Multiculturalism in Educational Practices: The Italian Case

The anthropological lens suggests a deconstruction of multicultural education: it cannot be pursued if we do not critically unpack the meaning of culture. Drawing on some ethnographic cases in the Italian context, we identify three potential pitfalls associated with a naive misconception of culture: generating excesses of culture, reifying culture, and overlooking differences within cultures.Policy discourse in continental Europe has recognised the need for a dy-namic and constructivist conceptualisation of culture to replace the “multi-cultural” educational model with the “intercultural” one. Italian school policy has embraced the latter, which can enable promising educational practices if practitioners share a critical understanding of its theoretical and axiological assumptions.