What is intercultural education?
Is it possible to develop new educational strategies to help children understand the great value of cultural differences in their early school phases?
As part of the activities of the BODI project, we organized a two-day training for parents of pre-primary children on April 22nd and 29th at Casa Officina.
Casa Officina is an intercultural education center which proposes various training and information initiatives based on an intercultural approach of respect and valorization of diversity. Casa Officina represents an outstanding example of parental inclusion in children’s school life as the cooperation between teachers and parents for sharing knowledge and tools on how to face sensitive topics is constantly encouraged by the school coordinator, the anthropologist and educator Maura Tripi.
During the two events, through non-formal activities, the project staff and 13 parents had the chance to deal with the themes of cultural diversity – how our feelings mirror a system of values that affects even the perceptions that we judge objective-, mental health and the expression of children psycho-emotional needs, gender stereotypes in the early childhood media industry and child sexuality.
Besides the training activities with parents, from April 4th April to May 5th, twenty-eight workshops with children were held at La Casa di Tutte le Genti Association with the purpose of testing the activities developed by the partnership directly with children of two age groups (3-4 and 5-6 years).
La Casa Di Tutte le Genti represents a very unique reality in Palermo, as it is a self-managed and mostly self-funded kindergarten/association that was born from the commitment and the efforts of Zenaida Boaventura, a Cape-verdean woman that in the last fifteen years has been reaching out to many families -especially with migration background – whose children are not enrolled in public kindergartens due to the long waiting lists.
Through interactive stories, activities for creative thinking as well as motive games and role-plays, children were encouraged to reflect on various aspects related to diversity, from the physical differences and the geographic origins to gender stereotypes and the different types of families. In an intercultural perspective, the sessions covered also the concepts of authority, rules, empathy and body awareness for the rejection of violence in all its forms and prevention of sexual abuse.
The multicultural composition of the groups has contributed to make the workshop implementation extremely interesting and inspiring.
Beyond the positive experience of the workshops in Palermo, the outcomes and feedback shared by the partners in France, Spain, Cyprus and Austria have confirmed the relevance of the themes and activities of the BODI project for early childhood education.
BODI – Cultural diversity, body, gender, health in early childhood education is a two-year project co-founded by the Erasmus+ Programme, Key Action 2: Cooperation for innovation and exchange of good practices – Strategic Partnership in the field of school education.
The project partnership holds 5 organisation:
- Elan Interculturel (France, coordinator);
- Cyprus Pedagogical Institute (Ciprus);
- Kindervilla (Austria);
- La Xixa Teatre (Spain);
- CESIE (Italy).
For more info on the BODI project, visit also the website and follow the Facebook page!
If you are interested in receiving the materials and/or organizing workshops with children, parents or teachers, please contact Alessandra Cannizzo.
