Mobilizing intercultural education for equity and social justice. Time to react against the intolerable: A proposal from Spain

Abstract

Education is suffering from the consequences of strengthening neoliberal policies, which impose an education model that serves the interests of the hegemonic economic system. The market rationale is being implemented in schools, moving the interests from equity to efficiency, from equal opportunities to performance. Starting from setting out a panoramic view of the way in which the intercultural focus in Spain has been used, with an approach to the different educational spheres in which we have carried out our work and research –educational policies, teacher education, school practice and education outside the school – we discuss the paradoxes and ambiguities that remove the transformative capacity of intercultural education and propose the reformulation of interculturality as an ethical and political project to subvert inequality by mobilizing to collectively create and enable images of education that contribute to a sustained way of building an equitable and fair society. Assuming our role as academics, we design a specific collective proposal on who mobilizes, with whom, as well as the attributes of the processes to be generated are discussed as well.

Keywords:

• Intercultural education
• Spain
• equity
• social justice
• educational policies
• ethics
• politics
• transformative education

Notes

1. Opening Speech of the International Conference ‘The Intercultural Dimension of Citizenship Education: The North and the South in a Postcolonial Europe’, organized by the Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES, University of Coimbra) and celebrated in Lisbon, Portugal, 4–5 June 2007.