A proposal for intercultural intervention in Secondary Education in Cantabria

Abstract

The modern society of the XXI century is creating a great number of demands that have to be covered by our school system referring to the need to educate citizens in a multicultural society and to the increasing amount of foreign and multicultural students in our classrooms. This is producing a great number of pedagogical activities in our schools which should have a double purpose: to facilitate the enrollment of foreign students and to work with all students (especially native) in the acceptance of diversity and promoting intercultural competence. For a time, in the Community of Cantabria has been working in this field, trying to address some situations we observe in the centre as: the difficulty for foreign students to achieve academic success and the influence this has on their personal development, the presence of cultural attitudes conditioned by the family and social background of these students and their resistance to change, the absence of a real cross-cultural content in the curriculum, the resistance of the education system to adapt to changes, the importance of lifelong learning as “enlightenment” of practice, etc.