A M I S S
Guidelines for Intercultural Education: How to train mediators for a inter-cultural kindergarten
1.6.
The Intercultural Educator
Our hope is to design an ideal model of kindergarten. At the same time, we want to dedicate this design to a very special teacher: the intercultural teacher. In these Guidelines, we will try to define the skills and knowledge of this professional. In Bologna (Italy), this role is covered today by scaffolding figures: the visits of intercultural mediators in schools. A medium used in exceptions for highly problematic cases, often as a pure language interpreter, the mediator works about a few hours each a year in school, or even in all the schools. Part of the knowledge on the issues of integration, was developed by support educators. Support that is given to individually "certified" children, (children with tested psycho-physically delays) to help them attend public schools. To these tutors, many foreign children have been entrusted, and some of these tutors indirectly have performed informally (and often unknowingly) roles of mediators in the classroom. But a strong limit to be achieved of these tutors of intercultural teachers is their strictly individual rule of engagement: they can only help one child at a time throughout the year. In addition, this profession lives with precarious employment contracts, for which the government does not invest in its training or requalification. In reality, in the last ten years, up to 30-40% of foreign children have been integrated into each class in Italian schools, leaving the individual classroom teachers to figure out a way to work better. Intercultural education is carried out instinctively by school personnel, where there is (almost) always some teacher supporting the foreign children more than others. Maybe it is the teacher of a foreign language. Or just by nature and initial xenophobia, has built over the years a personal specialization, which later on is consulted by colleagues and they get involved when they have problems in the relationships with foreign students and their families. Intercultural education is carried out instinctively by school personnel, where there is (almost) always the intercultural teacher supporting the foreign children. It could be the teacher of a foreign language. Or just by nature and initial xenophobia, one who has built over the years. a personal specialization, which later on is consulted by colleagues and they get involved when problems occur in the relationships with foreign students and their families. In compulsory schools, this phenomenon was accompanied with official recognition. In every school there is now formally a helper, an ordinary teacher who is considered responsible for interculture, just as there was for security. This is a point of support and reference for the entire school, therefore acting outside the classroom for foreign children. In the last decade, hundreds of update courses on interculture have been organized for teachers of the Kindergarten and compulsory schools. They are usually a few tens of hours of training, attended by individual choice and voluntarily by the teacher. In this context, our intercultural educator differs mainly because this is not a role of "emergency", which solves the problem for each foreign child and at the same time he is a mediator and an educator who has had firsthand experience of migration. He plays the role of the foreigner with the other teacher. His specialty is to work every day, with a group, insisting on a different learning of the language. It was designed from the very beginning as the sum and result of a couple: mediator-educator. Now we need to see whether from this pair, we can build a profile of skills and self-employment knowledge: a new specialty called "intercultural educator." Unwillingly, we are left to link the traditional teacher to a whole series of practices borrowed from several disciplines: the tutor, the anthropologist, the facilitator, the assistant, therapist, mediator (ombudsman), the interpreter, the language Project: 357110- LLP- 1- 2011- 1- GR- KA1- KA1MPR
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