A home culture pedagogy? Problematising and developing the concept of intercultural education

Abstract

In this article, we take as our starting point the argument that intercultural theory and, above all, intercultural education often focuses on people’s ideas, consciousness and attitudes. We argue that intercultural education has a bias towards cognitive structures as well as individualism. In parts of the intercultural research field, there is thus a lack of knowledge about how an intercultural dialogue can be understood based on interaction between people and the institutional and structural contexts in which they meet. The aim of this article is therefore to discuss how an intercultural dialogue can be understood from a social-psychological and sociological point of view. We argue that the dialogue in ‘actual’ meetings between people is not governed by ideas or attitudes, but by negotiations and interpretations that are situated. Furthermore, by introducing the concept of home culture, we discuss how this dialogue must also be put in relation to the present overall life situation, here and now, of all children/students, as well as to institutionally and socially active categorisations, routines and power relations, in order to develop fruitful, critical and relevant intercultural education.

Keywords

• interaction
• situation
• power relations
• education
• interculture