Intercultural module

Well… conclusions about the intercultural module… there are…

In a general view, I think the module was interesting, although I have learned almost all the theoretical contents in my last course in Spain, in a subject called Intercultural Education, where we talked about integration, inclusion of immigrant children in schools, intercultural meetings and shocks… One of the things I most remember about that contents is the different models of understand the coexistence in the schools. We learned it with a very useful “food example”, where we could find three different “school-plates”:

- The “soup” school: where different cultures and people coexist maintaining their own identity and characteristics, only sharing the same place and contents.

- The “fondue” school: where different cultures are involved in a majority culture that covers everything, so they coexist but without mixing and with the supremacy of the local culture and traditions.

- The “pure” school: where many different cultures and kinds of people are completely mixed, making a new and common type of culture.

With this metaphor I understood the big different between multicultural, that only imply coexistence in the same environment, and intercultural, that implies that different cultures are mixed and learn of each others, creating a new one.
Other of my experiences I most thought about during that module was when I worked in a homeless shelter, where more than a half of them were from foreign countries. Apart of the language barriers, I could feel sometimes how difficult was to understand each other, and how we understood different things with a same explanation…When I read the conversation between the magistrate and the aboriginal, I revive a lot of situations where I was involved…situations where understanding looks almost impossible, not only for the language, also for the different cultural backgrounds, ways of thinking and understanding, conceptions about gender, work, ways of life…

I think that conversation was a very good example and was very useful for me to reflect about the difficult of having a horizontal relation with minority groups, because always the most powerful part of the dialogue is who looks right and the less powerful or belonging to a minority looks wrong… In one of the group works at the camp, talking about this conversation, somebody says that the aboriginal looks stupid… Hours later, thinking about it, I comprehend that for my was more stupid the magistrate, because knowing perfectly that the other person were not going to understand him, repeated and repeated the same questions, without changing any expression or trying to make his speech understandable… So, both parts are equally important:

- The aboriginal must try to adapt to the dominant/new culture, not for obligation or because his own culture would be less-valid, only to understand the majority and to coexist in a good way with as much people as possible. It´s like if I would not be open to learn English, I would lost the opportunity of meeting a lot of people, places, ways of working…

- The magistrate must have intercultural competences, tools to work with, open his mind and try to be understandable for different people and cultures, because all are same valid, and specially in a multicultural world like this where we live today.

So, if one of these parts is not prepared or able to understand each other, there is no possibility of meeting… Is equal difficult to not have anybody to help you that try to help somebody that don´t want your help…

I could understand the importance of intercultural competences as social educator in this kind of situations, because if you are not patient, comprehensive, open minded and respectful there is no possibility of understanding, so there is not possibility of working or advancing in a social project… So I think is not only important, is completely necessary to have this qualities to do some kinds of works with some kinds of target groups.

And I´m not talking about immigrants only, because there are also many differences of this type into a same country or between different ethnic of the same nationality (for example, with Spanish gypsies, or with people from very small villages or that just have very different points of view and conceptions than yours).

And also I´m not saying that it´s easy, and it wasn´t at all for me in my job… Is a very hard and long work to acquire this competences and understand and respect cultures that defend things that for me are indefensible, like treating children and women like private property, disrespect for the workers, cruel treat to non-human animals, contempt about other ways of living or thinking… But I think that understanding is the first step to get the rest of the things (respect, equality, coexistence, changes in mentality, equal opportunities, horizontal relations, cooperation, solidarity…and all this beautiful words that we listen everyday in the theoretical classes but at the moment of practice are so difficult to get…).

So it´s a really long and difficult way that we need to go if we want to be able to work with people, wherever they come from…