Abstract:

The paper aims to analyze the thorny concept of curriculum within a challenging world of multiculturalism with an acute requirement for a genuine intercultural education.
Curriculum concept, curriculum hypostases, curriculum reform strategies are all the field of long and sometime false contradictory debates.
The first part of the paper has emerged from the result of a three years research project focused on curriculum fundamental issues, funded based on a national competition.
The first and also important step of this project was represented by an in depth documentation about philosophy of curriculum. This approach has been supported by the IAACS and RIFEFF - international organizations (in terms of offering opportunities for this documentary process). Visits, shadowing activities, debates with curriculum professionals in Canada, Brazil, and United Kingdom added interesting and useful information to our research.
The project team and other scholars have edited a significant number of papers unified under the PHOENIX International Conference, organized and run in Romania 2010. A monograph in Romanian and English has been published as a synthesis of the research reflections and conclusions. Further, reflections having as fundamentals other readings and analyses have been topic of papers published along the last six years.
This paper briefly presents some core ideas involved in all these years of work. A comparative approach of different philosophies is included. The presentation of the common aspects of these different philosophies is focused on the pyramidal representation of the learning situation, as a core aspect of curriculum. This part aims to explain that eventually there are not essential contradictions among all theses but only analyses from different perspectives of the same core issue.
The second part of the paper is focused on the cultural/multicultural context seen as an important factor of influence for learning situations and learning experiences.This part presents the case of an European country (Romania) that is both source and host for migrants. A new approach of the intercultural education should be an important part of the curriculum reform in Romania and not only. Milestones of a strategy aiming to develop effective intercultural competences are exposed and argued.
A sneak peek into the history of Romanian education along centuries stresses the implication of successive cultural contexts and the necessity to be open for an adequate intercultural educational approach of this new millennium. These issues are topics of the third part.
The presentation of Romanian education within a specific multicultural context in the new millennium is the basis of the argued necessity to build a new philosophy of the intercultural education. This is the context of a methodological approach aiming to develop the committed learning style as an effective factor of a qualitative learning and of the development of the intercultural competence.
The last part of the paper invites to reflection upon the mentioned derived concept: committed learning style as an effective factor of a qualitative learning. Only several aspects involved in research have been selected for the reasons of this paper. They are focused on curricular aspects, on the way to help the proper transformation of the learning opportunities into personal effective learning experiences to our students seen as citizens of the Planet.

Keywords:

Learning situations, learning experiences, learning opportunity, curriculum, intercultural education, committed learning style.