policy has embraced the latter, which can enable promising educational practices if practitioners share a critical understanding of its theoretical and axiological assumptions.