Diversity education made its official appearance in the Italian formal education system in 1994, with the groundbreaking Ministerial Memorandum on “Intercultural dialogue and democratic coexistence”. The key principles outlined in the document – still highly relevant, nearly 30 years on – were the following:
- Intercultural education should be considered as the pedagogical answer to cultural pluralism, rather than just a compensation measure;
- It must concern all students;
- It has to do more with the development of relational skills and dialogic identities than with the teaching of specific topics;
- It implies a less Euro-centric approach to school subjects, as well as the safeguarding of minority languages and cultures.
The implementation of these principles in the school curricula, however, has always been inconsistent due to the uneven territorial distribution of migrant communities across Italy, as well as the need for teachers/educators to deal with emergency issues such as welcoming the growing wave of foreign students and meeting Italian language teaching requirements. To this day, local school programmes – often undertaken in partnership with NGOs and local authorities – widely differ in terms of their goals and objectives, methodologies, tools, and expected outcomes, ranging from formal school activities to informal actions aimed at developing inter-ethnic relations, based on principles of equality and cultural pluralism.
Furthermore, between 1994 and 2006 there was a legislative gap regarding intercultural education, with only a few significant exceptions such as Law 40/1998 (which required schools to develop a number of intercultural projects aimed at «acknowledging linguistic and cultural differences as the basis for mutual respect, intercultural exchange and tolerance»). Against a background of the then staggering growth of the foreign school population, the Ministry of Education created a Unit for the Integration of Foreign Students in 2004.
In the following years, some long-awaited steps were taken to fill this gap and make up for lost time:
- in 2006, the publication of “Guidelines for the first reception and integration of foreign students” and of a “Policy framework document for the integration of foreign students and intercultural education”, as well as the establishment of an ad-hoc National Observatory;
- in 2007 and 2014, the Ministerial guidelines “The Italian way for intercultural schools and the integration of foreign students”;
- in 2015, the recommendations outlined in the Ministerial document “Different from whom?”, including the valorisation of linguistic diversity, the adoption of preventive measures against school segregation, and the promotion of intercultural education as a vehicle to improve relational skills and to develop an open attitude towards diversity and “otherness”.
The National Observatory for the Integration of Foreign Students and Interculturalism went through different reorganisations. After a couple of years of inactivity, it was reinstated in December 2019, a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic upended the lives of millions of students; the latest data available had just shown that one student in ten has a migration background, from kindergarten to upper secondary education (Ministry of Education, 2020). Not surprisingly, students with Non-Italian Citizenship (NIC) were the hardest hit by the introduction of distance learning. The Observatory memo “Language makes us equal” (September 2020) highlighted the challenges of the pandemic for a school system that is already struggling with ensuring equal educational opportunities for all. «Key strategies for not leaving foreign students behind in the near future involve: a) New investments in targeted learning tools for Italian L2. b) Promoting relational dynamics between Italian-speaking and non-Italian-speaking students with a view to improving language learning. c) Increasing the number of L2 teachers and experts in highly “multicultural” schools. d) Strengthening individual tutoring and support for all students facing difficulties, most notably unaccompanied foreign minors. e) Identifying quality criteria and guidelines for distance learning which take NICs into account» (Fondazione ISMU 2021).
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