Varianty
The following five activities have been selected from the publication "Intercultural Education – a handbook not only for secondary school teachers", which was created within the framework of Varianty – Intercultural Education project, realised by People in Need Foundation, Prague.
The handbook serves as a methodology tool as well as a source of information to Czech teachers who want to implement intercultural issues into their lessons. In the Czech curriculum (Frame- work Educational Programme), intercultural education is treated as an interdisciplinary and cross-curricular topic; consequently, as there is no specific subject concerned with this thematic field, teachers of all subjects (primarily of civic education, history, geography, but also of others) are to include relevant topics and principles in their lessons as far as the school curriculum (called School Education Programme) allows.
The character of the activities reflects the multicultural situation in the Czech Republic: there exist numerous socio-cultural (conceived of as national or ethnical) minorities here, relatively small in numbers; and a large majority, the members of which build their identity also primarily on the notion of ethnicity. Not surprisingly, racism and xenophobia, often based on implicit or explicit nationalism, are the main problems of Czech majority society at present. As a consequence, the crucial issues that intercultural education tends to tackle in this context include, above all, deconstruction of stereotypes and uprooting of prejudices aimed at the minorities.
Thus, the objective of presented activities is to provide insight into the character of techniques that are realised in Czech schools, and, hopefully, to serve as a source of inspiration. Nevertheless, the activities were not originally designed to be used in other countries in the form presented – adaptation to a concrete situation and to the respective multicultural context would be probably necessary.
The Variants webpage provides information, texts and methodical material for the usage of intercultural, global development and media education. The webpage offers tools to reach the goals and contents of the Framework Educational Program through interactive way of teaching.
