What should schools do about the family cultures of their immigrant students?

Abstract

The so-called Intercultural Education remains a challenge today. The purpose of this paper is to examine a particular aspect of the intercultural approach in daily school practice, namely how schools handle immigrant students’ family cultures; an issue of concern to a great number of school teachers. Besides the most ordinary questions, teachers find it rather difficult to implement such policies within the classroom. This paper addresses the fundamental questions that arise in on-going training sessions with teachers as well as providing some tools that we, as intercultural trainers, think important to encourage reflection and self-analysis, while promoting a more inclusive praxis rather than a folkloric one. Relevant critical approaches from different fields that have examined some of these self-named ‘intercultural’ activities have been taken into consideration, especially those activities that unintentionally mark the ethnicity and ‘otherness’ of immigrant families.