Interculturality: Where Do We Go From Here?

By specifying in the law that the intracultural component of schooling is necessary to promote the recovery, strengthening, development and cohesion within the indigenous peoples cultures, the resulting educational policies and practices assume that indigenous students are not only fundamentally dierent from other children at their schools, but also possessing a static identity (Osuna, this issue). Equally important, these examples demonstrate how schools contribute to the replication of social hierarchies through everyday practices in individual classrooms. [...]we suggest that teachers do not typically analyse culture according to Eric Wolfs pool hall metaphor in which distinct cultures are conceptualized as various billiard balls ricocheting o one another (Wolf 1982). In this way, the critique of multicultural education recognized by anthropologists is neutralized, and the emancipatory capacity of intercultural education is undermined. [...]the educational system continues to reproduce discriminatory practices based on cultural dierences though the creation of instructional programmes designed for specic cultural groups. [...]discourses of integration or inclusion should be avoided as they are based on notions of dierence as decit (Mata-Benito, this issue).