DIGITAL LIBRARY
DEVELOPING AN INTERCULTURAL VALUE-BASED DIALOGUE IN SCHOOLS
University of Pisa (ITALY)
About this paper:
Appears in: ICERI2014 Proceedings
Publication year: 2014
Pages: 464-471
ISBN: 978-84-617-2484-0
ISSN: 2340-1095
Conference name: 7th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation
Dates: 17-19 November, 2014
Location: Seville, Spain
Abstract:
Inclusion doesn’t stand on availability of rights and on corresponding goods and services, but chiefly on sharing cultural values.

Values are conceptions of common wealth through which we weigh behaviors, purposes, feelings, ourselves and others. Following values, the subject doesn’t mechanically conform to standard patterns: while learning those patterns, at the same time he customizes them putting in something of himself (needs, fears, dreams) and then returning to the collectivity those patterns enriched of nuances of intimate and fresh meaning. To more culture it corresponds more personal fulfillment, more independence from external patterns. For this, we say values are ruled by individual ground, not that are preformed and flow from society (or school) to individuals in a irreversible way.

We take up a value if we discover something of common and superior which ‘naturally’ fits in our personal life project: values take part of subject’s motivational structures if he recognizes a consonance with something he already experienced as authoritative and trustable. This ‘something’, preparatory to cultural value, is the worthy.

Worthy is a natural and indefinite urge to bond to (objects, human beings, environment and notions) which receives a definite shape in daily life contexts (i.e. family, classroom, sport association or company): every context has its own typical rules fostering a particular cultural capital generating typical worthies. The real shape of worthy implements into ‘typical ways’. Into ‘typical ways to do’ (manual hobbies or crafting activities, leisure activities, etc.); into ‘typical ways to connect’ (face-to-face relations as well as social networks virtual contacts); into ‘typical ways to symbolically express’ beliefs and life outlooks; into ‘typical ways to disclose one’s feelings’; into ‘typical ways to study’ or ‘to make entrepreneurship’, etc.

Worthy designates what we 'take care', ‘have at heart’ and 'believe’, displays what we think and do, what we say and feel (authenticity, transparency) as a whole, and also pursues this unity (pleasure/duty coincidence, commitment/accountability interlacing) in practice.
Pedagogical outputs: – we learn/share a cultural value nurturing its source, the worthy; - the worthy arise from a non-formal learning in clearly-defined contexts; - a set of worthies becomes identity’s kernel; – we need to dialogue with the root of values, i.e. let respective worthies ‘talk to each other’, in order to understand Alter; - values interchange leads to inclusion.

Dual track strategy
From teachers: - educate students to tell their own life story, so to be aware and empower their own worthies and strengthening their uniqueness (narrative method); - take the rules of the classroom-context hampering or developing the dialogue (ethnographic method); - assist students entering each school-fellow’s point of view to go back up to his values building a likeminded thinking (dialogic method); - get evidence of a cultural value through a corresponding behavior, so giving authority to it (mimetic method).

From local authority: involve the civil society and in-between agencies debating in discursive arenas together with teachers, students and their families the value-based habitus surged in school; - this habitus should spread to multiple contexts.
Keywords:
Intercultural dialogue, value, worthy, identity, multidimensional educational method, deliberative democracy.