Intercultural Education

The Related Approaches of Anthropology and Multicultural Education

Intercultural education is somewhat distinct from both the teaching of anthropology and multicultural education for elementary and secondary students. An anthropology course, while it may achieve the same goal as intercultural education, is designed to describe the ideas and methods of social science, based largely on what anthropology has learned about human cultural variation, the origins of humanity, and the rise of civilization. In this, it is broader in scope and less focused on transforming students' ethnocentric views. An anthropology [Page 1312]course will spend most of its time describing the methods of anthropology, the fossil record and what inferences can be drawn from skeletal and artifact remains, and, more to the point of intercultural education, what anthropology has learned about cultural systems and the range of variation exhibited in these by societies around the world. A student may do well in such a course but not come to the transformational understanding required for intercultural education.

Source: © Photo provided by http://www.downtheroad.org, The Ongoing Global Bicycle Adventure.

Intercultural education is not specifically tied to anthropology as a discipline, especially an anthropological approach that dispassionately presents a description of humanity. Rather, it seeks to persuade students that there is an inherent value in other cultures. In this regard, it may be imbedded in any course (e.g.,English, language, social studies). The findings and conceptual approach of cultural anthropology may inform and guide it, in concert with allied fields such as sociology, speech communication, psychology, and world history, but may not be directly identified with it.

Intercultural education is also distinct from multi-cultural education, although it blends into and overlaps with it. Multicultural education focuses more on cultural pluralism within a nation and, in support of this, strives to present pedagogical materials from a variety of perspectives (by ethnicity, gender, social class, etc.). This is done in order to provide students of diverse backgrounds with materials that they can identify with and thereby gain some measure of ownership of their educational experience and close gaps in achievement.

Intercultural education is designed to create in students an improved world-view, one that includes an appreciation for the broad range of human cultural capability and expression. In other words, it is the educational application of the anthropological dictum that the members of all human groups possess an equivalent level of intellectual competence and a cultural system that is well formed and valid. This anthropological view of humanity is associated with two seminal orientations about how humans and human culture should be studied. These constitute the basis of an intercultural approach, as well as its challenges, in elementary and secondary education: a comparative approach to learning about humanity and the analytic skills to perceive practical and ideological value in other ways of life, or cultural relativism.

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